After breaking bread together, men gather where we have for decades. Scuffed chairs couched in a circle, socks caress socks on our common ottoman. The check-in process never quite done, my posse pretends there’s a pond, tosses pebbles in, deals with the ripples, fishes. Deeply felt but not always easy, K., 46, offers, “My boss pisses me off.” Pause. By accounts the best of us, L. angles, “Let’s get present in the room.” Then for some glorious reason the eight of us are jujitsued toward Sunday’s silent session. Collective skin peeled below bottled-up gripes, we drink the wine of everything and nothing, feel ecstatic, well met, to a man pledge to see the last one through though unsure what that might mean. Buds buttress my unstockinged essence-- B.G.E, I’m forever touched. Even though it’s Easter, each soul is the opposite of crucified. Swept into the maelstrom, we will end up as separated atoms which, every billion years or so, bump together to form molecules, every few trillion have the sorta group reunion knocks our socks off.
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Gerard Sarnat
Gerard Sarnat has been nominated for the pending 2022 Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Star Award, won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of 2021 and previous Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published including in 2022 Awakenings Review, 2022 Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County Celebration, 2022 Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival Anthology, Lowestoft, Washington Square/NYU Review, The Deronda Review, Jewish Writing Project, Hong Kong Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Arkansas Review, Hamilton-Stone Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times as well as by Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, University of British Columbia and University of Chicago presses. He is a Harvard College and Medical School-trained physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/resources to deal with climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with progeny consisting of four collections (Homeless Chronicles: from Abraham to Burning Man, Disputes, 17s, Melting the Ice King) plus three kids/ six grandsons — and is looking forward to potential future granddaughters.