April 2020 | poetry, Pushcart nominee
Dearest Friends,
I wanted to inform you of the cats and my disposition to move from San Francisco to Palm Springs in about three weeks, living out remaining time in an easier quieter environment.
Serving on non-profit boards plus having a half-century’s active social scene has just become more than we can handle.
I’ll try to adapt to a different existence, and hope to stay in touch with everybody — but I do ask that you be patient, not push too hard – there will be a lot to adjust to plus everything takes extra time at this stage of the game.
I plan on maintaining current email address/ mobile number, will advise you of new home address/ local landline number once have settled in hopefully beginning of March.
I’m so very grateful to have wonderful chums who shower me with love along with support.
Much as I would like to see everyone prior to leaving, it’s impossible. Your understanding is appreciated.
Escape the cold, come to visit next winter during the desert’s wildflower blooming as well as January’s Film Festival if not sooner!
Particularly with my life’s partner passed, I’m missing each of you already.
Gerard Sarnat
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published in academic-related journals (e.g., University Chicago, Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, University of San Francisco) plus national (e.g., Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Clementine, pamplemousse, Deluge, Poetry Quarterly, Hypnopomp, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Poets And War, Cliterature, Qommunicate, Indolent Books, Pandemonium Press, Texas Review, San Antonio Review, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review and The New York Times) and international publications (e.g., Review Berlin and New Ulster). He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a 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 global warming. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to future granddaughters.
April 2020 | poetry
(Pegasus Constellation – Winged Horse)
You ask me the difference between Pegasi
and unicorns as embers of fire complete
burned circles four feet in front of our feet.
Our town hankers for a time
when fire and hunger were rare,
when wings or horns were inconsequential,
when hearts waltzed woozy with pixelated promise.
Now wings and horns are all we have. One fantasy
after another. Men lament their learned helplessness.
Women work to recall the struggle to overcome it.
Unicorns all glitter magic until they impale our throats
with singular horns. Shame shows itself as hemorrhage,
detectible only by internal scan. What the world
sees as magic you see as disgrace. A dearth of grace.
Our blood fertilizes our flowers, blooming toward the cloud
cover of heaven. Pegasus uplifts the dead.
Unicorn=death and death and death.
Pegasus=angel on which the soul floats into whisper.
Amy Strauss Friedman
Amy Strauss Friedman is the author of the poetry collection The Eggshell Skull Rule (Kelsay Books, 2018) and the chapbook Gathered Bones are Known to Wander (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016). Amy’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and her work has appeared in Pleiades, Rust + Moth, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her work can be found at amystraussfriedman.com.
April 2020 | poetry
As Much to Speak of Weather
I do not write of my father because he loved me, a truth I have come to believe in for its obviousness—no less obvious that is to say than the way one speaks of rain, its beauty and betrayal. Today’s rain is preemptory, a windless gravitas: what a speaker of political mindset might refer to as bi-partisan, claiming a democracy of garden and glass. How parental! (How paradoxical, both bound and torn asunder!) To speak of my father’s love, then, is as much to speak of weather as if weather is all there is to speak of. My father—who has since taken his words to the grave—has nonetheless left me with rain, another season’s first chill of rain.
Words Frequently Confused: Historicism, Histrionics
If you don’t know the width of the forest when you enter it, how will you know when you’re on the way out? Or do you mean to settle there, to burrow under the dry root of a defeated tree and stay, an abundance of honeybees and berries nearby, a small clear stream? Haven’t you notified the children already, sold every earthly possession, signed up online for Your Majesty’s benefit? Come on, Columbus, isn’t that the way of forests? Aren’t you lost before you know it? Aren’t you penalized half the distance to the goal?
Phillip Sterling
Phillip Sterling’s books include two poetry collections, And Then Snow and Mutual Shores, two collections of short fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told and Amateur Husbandry, and four chapbook-length series of poems (Significant Others, Abeyance, Quatrains, and And For All This: Poems from Isle Royale). A fifth series, Short on Days, will be released in 2020.
April 2020 | poetry
Quand j’étais jeune
The leaves sprang bright and
Green from every branch
Sparkling in the spring sun
Et maintenant
The leaves fall red, yellow
And museum blue
From each knotty limb
Quand j’étais jeune
Dashing like a gazelle
Across the trafficked boulevard
Catching the bus as it paused
Et maintenant
Waving a cane of oak
Cursing the huffing diesel
Standing behind and alone
Quand j’étais jeune
The femme avec les yeux
Smiled like an amused cat
Purred and waited
Et maintenant
Like an irritated crow
The femme squawks
And flies away
Quand j’étais jeune
My head was full of dreams
Et maintenant
There is only the menace of silence
Phillip Periman
Phillip Periman was born in 1938 in Memphis, Texas, grew up in Amarillo. He received a BA in history from Yale University and his M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine. He has had poems published by the Black Mountain Press in their anthology, “The Sixty-Four” (Best Poets of 2018) and by Unstamatic. He writes about aging, retirement, his life, and the world as he finds it—always in an attempt to acknowledge the real.
April 2020 | Best of Net nominee, poetry
When I’d walked away
from my beloved house
the new owner called: to say
she’d found a ring
and a feather
stuck into the beam
above the bedroom:
had I forgotten?
She’d saved the ring
but she’d lost the feather
I told her to keep it the ring
part of the house
I had its mate
broken in three pieces
in a little tin box
one broken circle enough
I brought her a new feather
left it in her mailbox
a long brown feather with
a blue tip and white edges
I’d let her decide
the name of the bird
Kelley Jean White
Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.
April 2020 | poetry
Geography is not important.
Everywhere
is the operative word.
Bared soul.
Barefoot.
Bare.
Tread carefully.
Mind your underbelly.
Be a turtle.
Carry the essence
in your hold-all.
No roots allowed
past the security check.
They can see with
their X-ray machines.
You carry
a sharp, merciless
switchblade
made of stainless
grief.
*’Heimweh’ is more than ‘Nostalgia’
Rose Mary Boehm
A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives Lima, Peru. Author of one full-length poetry collection and two chapbooks, her work has been widely published in mostly US poetry journals. Her latest full-length poetry MS, ‘The Rain Girl’, has been accepted for publication in June 2020 by Blue Nib. Her poem, ‘Old Love’s Sonnet’, has been nominated for a Pushcart by Shark Reef Journal where it was published in the Summer of 2019.
