day FOURTEEN HUNDRED and TWENTY THREE

4. Supratentorial Organ Recital Talk

My fast friend for seventy years
began our Zoom schmooze
catching me up on

an apparent second epidemic,
as taking an Envo mask off,
one more tawdry tale

of early-stage dementia among
our grammar school chums
on Chicago’s Southside

comes out of her mouth along
with that quite obvious
requisite follow-up

question: whether our Alzheimer
crew’d be envious of comrades
who’ve already walked

the ultimate gangplank, are dead?

--Gerard Sarnat

Gerard Sarnat 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 recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published including in Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times as well as by Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Chicago and Columbia presses. 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 climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to future granddaughters.