"God/ess of Duality"
by Gerard Sarnat
God/ess of Duality
i. Homeric Heist
Guise of loyal beggar, cross-winds magic returned Odysseus to Ithaca to gather kindling.
During Trojan Wars, matter referred to a maker of mats.
Under earthen lamp light, tailors stitched royal clothes from bolts of silk.
Mythical journeys celebrate finding places in ourselves that represent home.
Cleave is the Janus verb which means both to stick tight and to fall away.
ii. Bilingual y Totipotential?
Ocho reasons
for these pseudopods
to go to work
cada of my tentacles’s
decentralized
though toda co-ordinate
toward goals
seeming common at all.
Experts say
I/we are much smarter
than many
animales – and Yes s/he/
they identify as wo/man
(cis más trans)
8-spirit nonbinary octopi.
Poet and aphorist Gerard Sarnat is widely published internationally in print and online. He has been nominated for the pending 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 Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry’s publications include 2023 San Diego Poetry Annual, 2022 Awakenings Review, 2022 Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County Celebration, 2022 Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival Anthology, Ocotillo Review, Gravity of the Thing, American Writers Review/ San Fedele Press, San Francisco Creative Writing Institute, Israel Association of Writers in English, In Parentheses, Sacramento Review, Pocket Samovar, Black Sunflower, Free State, The Broken City, Sandy River Review, Three Rooms Press/Maintenant, New World Writing, Songs of Eretz, New Verse News,The Font, BigCityLit, HitchLit Review, Lowestoft, Washington Square 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 Yale, NYU, Slippery Rock, Northwestern, Pomona, Brown, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Grinnell, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, Universities of British Columbia and Toronto and Chicago and Virginia presses. He is a Harvard College and Medical School-trained physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised 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.