Svetlana Lavochkina ~ Esther Greenleaf Murer ~ Gerard Sarnat

Trois poètes

 

 

Svetlana Lavochkina

MIDLIFE SOUTH OF THE MIDRIFF

 

She:

 

I say I will come to your place

Wearing parrot attire,

Or nothing under my coat.

I’d look like a striptease dancer,

Miss Chastity from Soho’s Gwynne Club

In a vintage documentary you liked 

On dangerousminds.com.

I tell you I’ll do the Coffee Grinder

Much better than the stiff Miss Carmen,

I’ll perform the Quiver & Shimmer

Way better than the humdrum Miss Cher.

 

I try on orange stockings, green skirt, red belt.

It’s not the colorful cackle

Rising in the mirror that confounds me,

But rather, the Miss Chastity outfit

Highlights the dark circles under my eyes

More than my fetching glance.

So I dress quieter, safer. 

Gray jacket, black top.

I chicken out of wearing

Nothing under my coat.

 

Astride you, I look as absurd 

As duck-nosed Miss Carmen suckling a poodle

Whose tenth generation descendants, pink-leashed,

Now pee on London’s rowans and planes;

Miss Carmen must be in her sixties by now,

If she didn’t die young of AIDS.

By and by, my feet warm up,

Thigh rippling subsides

As the monthly ovum express

Steams through my groin.

 

Now I don’t ride you

But this fatuous vehicle of my own manufacture.

I fly it like a witch on a broom, 

Beyond reach of the daily precipitation:

Peevish spouse, tight schedule, teen progeny, skillets,

Skeletons yawning unused in the cupboards.

 

Troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere,

The eggshell hardens

Into a happy asteroid B-613,

Withheld from the Little Prince
By his author, the pilot. 

And although we already have five,

To count yours and mine,

I mesh our genes in my mind

Braiding an invincible DNA, this time,

Resistant to moral and bargains.

 

But just ten days later, B-613 makes its descent,

Plummeting into a rusty puddle.

The dead thing smells  

Of iron and vertisol.

I wrap it in a white cotton cloud

And bury it, according to communal law,

In its appropriate mass grave

Of the gray garbage container, residual waste,

In which there also rest in peace

Ashes, cigarette butts and old household objects

Like hairbrushes and cutlery.

 

On its futile two day journey,

The ovum in heat didn’t leak a drop

About the number of its kind

Still sitting patiently, ready to start their flight

From my hangar.

 

 

He:

 

She came wearing gray again,

Although she had promised parrot colors

Or nothing under her coat.

(She takes any shitty link I send her out of boredom

For sacred. Now she thinks she can dance striptease.)

 

A svelte female shape prone on the wardrobe

Made of gauze and potato starch;

It’s her, a decade ago;

I remember messing up the first mould –

We were too lustful to wait for the starch to dry.

I tore the gauze, and slid

Into the sticky white heat.

She wouldn't fit into the shape, not anymore.

Neither has any atom that made her up

A decade ago, survived.

 

She gives up her striptease intentions at once.

Too stiff, too heavy, too shy.

Her navel winks at me guiltily

From the folds of her belly.

So she just picks gray stalks 

In the wheat of my chest.

A pinched nerve on my thigh 

Bleaches the thrill of her fingers to whisper.

 

I can sustain grunt work for a minute.

(Shit, I hope I didn’t knock her up.)

A decade ago, I wouldn’t have cared if she’d got enough, 

But now I oblige. My hands finish the task 

Without much verve

But also without a grudge.

 

New ailments respond to medication

With fresh obedience, like to a new strict teacher.

Beta blockers say, blood pressure, sink, and it sinks.

Triptan says, migraine, stop, and it stops.

RectiCare says, piles, detumesce, and they do.

But lumbago is nasty.

Soma can’t bend it; even Vicodin fails.

The brute needs a living, loving assassin.

 

She is on the rise.

Wet storm, steam bath,

Meringue crumbs on Key Lime Pie.

Now do what I say.

With your hands akimbo,

Place them on either flank 

Of the lumbar spine,

And go from side to side.

Oh, your hands are like opiates.

My back’s an addict, don’t stop...

 

I wish you had groaned like this, she sighs,

When you came. 

 

 

Svetlana Lavochkina is writer of fiction and translator of poetry, born and educated in Ukraine, currently residing in Germany. In 2013, her novella "Dam Duchess" was chosen runner-up in the Paris Literary Prize. Her debut novel, "Zap", was shortlisted for Tibor & Jones Pageturner Prize 2015. Her work was published in Circumference, Chapman, Superstition Review, Witness, Cerise Press, Drunken Boat, Eclectica, Mad Hatters’ Review, The Literary Review, Chamber Four Fiction Anthology and elsewhere.

 

 

 

Esther Greenleaf Murer

Not coming to a midnight horrorfest near you  

 

The amoebat

is a eukaryotic proto- or pre-bat.

From its home in water which drips from the roofs of  caves

it sends reverberating waves

which are not technically a radio broadcast;

it's more precise to call  them a pseudopodcast.

When an amoebat echolocates a cloud of no-see-ums

it warbles supersonic Te Deums

and off it flits on a search-and-engulf mission,

a journey it spends dividing and redividing by fission

until each and every no-see-um

can requiesce in its very own amoebat mausoleum.

 

 

I was a teenage werewolf for the FBI

 

Back then they didn't have drones.

I'd prowl the meanest streets,

devouring mobs and gangs and gaggles 

just like I'd dreamed of doing

as a junior wannabewolf.

 

Now my fangs are blunted or missing;

raw flesh no longer agrees with me.

Yes, I'm a aging havebeenwolf

and the FBI has put me out to pasture

dressed in weresheep's clothing.

 

(Apologies to Christian Morgenstern)

 

 

Esther Greenleaf Murer, an octogenarian relic of the twentieth century, lives in Philadelphia.  She has been featured poet in The Centrifugal Eye and KIN, and published her first collection, Unglobed Fruit, in 2011. http://esthergreenleafmurer.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

Gerard Sarnat

COUNTERING A HAIKU MIT EIN HAIKU

 

Wonder

 

Beyond

opposable thumbs

and a facile tongue

what makes us human?

 

 

Get A Grip, Mrs. Hatfield

 

Ich survived Auschwitz

mein mate der Blitz --

Es ist still hart to talk about.

 

 

 

High Holidays 

 

“Don’t do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head

up and down. Prayer is an egg.

Hatch out the total helplessness inside.”

-- Rumi, Prayer Is An Egg

 

Holy of Holies now closed,

Yom Kippur* prayers and fasting almost done,

germ of New Year visions just beginning

 

Fanny’s post Holocaust samovar

bitter tea hovering, suck ein cup mit milch,

cube weiss sugar tucked ‘tveen gums.

 

Prekushk flashes through my mind --

the ceremony’s name in Polish

which I never grokked before 

 

-- or does it mean Cockroach?

Back from shul*, unyoked

from his only dress duds’ suspenders,

 

birthday suit quavering

like a peeled three minute egg

biped, Isadore squints in the tenement’s

 

embryonic ice box

for leftover brisket

which alongside herring and fresh baked

 

rugelach hatch their Cadillac

of a boychick while

Fanny shoves two thumbs down her gullet.

 

* Day of Atonement before Jewish New Year, Yiddish word for Synagogue

 

 

 

Sacred Sperm Specter

 

An impressionable boy avoiding Poppy’s figmented exploits,

I accompanied him to project Principal Investigator

Protocol Kodachromes on the driest of lecture circuits.

 

Elsewhere Dad appeared a juicy backslapper who brought

an all-purpose attaché case, emptied sweetmeats for others, particularly

women I conjured he met and inseminated on the garden path.

 

But back home it often seemed to me there was nothing left

for the family. Dad’s severe finely etched shock of hair

reminded me of a cross between Edison and Frost.

 

Over seared dinner when we were kids, Mommy pruned

the designated role she clung to as our desiccated scapegoat. 

What did she perceive? Condone? Pare? Care?

 

Did she consider leaving the cad?  In truth outside the house,

Mom was a substantial Associate Dean of the USC School

of Social Work, with a coterie of women friends whose achievements

 

preceded ballyhooed feminism. As far as I could demystify,

she tolerated Pops’ fig leaf fictions to keep us together.

Now that his cuckoldry’s been exposed, I marvel while Mom’s sham

 

clucks on and on and on about how much her supporting actress

romance with a leading man blossomed. And please do remember

I’ve constructed this word salad conjecture without one iota of proof.

 

 

 

Gerard Sarnat has established and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised and been a CEO of healthcare organizations and Stanford Medical School professor. Gerry’s work is published in over a hundred magazines.  He is the author of three critically acclaimed collections:  HOMELESS CHRONICLES from Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), and 17s (2014). For Huffington Postreviews, reading dates, publications and more visit Gerard Sarnat.com. His books are available at select bookstores and on Amazon; his work appears in literary journals stocked by Barnes and Noble among other distributors. So far in 2015, Gerard’s features and honoraria have included Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, Avocet A Journal of Nature, Poems, LEVELER, tNY, StepAway and Bywords. Gargoyle has accepted a piece for its fortieth anniversary issue due out in September 2016.