Carla Sarett

A Year of Many Doubles 



I pass the tragic donut shop with stale
coffee where old men slump over yesterday's
Times, refugees from the breadlines left-over
from a few depressions ago. There,

I saw the double of a man,
I'd lived with in a small cold room.
How I snaked my arms around the double-
man until we broke apart forever and ever.
He ran away to leave me only his
unloved original.

It was a year of many doubles.
After we heard "Gloria" at Patti's concert.
every hotel window was on fire
bright as a lunch poem,
floating in semi-tropical night.

A whiskey-soaked poet in blue satin pajamas
and Shalimar, teetered from the tenth floor
as artists built her a cigarette pyre
The bored copies below ignored her leap
and the stained sidewalk.
They’d seen a better leap, a celebrity’s,
the day before.

It was a year of many doubles.
My double sighed, cool as a funeral,
and disappeared into Manhattan.
Mad transients sang
all my troubles lord, soon be over.

 

 


Warren in Nebraska 

 

All I knew about Nebraska, not counting
My Antonia or the Dust Bowl,
was the great Warren Buffett lives there,
as if living in Omaha counted, while living
in L.A. or New York or Chicago,
or any of the places where the people
other people say are not real Americans live
which makes the great Warren very real.
(no one in my family saw Dust Bowls
but they saw worse, trust me.)
Warren stayed in Omaha, he could live
anywhere, how great is that? everyone says.
Like staying home is a big deal, which
no one says if you're broke, ever.


 

Carla Sarett's recent poems appear in San Pedro River ReviewProleJournal of Compressed Creative Arts, and elsewhere.  She awaits publication of her debut novel, A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press) in early 2022.  Carla lives in San Francisco.  She blogs at carlasarett.blogspot.com

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