Gerard Sarnat

Dysbiosis* Looming
 
Under strange gravity
of the Anthropocene era,
clinical medicine’s grand
design has just begun to feel
more than a little bit weightless.
 
Apocalyptic natural world forecasts
are rendered with increasing urgency
recently, formalized as an “ecoanxiety”
mental health diagnosis that pathologizes
existential questions vulnerable to upcoming
upheavals — climate depression, environmental
grief and futilitarianism: during some rudderless moments,
I write using rising tide metaphors which function as convenient
metonyms for climate change’s comprehensive human disruption.
 
For clinicians who feel especially steady on their feet, expressions
of ecologic nihilism might sound premature, hyperbolic, or perhaps
too literary. Equanimity, after all, is an ideal that many docs are taught
to strive for, the regulation of internal thermostats detached from one’s 
immediate surroundings…Still, every set point is prone to dysregulation.

*Blaser, MJ. “Fecal Microbiota Transplantation for Dysbiosis — Predictable Risks.”
New England Journal of Medicine, 21 November 2019.


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, Turtle Island, MIPOesias, 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 Oberlin, 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.