gershon hepner Poems

The novelist’s art can compel our beliefs,
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Good Catholics used to eat the dish
on Fridays and when they thought that God
said Fridays they must all eat fish,
the fish they chose to eat was cod.
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Writing Cheetah’s story as a chimp
enabled Moehringer to tell his story
from the primate point of view. We crimp
our style reporting one another’s glory
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Women on the edge of being just
a little overweight are more enticing
than those with narrow hips and flattened bust
who on the runways are more like the sugared icing
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Digesting cholent beans,
schloffing Yidden tend to snore
and then disgustingly exhale.
Hardly ever do they fail
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Some people say that hokey-pokey
refers to Catholics’ loss of focus
when priests do things that seem most hokey
in the mass’s hocus-pocus,
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People are not absolute beginners
once they have come to realize
that absolution does not come to sinners
till love has opened all four eyes.
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Unless french fries are very crispy
they should be banished as fast food
and trashed or tossed just like a Frisbee,
not chewed before they are eschewed.
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After nights of madness
mornings become grim,
dissonant as sadness
lowered like a scrim.
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Mattel is making hair-brushed Barbies
unlike the previous airbrushed harpies,
because the doll’s begun to show
her age, and lost the primal glow
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