Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

The Da Vinci Code, Cracked

Sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first.
A dangerous practice known as “corporal mortification.”
insert your key again and the process is reversed.

Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth?
The monk’s red eyes filled with anger and frustration.
Sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first.

The premiere Goddess iconographer on earth
could feel himself ascending to a higher station.
Insert your key again and the process is reversed.

Don’t be ridiculous. A forgotten Templar church,
the Pyramids of Egypt, and even the United Nations—
sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first.

“La police? Si rapidement?” He cursed
the Pope’s vacation.
Insert your key again and the process is reversed.

He understood the true meaning of the Grand Master’s verse:
something about using satellites to track manta ray migrations.
Sex as a pathway to God was mind-boggling at first—
insert your key again and the process is reversed.

___

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, New York: Doubleday, 2003.

 

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) tried to be a poet 20 years ago and failed miserably. So he’s trying again. No he doesn’t exactly know why. In the middle there between failing at poetry he wrote a book about the original Wonder Woman comics called Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism from Rutgers University Press. He just read the wonderful anthology Against Expression which is a collection of uncreative writing—people who make poems by listing every number from 1 to 1000 in alphabetical order, or by listing every word in Moby Dick beginning with the letters “un.” It felt like coming home.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.