Simon Perchik


*
A simple hush and the moon
loses direction, smells
from skid marks and nausea

wants to change places
end up on your shoulders
the way a sobbing child

uses height to forget
be near where the others are
and sideways, this way and that

–you calm this gravestone
as if not enough darkness
could stop in time, went on

to become evenings
and all these lighthouses
abandoned, hardly turning

lit by this single shoreline
led across as rocks
and the afternoons inside.



*
Exhausted, turned back –your death
never quite buried here
and inches down still struggling

the way the mist clings to you
as water older than sunlight
though there’s no need for shade

and over your throat the row by row
not yet thirst and constant waterfall
–try! with a single mouthful

the same stone the Earth still grows
to feed you dead your only chance
left upright, for keeps and behind

smelling from fruit and branches
within reach –a sip, a rock
broken off one root with another.


*
Inside your arm a rope
though the road you hide
is lifted by hills –the sleeve

rolled back the way all curves
return as if nothing happened
pull alongside, surrounded

no longer airborne
let you splash among the turns
poured over your fingers

trying to squeeze from the sky
the color circling overhead
as darkness and engine sound

strapping you in
filling your hands with noise
black from a single fingernail

pointing at the ground
still afraid to move
while you rush about

with the headlights off
broken as if you remembered
where to look now that the car

is in someone else’s name
a fake address and your only chance
is without a day in mind.




Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

To view one of his interviews please follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8
 
 
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