Simon Perchik


*
She wraps your limp the way the sun
marks out its darkness and along the ground
pours a small circle –you’ll make it back

she says, writes on a pad kept open
how seabirds will call each other
over and over force their feathers

though your shadow too has taken on
that phase even the moon
with all its rivers and stars

–just two pills and at bedtime two more
which stone by stone will become
a second moon once you lay down

face up, floating midair, not yet asleep
reaching around the Earth
that stops as soon as you touch it.



*
And the river falling into you
lies down the way you are fed
by stones that no longer open

as rain and your breath
never seen again, left in the dirt
these graves are used to

is all they know –with each meal
a far off night bursts into flames
once it’s singled out, fills your mouth

as if it would not happen twice
and yet you eat only in cemeteries
in a sea whose water has dried

to become for the dead
a new language, easy to whisper
over and over and the heading.



*
You crumple this hat the way a hole
changes color, is held in place
lets your forehead hide, circle down

end over end setting fires –what you try on
no longer smells from rain or stays
or turned low in the mirror

remembers to burn in the open
as the sound falling from dirt
and broken loose though you walk away

just to walk away :a damaged toss
with less than there were
no longer over your shoulder or done.




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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