local_library Untitled 1

by Simon Perchik

Published in Issue No. 246 ~ November, 2017

You limp and her casket

breaking open, its splinters

lose hold and this dirt

 

is water again, each ripple

wider and wider drags ashore

though the pebble you tossed

 

covers the sea with a darkness

that spends its life drowning

–a tiny rock has broken off

 

from your step by step holding on

forever –you walk on water, close

to the crater’s rim half wood

 

half storm, half where her voice

could be mistaken for moonlight

for the one stone more who in the end

 

is dead and you lift it

gently, lower it to your lips

as if it was a whisper or a mouth.

 

account_box More About

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 Reflection in a Glass Eye 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.