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No, it’s about the sun and a sore
that opens :every morning
is already swollen, weak, clouded over
wobbling from some near-by breeze
reaching down as the hillside
where her shadow should be
though there’s no grass either
only this bed spreading out
the way smoke rises night after night
as the still warm night
that festers in these sheets
can’t wait any longer.
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You glance the way fishermen aim
then cast their nets and though the camera
will struggle it’s the sea that needs
mending :another chance
at how much longer in the embrace
corners will form for a photograph
already in fear—nothing moves
where what will come and what not
makes you feel for glass, want to be seen.
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Again a calendar, each page
is burying you in the sea
that races past your forehead
with only your hands for shoreline
and one year more
—by nailing it to this wall
you agree not to forget
and fast, go hungry :trust
will return, already draining the light
from the sun, sprinkling its warmth
not yet those old love songs
choking louder and louder
as days, weeks, wing beats
and from this heavy paper
an overwhelming joy
—it will happen, embraced by circles
and fresh scented shining blades
—you will lean into this wall
become branches and leaves
that are not yet smoke
though month after month
stay close, want to be lifted
remembered as the dotted line
the promised, no longer falling.
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All but the splash is thickening
half as marrow, half
feathers and long ago seas
share this pot with bones
dropped end over end
though they stay, are growing wings
the way mourners are overcome
by turbulence, lean into each other
—it’s a dark kitchen, barely room
for the talons that will stretch
are already flying side by side
as smoke reaching around the silence
all afternoon carrying the dead
though finally every bone becomes too heavy
from nothing inside but shoreline.
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You walk clinging to streams
from when the Earth was shattered
still gathers up the rocks broken off
for light where a sky should be
help the lost find their way home
and though her grave was left behind
you come here to start a fire by naming it
slowly after the tree that widened, became a sea
and every night washes over this stone
guiding it back as a singing—each leaf
already the warm breeze that reaches up
no longer smoke from arms and distances.
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 and Literary Library, 2019. For more information about Simon, including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website here.