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As if by yourself the harness
Half-branches, half-marble
struggling to slow the moss
and around both shoulders
the crowd envies such a strength
—a fake! what they don’t see
is the iron bit that’s vaguely green
though it’s your jaws not these gates
that cannot move without you
—a belonging and yet this mold
is always in bloom, holding on
to one winter more
that needs flowers
the way all mourners kneel
and underneath the snow
look for a wagon not from wood
breaking down in front its fragrance
and where you stopped for water.
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With no ink and the nib
learning to dry
as shadows and a dark room
—what you stroke are the words
before they turn black
then emptiness, then
yet her name
is not something you dig for
then row by row
so this page on each side
stays damp from dirt
covered with fingers
—you almost point
though nothing moves
not these walls, not
what would reach around
hid from your arms
—this pen and in the margin
a wooden handle
squeezed tight—drop by drop
swallowed the world.
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These piles hold back: each finger
embraced the way darkness
covers a sky no longer needed
and what you breathe out
stays black till it cools
closes and overhead the dirt
shades you though clouds
left in the open are useless now
pulled along behind these bars
used to hands growing huge
in sunlight, in this makeshift prison
filling with mist and shovels.
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These blades changing course
veer the way all tears
cut off, half scrap, half
make it back as glass
—don’t let the rain fool you
or look for the edge
by coming against another
so no one can see the reeking
from engine oil and faces
wiped from between your fingers
though every breeze calls out
for caress, keeps dry
as if by itself
it could park this car
tighter and tighter and when you touch
it’s the silence that seems familiar
a curvature made from
nothing’s there, nothing’s working.
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These dead still need pills
though the one rock you leave
no longer reaches star to star
—what they swallow is mist: a sea
with its arch dissolved in this black dust
brought back for silence and them
—it could be done, already these graves
are monstrous, all mouth, all lung
and arm in arm begin to flower
overflow the trees, the fruit, the dew
with one more stone to weigh down
the so much coughing
—it’s how they breathe: a tiny flower
with just enough force
undone for thirst and their eyelids.
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.