Simon Perchik
TWO POEMS

*
You no longer bathe
though a cold rain
flows through one arm

grieves the way each river
carries off its slow descent
with a deadly hold

—around these gravestones
your smelly leather jacket
still arranged so its sleeves

spread-eagle, are packed
with a sky already darkened
by the more and more feathers

that have no heading yet
and your shoulders without hope
weightless over the water.

*
These stones too steep, cling
the way the overcast side by side
lets through one star –in the open

you devour its incinerating light
and distances though the grass
has just been mowed and watered

knows all about how the night sky
stands back, erect, righteous
between each grave and winter

where you lean over to drink
—always the same cold air
two mornings at a time, and choke.

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 Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. His poems appear in issues 14, 18, and 22 of Cleaver.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #25.