Cover Art: Marc Chagall, Aleko and Zemphira by Moonlight, Gouache and pencil on paper, 1942, MOMA

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Two Poems

​You grieve as if this shadow
has no sound yet
though once your face is covered
 
you let more darkness out
and what you hear
stays, clots the way one hand
 
clings to this dirt made black
by the other, left behind
to hide in the scent from rivers
 
that move again, keeps you company
years after as the cry
for water and already this crater
 
gouged from your mouth
stone by stone, caving in
and your lips boiling over.
 
 
                            •  •  •


​You are pulled and the same darkness
lifts your arm around these stars
spreads out door to door
 
knocks so your fist can smell
from blood become your heart again
dragged ahead as if you belong
 
near distances, end to end
though this cemetery
has forgotten its dead
 
holds only the invisible hillsides
soaking in stone and narrow alleyways
passed along till they close
 
and what will be your tears
waits as lips, as the sky brought back
crumbling with not a light left on.

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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. 

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past, Laurinda Lind                                                                                                                                                                                                         next, Juanita Rey