Simon Perchik

You stir this can before it opens

as the promise a frog makes

when asking for a kiss :the paint

warmer and warmer will become

an afternoon with room for mountains

and breezes close to your shoulder

though that’s not how magic works

–there’s the wave, the hand to hand

spreading out between the silence

and your fingers dressed with gloves

as if it was a burden and the brush

raising your arm the way this wall

needs a color that will dry by itself

leave a trace :a shadow not yet lovesick

no longer its blanket and cure.

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 Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.