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Simon Perchik

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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. 

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