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 .
Like the title says.