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 in 2017.
Untitled 1
You dead still look out at water
are sheltered inside these row-houses
laid down along the shore –each grave
waiting for your Moses-like wave
the way a valley is dried
for rafts made from stone
though water never leaves you
covers each afternoon
with the few hours it needs
between your hands
kept separate to clear a path
as if nothing happened.
Untitled 2
Barely marble yet these tents
are pulled along the ground
by rope that needs more rope
not yet some high-wire act
for acrobats just learning to wave
while the crowd below
listens for rain already overgrown
with mold and longing, kept wet
by your step by step holding on
to the corners as if they
no longer want to be unfolded
and you could stop walking.
