Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” and a complete bibliography, visit his website.

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By Simon Perchik

As if your death is not yet the same weight
traps count on though you are leaning back
putting dirt in your mouth while to the last

pebbles come by to shelter you, lie down
–you will have to die some more, brought
this far by what moonlight has to say

about holding on–you have to eat from a
hand
that’s opened till your grave is too heavy,
fills
broken into for each goodbye hidden away

as the breath clinging to footstones that
wander
past, throwing a cloud over you, boarded up
as mountainside and so many deaths at once

–here even rain is comforted to keep you dry

–whole families sitting down, waiting for
you
to walk in, forget something somewhere else.