SurVision Magazine
An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Six
SIMON PERCHIK
* * *
To keep from breathing you cough
the way these two stuffed pillows
still float on the bed
wanting to fly off together
– you have been given
an advantage, are aroused
by snow melting in your throat
as flowers and footprints
though another year as gone by
and your lips shrunk down
to the bone – you dead
are warmed by a fever
no longer in one piece
has barely enough dirt
to hide the afternoon
that knows all about burials
becoming rain by listening
for your cough, can hear it
rising from this bed
as your breath with nothing's wrong
till suddenly it's louder.
* * *
You eat this snow for its forgiveness
already hear it soften
the way the window lets you look through
without it making a sound though it's your tongue
that can't move, is trapped, tightening on the cold
not yet the word for what was lost
when nothing's changed, the dead, one by one
falling in front your lips without anything left over
for your mother's voice and later.
* * *
It starts at the foundry, softens
then flows slowly past
though the nail you've just pulled up
is already bending over, gasping for air
knows all about rust
from the way a summer breeze
will comfort the still warm air
and together eat and eat and eat
– who can make it breathe again
be more merciful, let it wait
till the board finds another board
a corner and though there's nothing inside
it's enough – who but you
digs with a hammer, hand over hand
looking for the others.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker, SurVision and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Gibson Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2019.
