Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Twenty-five
Spring 2011
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*
Simon Perchik

This gravestone :each sail
still leans on course
flops and wheels
before it topples into ice
–the heat from my hand

flows over you
–you hear only the streams
still cold from melting snow and knives.

This granite as lovers will cut
against the widest pine, your initials
grew longer, the sky
everywhere has withered

and this ice block
flowing past my lips as a beast
will gnaw the salt from stones.
Your name too is cold, is now alone.

The heat from my hand can kill
and each snowflake in tears
–nothing’s left but tears and lettering.

I lick your gravestone
for tears that fit my mouth
for those words we giggled to each other
for the small stone that will slip loose
fall, seal as if the sun too
was wished by one stone on another

on every grave till the last
like the sound when your back broke
–one too many bones, or dust
or chips from out the heart

–there’s never enough! everywhere
pieces, pebbles :blizzards
brought back to fill the dead

but you hear only the departing floes
the washing, each time outloud
and the sun heated by my emptiness

–I have no more, this last pebble
will fall to others and the sea
rise from my hand, each snowflake rises
and the flickering light you hear.

About Simon Perchik

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