Bodega | The wet-paint sign stays behind...

The wet-paint sign stays behind...

The wet-paint sign stays behind
lets you have the bench to yourself
watch how the battlefield standing by

becomes a hillside with the dead
at attention, still in formation
waiting for the command

you drink from its shadow
the way this make-shift raft
sticks to the ground as the silence

filling your mouth with a sea
to let it all take place
where you have taken a seat, sit

trying to remember how to talk
to look between these old boards
for rain or no rain.

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 Weston Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com. To view one of his interviews please follow this link.

104 – May 2021

By Simon Perchik

The wet-paint sign stays behind...