You flip this jacket over the shoulder
where a wing should be ̶ a carefree strut
that weighs nothing now, can hear you lift
till one sleeve is closer to the other
̶ it’s feathers you’re after, the climb
to when this hillside was an avalanche
covering these dead with its warmth
the way each row spreads out
and side by side the slow climbing turn
is buried under the small stones
still listening for evenings and cries
while you walk by in soft slippers.
——
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in the Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Rosenblum Poems published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020. For more information including free e-books, a video interview, and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website.