Mantis 20 (Spring 2022)
New Poetry

Simon Perchik

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You sit along its rim, count
the way this well returns
wishes and seawater

and each sky scented
by the damp breeze
that suffocates its prey

–you don’t escape, let
the warm sand take hold
surround your arm over arm

as a day still struggling
thrashing in nets, tossing out
balloons no one wants anymore

or celebrates the catch
where a small stone
was asking for you.

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 Family of Man Poems, published by Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2021. For more information, including free e-books and his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website at simonperchik.com.