While still in one piece, each horse—half blind,
half bewildered—is led around
by the acid taste in your mouth. The music
needs work too, though victory is hiding
in the yells. This pop-up carousel
knows only the sounds left as dust
from the cavalry that will arrive with the tug
some child is given by touching another's head
with their own—comes to this park
where the sky expects its sunlight to leave
as the shrieks not yet in place,
and only the hooves are still in mid-air
the way death offers its arm, adds its weight
without turning around—lets you mount from a bench
that lowers your forehead closer to the grass.
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 Reflection in a Glass Eye 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSK774rtfx8