“It’s When”

From WTP Vol. VII #6

It’s when you widen your lips
that the air hasn’t the strength
to say it has nothing left

only the word for cars
moving slowly one behind the other
—it’s useless —it’s also November

and she is dead and the rain
smells from the word
that let the fires go out.

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 Osiris Poems, published by boxofchalk, 2017.

Featured image taken by Rossetti Perchik, A.I.A.