A blue suited Magritte man shuffles red cards
on a white table. He sits in the shade of a green umbrella
with a silver pole. Part of the table is gray.
There he lays the cards face down. The table has the measles.
It is a child’s cheek cradled in its mother’s arms.
He turns over a queen. Her flesh tones are points of color.
From the top of a building the table is a small green circle.
Only his elbows are moving. They turn over four sevens.
A sudden gust collapses the umbrella and the cards
scatter in the street. There is a dust storm on the moon
and a mote in the Magritte man’s eye.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 6.
Robert Perchan’s latest books are the comic novella Tropic of Scorpio (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2022) and Last Notes from a Split Peninsula: Poems and Prose Poems (UnCollected Press, 2021). His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions in 2000. Bob continues to eat and drink in Busan, South Korea, under the bemused gaze of his translator wife, Mi-kyung Lee.
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