"Pages of Charts, Chirring Decline! Decline! Decline!"

featuring mandibles, moonlight, Moreau's doctoring, multiple spies in the house of love

Jan 02, 2024

“The Beetle” begins with the simple, impossible factuality of an early Simic poem:

With his slick green
insect mouth, his
clicking mandibles, he says:
“It’s too late.”

And from there swerves into an exacting first-person violence that, without quite shaking off the dispassionate, surrealist language of the poem’s beginning, recalls the grand myth-making vengences of Plath.

Read “The Beetle” and “DMs” by Stephanie Yue Duhem, now at AC.

*
Slowly this coral
braces for the back and forth
by changing colors
beginning with moonlight—in time
the leaves become tea, gutted
the way an old woman with beads
weighs your palm for riverbeds
then spreads each finger
whose only memory is the darkness
that helps you breathe
underwater til it burns out
smells from emptiness
and standing in a circle while you drink
from a cup filled with some meadow
overgrown, forgotten, all at once.

I never met Simon Perchik, but I would have liked to. He sent us work occasionally, and we always loved it—poems that were strange in a quiet way, not exactly the sort of thing we usually publish but also not not the sort of thing we publish; work, in other words, that pushed at the boundaries of our general editorial leanings, in a way that seemed to expand our own vision of what Always Crashing could be. He was unfailingly charming in his emails. The poems he sent were always untitled, or perhaps titled with the asterisk each had at its head, but each submission seemed to hang together as a sequence. We published him twice: once in our fifth print issue, and once online, a gorgeous sequence of five poems. I learned, too long after his passing, that he died in the summer of 2022, at the age of 98.