Perception Spring 2023

melancholy gaze
Julia Gershowitz
Melancholia pursed its lips &
Kissed your frosted cheek.
Its taste is numb
Unaltered by the simple quiet breeze.
Meaning rests on your skin
Bittersweet and ambivalent
Unsure and ghostly
You let out a sigh &
The pressure upon your eyelids became too much to bear.
As they
Finally reached down
Hiding your view of the darkness
Protecting your vision from another sorry glance
Yet, even with eyes closed,
You encounter the darkness again.
An empty unknown
And as eyelids begin to raise,
The aperture widens,
And you can’t help but to blink.
Still stuck in a haze
Starry.
Still.
Staring at nothing, but
Searching for everything.
Soup
I. Alvarez
Men spit their hardened faces towards me
and the black road curves too sharp.
Calloused hands and cowboy hats,
the sharp smell of spilled beer
and Patsy Cline warbling in the background.
I watch you wrinkle,
paper skin crumpling like a hotel Bible.
The house reeks of Camel Lites.
We stop for Panera Bread
and you pour three, four, five packets
of salt into the soup. Humming
along to Johnny Cash and you can’t even
bring the spoon to your gummy lips
without spilling.
At your funeral I can only
think of the soup. The ugliness of Iowa
on a Thursday, the men with
their faces and the Waylon Jennings
on repeat, Badlands
looming in the distance.
The soup, filmy and ruined.
96 | Perception
Spring 2023 | 97