a literary arts journal
PAINTED LIONS CATCH ON FIRE
Michael Salcman
The bullshit of surrealism goes back and forth
From meaning to no meaning
And back again
From decade to decade like the seventeen-year cicadas
Like the child you’ve raised against its will
Asleep in your house for the last time
Before going off to college and those scholastic lies
You rejected decades ago at the same age
As if words were a science and not a guess:
Why do we live in a museum my daughter asks
Why do all your patients die my son quizzes?
The manes of Dalí’s finely painted lions catch on fire
The sun swallows the Earth the sun later swallowed
By a black hole where God does not throw dice
A prediction an old man made against his will
Like the Second Coming or a corporate meeting
On an operating room table
A soundless umbrella and a sewing machine
A man with a bowler hat and cane
Floating immobile in the sky forever.
~~~
Michael Salcman, poet, physician, and art historian, was born in Pilsen Czechoslovakia and came to the United States in 1949. A child of the Holocaust and survivor of polio, Salcman has served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. His poems have appeared in
journals like Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. His poetry books include The Clock Made of Confetti (nominated for The Poets' Prize), The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing, and A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner of The Sinclair Poetry Prize). His three recent books from Spuyten Duyvil include: Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (2020), Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022), and Crossing the Tape (2024).
He can be found online on Facebook and YouTube as Michael Salcman, Twitter/X at @poedoc and his website www.salcman.com