Where the air was lithe as teleost fish,
I was mercy, pity, peace, crushing on her, immediate,
a sessile flower rooted in the shoulder of a satellite,
and with hygienic disrepair, teeth the outside of an old mill.
I looked to laugh,
I called up words
and on them was carried up into gelid rooms;
I was bruised by lights as from wrongness there
(and niftiest inward where I’d cocked the springs,
while under-swimming to pull down the sexies from hobs).
When her sweetheart worked, my neck split atop the pole,
head displumed and pegged, example to set off a cached wealth.
I looked to laugh,
I called up words,
and heard simply soft chuckles on every passing voice.
His mouth speaks tirade but
the kaleidophone has split
all of his speech into slush.
“Are we starry sorry?”
I listen. “No, no. But I understand.”
This is the moment when I
get rid of him, though still
mention my urge to
sock his face back and look
for the candy
for forgetting to lift me
from a bar-den meet full of
meat still clinging to spun-out baboons.
His charm: “Voila- apology.”
My statement: “I spent time with
one of the subtlest, then he
showed me his van.”
The earpiece fractures, then blooms.
Adam’s shrapnel enters my ear:
“Eve, you putrid stew of puke.”
I listen. “Yes, yes. And I understand.”
Ovation
To live in a bottle of bay leaves, I lead a woman with morning hunger like yours
into sunrise. On the leaves, drought to veins suffocated,
broken offshoots tortured for soup.
You say it is in a bowl, and raise your spoon to employ breakfast,
but it was at first a mule-bray flavor riding the water in a pot,
and it was first in measuring tins and spoons,
and it was first in bottles, a refrigerator, and behind the curtain in a skull.
She woke and was a swish of wet curtain for the shower.
Behind the hill the light eye lifted, dilating the library on 4th street,
lilting the fluent shapes of bus-stops, alighting on apes and stairwells and elbows.
“You’re still awake?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“You’re making me soup?”
“The Sun is coming up. This one’s yours.”
The air is porous and catches against the mood of moon and October.
I serve with a bowl, bread. Activity.
I have seen you, the public, after ladles, your eyes ironed and nostrils looming
for the thing of it; she is the same.
She is a woman of yours like a reel of film rolled out to expose every frame
of the scene. She is very public once the Sun has risen.
Then, the Sun explodes with ovation, from the highest, sparse-treed line.
Her clean spoon, as though nothing is beyond it,
dips through the steam
of the coliseum.
Ray Succre
Not inhuman shim-fed pose upright and the candor: What a meal.
All truncated to a test the nocturnal violence.
All moments wait out respiration
The peck of hungry homages growth of peat the peek of your birth
Quick utterance hello saber, spin gestate
hand in hand, doll in doll, matryoshka
The 8th lady lady Clairol dumb lady eight
Mental bisque of cognition stop yelling pared body into hairy legs—
fiery omen cyst in dementia— Picasso forest
Squander revoke your lot in Hell the nocturnal tenors saran toupees
harpies and gorgons spitfight and the get-out.
Epitaph: You sat in a centaur’s hard dentures,
gnashed white shrinking from nothing incapacitating fucks
but orderly posed not inhuman.
Ray Succre
Bio: Ray Succre is an undergraduate currently living on the southernOregon coast with his wife and son. He has had poems published inAesthetica, Poets and Artists, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novels Tatterdemalion (2008)and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print, and Other Cruel Things (2009), an online collection of poetry, is available through Differentia Press.
For inquiry, publication history, and information, visit me online:http://raysuccre.blogspot.com
