Ray Succre
Bio: Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, 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. Other Cruel Things (2009), an online collection of poetry, is available through Differentia Press.
Flies and Peaches to the Ground
The live American, gem-eyed
and peach-tongued at the table,
has red drifts and green slants.
Plates arrive amid the flies,
a flock of them. They swim
the nations out, sound a strong horn,
lie level as the peoples secrete
and slide in morning yolks.
The hairs have scarcely grown in
before they strike the floor.
Beneath the air and sea, is ground.
It knows of no difference between
boar-tick and tire, and covers over
in a shake the same.
The dead American is no more
obscured than the dead Spaniard.
Urchins. Hieroglyphs. Minerals
to stick against a dog’s paw dig,
laying down cow bones in a surly
earth that churns.
The Wades in Notoriety
Some path sick or tussled lends its length to celebrity,
pitches clay-baked in flashed green light,
and warden-pared segments.
Riches sweeten, a death of brink freshness,
with crocodile eyes or distant,
but their rhapsody is smeared in frank ransoms,
with iodine crocked in the cut.
Here on some path stacked and tottering,
and pressed against all sides by searing, slow shoulders,
these hoisted beings wave through tinsel,
as if pledging they are made to appear,
and not leave ever. They soon sit,
and then wage and ware are innovated.
When the path brightens, a slash through domestic night,
these cutely culled human riches
raise as if praises for wooden, unborn babies.
The Auger Down
The caravans pass and will not distinguish
hitch-thumbs in the background from middle
fingers, the Beat; old men tell it the gut of art,
flipped like a generation, the one,
sucking dead cats up through grates for brunch,
and applauding genitals from atop ugly tongues
and snappy fames that seldom dealt with their
own aftermath,
riding the auger down.
Someone holds the lid up in reference
and pours the vomit out like
gizzards flopping from
a nude grocery turkey;
someone flushes and leaps in,
riding the auger down.
The green-blue hot dog in a chapbook
is uncovered,
gasping, turning down,
the groove opens her legs and
all the dead Greeks on Troy fall out,
gasping, turning down,
the subjects caught up in cellophane,
gasping, turning down,
art affairs after love affairs into cat affairs,
soured milk, dogshit, parkside deals,
gasping, gasping, turning inward,
riding the auger down.
Without Anesthetic
The toothache splits your jaw into halves,
and haunts them, tooth by twisting tooth,
kerosene on water around a child yellow truck.
That face is grasped in sudden muscle
as if a bruise with eyes and nose
above a stone-tumbler with a tongue.
You stamp the floor, you patch your hands
together, opening the mouth and tugging
from harsh spirals of pain, as from a gasping
fish on the hook.
