Ray Succre
Ray Succre currently lives on the southern specks on the lips and chin.
This room, as if a flailing prawn,
gave off its recent discord from the baby.
Unpotted plant, the soil under his nails.
The books scattered, torn pages tiling
the floor—
The house woke each day and stretched.
The baby lived alone. He set his table
with bent spoons and bibs,
his feet in decomposing heaps of toys.
A bottle of lapsed milk was featured wine.
Visitors came to sup and philosophize
the times. They noted his shambles
and could follow his house-treks
from the wake of debris.
This specter of his path,
rambunctions wall to wall,
found its temporary vanish, and only one,
in the near soundless emanations of his
passed-out, late night breaths.
The visitors would let themselves out,
and talk over his progress, he was talking,
yes, and again the vivid house of baby
slept.
Happy 50th, Randy Cotton
On a hotel whiteboard, beneath
‘Thursday: Cod with white wine sauce’,
sidling a highway and above transient fluff
and lint in placed redwood bark,
atop night worms and trench eggers
all the world to ling, caught and strung
to the docks one block from the hotel
pantry, the sign, the lingcod special
with a sauce made from blanc, it’s headline
on the whiteboard, while the board’s
light is cancer to a 2nd floor room
where an isolated, pregnant woman forces
her image through a camera to the One,
across the crawls of a thousand miles,
to Arkadelphia, propped on electrons
and bits of lightblood, in wires
like unrolled twine between
the cups still stained red from the juice,
from the ladle, the bowl, with dry ice
atop Randy Cotton’s 50th birthday
tablecloth, while the woman’s stomach
rolls from the fish and the baby, her
rotund image in some portion cradling
that same spark that lights the hotel’s
black-lettered, whiteboard sign.
Mr. Cotton sips a drink, the woman snaps
a shot, and a filet is draped into a pan,
while people fluttering in cars pass in light
from the unnoticeable, flickering sign.
The Couple Enough
Who fallen-snow’s the hill in
blanketing lovesays,
and who elms the woods in
further hand holding,
who breaks their intricate tinder and
strikes a cephalous spark,
two halves of a sun in a bursting locket.
Who-
a solitary cack from a woman in the ground,
turned to her first heart’s habit,
and a denizen’s tacking against the house,
turned on his own clover rampancy.
What else is confident as a
strong, carotid marriage?
Enough-
Who.
And verily kissed-
Who.
A whimsical tilting on
spitting, ribbon talks-
unabashedly,
crashingly,