Ray Succre
At the Gelid Hotel
"It's not that I find the time right, but we're present.
There's a me and a you," he says, clean
from a cold swim.
She sighs arctic, then undulates; after all,
he did displace the others, a waddler prime,
breathy with a burbling gut.
They slip into the water beneath his clucks.
Once under, they glide, two chemical plants,
a floatage affair swollen with fat.
They ripple the bellies, bow-chicka-bow,
past water, cozy off sipping ice,
the rotund male belling out some glottal song,
and the lowing female, head and tail lifted,
telling up her name again and again.
The Fuse Is Scorched
I climb atop the mailbox, crow-perched.
When the bills arrive, I peck them up
from the mail-worker's hand.
He leaves and I caw, and soon, the hail drives me
back into my home with the upset windows
and quiet mate.
Definitive luxury, danse usury,
pale and in most ways requested,
I peck the bill numbers, pick the ones to pay,
until my nape prickles with dinner anticipation.
I am overfed. I grow large.
My mate is all-knowing, growing quieter each hour.
My caw is now deep but no longer important.
The twigs and wires of our nest are at odds the mail.
The fuse in my mind is thick with smoke.
In a dream, I go underfed, and impress my mate.
I march in my dream in my house until the night
there is a strike of catastrophe; the dream, as most any,
drops into a nightmare more realistic and ancient:
The mail stops coming.
The windows, choked in black, shatter inward.
The shingles rot off and the lawn decays.
I watch the pickets fall. Sinister or protective,
I move sudden and keep my mate near me.
My talons grip her wings.
We are screaming in the screaming house.
I will not let her leave.
The walls begin to burn.
At the Bazaar
After arriving where they passed several creatures,
and still seeking presentation, still listening,
I entreated and shimmered, pitched and took money,
selling them a colossal arachnid.
"We've been looking all day. If it bites,
how much poison?" the husband asked.
"Venom. And to the extent of sickening you,
but only that."
"We live alone; will it make babies with
other spiders?" the wife asked.
"No. It will only hunt and take them.
It will do this in a manner of sumptuous accuracy,
and within an unending, solitary hunger."
After exiting where one held the door for the other,
and sated with an eight-legged mechanism, its eyes
a grope of brassy cameras,
they returned to their nest, tautened the threads,
and painted their handsome monster cunningly in glass.
It will poison them the night, while not moving,
it will mount them in the brain,
and they'll love, they'll glass-tap and wait.
Sunshine Holiday
That my admission to modernity sings faulty,
and any pleasure spites my isolated marrow,
I can't but fret my place as between great frauds.
I am so impish, distraught, gunning.
Until the cranked and frolicked sodomy scatters
those circling gulls that raid the screen, I nudge
through un-lively laughter; is it that base nature
plays Demogorgon to civility?
For those moral crumbs across the drome,
I give my lesser eyes, but do see.
Having caught the world in garments
and nude machines, I take the gallop beside them,
some colt to drink from nibbling brook,
a nominal yet brooding, jealous sort.
My violence to the debonair is an aurora.
Leaving the Wake with Ana Kata
In the dress pulled up as fish scales
ripped back across the meat, Ana Kata
is lastly cut her loves in a christ-bed,
shriveled and sandy exposed.
The soft dress is circumcised from her spindle,
and stupidly left to a what-floor.
You think of fat bird and wriggled young dog,
but you do not think of tooth decay.
You see electrified porridge and the puppeteer's
sex show, but you do not see to the ulcers.
The minutes are felt or kissed or sucked at,
but you hardly stay the nights,
and pass over early, yourself like a gout spell,
or pitchy blister.