I find the remnants of
his seasonal praise of a highness,
or of some god,
in the dumpster
by the parking lot.
Feathers and blood, a beak
that's been engraved with
a woodburner,
engraved with some haggard letters
in a pictogrammatical language
in a box
in the garbage.
That chicken-killing man
down the hall
makes animal sounds
in recreation, practices them,
nails money in envelopes to his
own front door,
makes me nervous and wary.
Either of us is made absurd
by the other.
* * * * *
A Nova Rests on the Briar
Red dot—why, because the dizzying stab
snapped apart the center of my thumb,
an accuracy of point;
every pore could be a torn open hole.
The grimy thumb was desert. The nail, sky.
The point? Impermanence.
I was pulling brambles to drink four p.m.,
as they were playful to me,
and had the look of freedom where they grew,
having spread wherever they pleased
like petrol on the surface of an eye.
If my own eye should quetch and leak,
for the human brambles I've seen vanish,
until my very skull were dry,
I would not, in a torte of grief,
rewind or blink, rub or drift my focus loose.
The red nova on my thumb is tasted and forgotten.
In the seconds between stab, red, and suck,
men and women had left the Earth forever,
red novas swollen over by cold, hands, clutched
and then dismissed.
I grasp the brambles and drag them out of life.
I can kill them all by five.
~ Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay) was recently released in print and is available most places. A second novel, Amphisbaena, is forthcoming in Summer 2009. He tries hard.
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