Among the Lesser Loves by Ray Succre

A voyaging mind bickers through cold
rooms. Its woman grasps at pictures
and speaks in American south idiom.
What she says is also cold, and the pictures
show drinking people spanning chairs.

She curdles inward about a pretty man
she once knew that could make her
skin tip over with a certain touch.

A cartoon man walks from a woman
into a bar. Timely music plays.
Then the bar twists in half and people
fall out like drops from a dilated lime.

The woman grasps at pictures.


Ray Succre, Oregon, USA

Autonostalgia by Ray Succre

At perch in buckets by the hour,
and on filmy cola rims,
I snapped a shutter, daylight caught
atop the water in a boat,

and there between my eye and next,
and there in the nightcrawler-mulch
on my sleeves, and farthest into this
wind-stripped memory, nothing
so large as my father’s presence.

Nostalgia has its life in hundreds
of flashes, so strangely reduced
as to admire pebbles,
and though in warm memory
my father dictates, I, myself,
in them barely seem to infer a soul.

Most of the memorable me
will only be found in other heads.


Ray Succre, Oregon, USA