The Shine Journal

 

A Spell of Forced Shelter

 

by

 

Ray Succre

 

The road is for bashing

its leaves against tires,

and the car is slaughtered in

panicked cricket droves,

not a skin unbeaten but for

those lucky supples what

can stay in their homes.

 

The air drives and chills and

strips mail from boxes,

and the plum tree limbs snap back,

dragged howling down 4^th street.

 

The Sun crashes through

a cloud and is devoured just

as quickly, leaving a slanted,

flush rain to lean hard atop the roof

and an imminent long hour of

unpeopled mobbing

across the ground and

throughout the sky and

thrown fast against

these stuttering panes.

 

 

BIO: 

 

 

RAY SUCCRE lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son.  He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries.  His novel Tatterdemalion(Cauliay Publishing)is forthcoming in early 2008. He tries hard. Reach him  here:   raysuccre@hotmail.com    http://www.raysuccre.blogspot.com
 

MOTIVATION:

"My motivation with this poem began during a sudden shift in weather that knocked the electricity out of miles of neighborhoods in my small town several years ago, for nearly three days.  There is an imminent and irreconcilable relationship between human beings and the weather.  Beyond the usual and small-talkish mention of weather in day-to-day life, I have a fascination with humanity's reactions to it. 

 

There are times during even mild storms when the world seems to have been taken away from us, not reclaimed or possessed by the wind or water, but simply harried for a time by an intermingling of forces more strict or powerful than we can imagine, and that have literally shaped the world in which we live, as well as our very existence on it. 

 

This poem shows a side of the weather at odds with itself, but in a more visceral way we can better accept.  Its viewpoint is from a person having sought shelter, and who is unable to leave it.  This person watches a storm taking place, one that demonstrates a malevolence so constant and intimate that it can almost begin to seem human in behavior."