a poem by Ray Succre

The Adjustors

The noses beneath hats flare and reap in the space.
They in their shoe polish trample the weeds.
The weeds have grown all year.

The old woman will not be bought a new home,
they’ve agreed, and now they stand adjusting
a value on the rotting one.

Rats flit the property, scavenging food among bits
of septic debris.

Calculators. Clipboards. Hats. Nostrils.
The men enter the mud to the water’s edge,
still having not reached the flooded home.
The grandmother meets them and billows
in sucker’s talk. One of them slaps her
with numerals.

We will raise this house twenty feet,
they say, and the water will pool at the base beams,
and steel stairs will be your foliage,
but the view and savings will be ambitious.

The grandmother’s hat angrily sails into the lake.
The men add it to their notes.

At end, she drives the road under,
fuming in her blood as she climbs the gravel inclines.

Alone, the men smoke and gesture, talk fractions
and lunches. They are excited when they discover
a rusted shovel in the brush.
The sun lights their hands as they take their shovel
out back, into the drifts to kill rats.

© Ray Succre