Remi Recchia

Firsts

Moon transcending violet
over the shade of your first

kiss to light up your father’s study
next to a bust of your mother

echoed against her last suicide note
cased in glass to protect the darkened

swimming in the blood of your first
period and hiding in the mailbox

where you forget to look each midnight
under the family name and fake crest –

if crests can be altered –
seeping metal and wood into the ground

bathing in the first attic you refused to enter
without a kerosene lamp and a boy

spinning thread black.

 

String Theory, Revisited

He quoted himself against porcelain,
jacket zipper kissing bathroom tiles,
coughing up a steel black fountain
pen. It pooled and became an omen

reflected in apology
I’m out with grief
and my strawberry blue eyes.

I kept the bathroom light off all night
to keep the coyote dreams out,
the mold, starlit, in.

The blinds split headlights
and tangled in his pelican’s nest hair,
tracing soft acorn patterns
on the pillow.
My hands convinced his back
that he was safe;
the dreamcatcher shed its own beads,

he woke up in drivel without socks
and cleaned the floor three times, swallowed
two eggs cradled in a glass carton.

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Remi Recchia is an emerging poet and an MFA candidate in Poetry at Bowling Green State University. He has been published in Ground Fresh Thursday Press, Gravel Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cutbank Literary Magazine’s “All Accounts & Mixture” series, The Birds We Piled Loosely, The Blotter, The Laureate, and The Poems That Ate Our Ears, and has a poem forthcoming in indicia.