Remi Recchia: 2 poems
On Visiting the Fairlawn Cemetery in Stillwater, Oklahoma
The birds here are tiny dinosaur soldiers:
black & feathered & claw-footed. Probably carnivorous.
We're walking down the path hand-in-hand,
tourists unaffected by bones at rest. It is cold,
& you are wearing my sweater. The brown
threads weave over your chest like a casket.
I understand death in a detached way—studied
coldness & distended stomach. My dog stopped
breathing in February (or March or April) & I
never told anyone about it, just burned his collar
& ate the rest of his food. Sometimes it is like this
in life.
I smell the wind picking up a few miles back; your hand
stills the back of my neck like a mother in prayer.
I'm thinking about those cold yellow cats,
how their mother was there, unidentified, among her kittens,
& I watched townspeople & children litter & smoke
in the parking lot. I waited for them to leave & stomped
out the embers. We called every animal shelter that night,
asking what to do & where to go & they told you,
"ma'am, they're supposed to be there, they're downtown
cats," & I didn't want to be the one to tell you the cats
would survive just fine without you. & now you're staring
at the graves, at your reflection in my face, small & white
& marble, reading dates of little deaths, & I know
how beautiful certainty tastes.
On the Event of My Father’s Seventy-second Birthday
O God
On my knees
& I’m thinking about the man in a leprechaun hat,
how he’s drunk & asking me if I am
my father’s son, telling us his son was murdered;
O God
On my knees
Basement incense will cover my brother’s cigarette
sounds, but not the slow slope of my father’s shoulders
Sometimes I wonder how it feels to dowry a daughter;
O God
On my knees
Was Abraham afraid of animaling his son?
It doesn’t matter if Isaac shuddered
These are the things we give to our fathers;
O God
On my knees
I am twenty-three & I can’t remember how to catch
white leather seamed with red, & I want to learn again,
but my father is away, skin stitched together tight;
O God
On my knees
I’ve been told I was born old, but I’m not
the one with liver spots, my lungs are fresh,
& I have never been more afraid of death.
Remi Recchia is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Barzakh Magazine, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Front Porch, Gravel, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Haverthorn Press, among others. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University.