Election Day
The grass swoons
under your spittle, catching
acid sideways. Apple- and wine-
chunks push past your lips and straggle
over your chin, pink
and flushed with the leftovers
from a liquid breakfast. Your father
is ready in a blue Camaro stalled
in front of an oak tree. Small
circles of adhesive are also ready,
calm and patriotic inside dry
churches and schools. Liver spots
blind the sun. The polls have been open
since six a.m. Your hands have been open
since midnight two days ago—palms
sweating, fingers as bottle-openers
as stick figures as rats. You
are not ready for your America
to crumble. You think sometimes
that pride is like the last icicle
in an icebox—smooth and jagged,
stiff, stiff. Defeatable. Your father
tips icicles out of iceboxes before
they form, but you can catch
the beginnings sometimes, and lick
the the salty rim-lid. You think
about the first time you kissed a boy
and how his lips were unsweet,
and remember the trauma of public
school, and how your father
would pull you out at lunch time
for ice cream and a new book.
He understood you on a simple
level; you understood yourself
in the lens given. The Camaro
fails to start three times, and you
wait to join you father and watch
him vote for his ideology over
your sins.
Under a Walnut Tree on a Sunday Afternoon
Silver sleeves covering a lace wrist-
watch, two gold buttons on the cuff,
brown tresses June-baked under the full sun
and curling on a shoulder—she offered
him an apple with seeds on the outside
and skin in the heart, coating the stem
with a blackberry that stained itself
on the way down. Purple juices met rough
red and white ridges, trickling south
to the core and the bruised under-flesh.
He rolled the berry between his forefingers;
he leaves shuddered above her and dropped
white fragments—she stopped, remembered
delicate parasols and luncheons, appealed
to the summer before counting ingredients
for iced tea, and covered her pink with white linen.
The Socio-sexual Indicator of Horned Owls
Three horned owls in a sycamore, swallowing
empty mammal bones hollow like lockets
and delicate as a maiden’s ring finger; they compare
their horns, which are not horns but plumicorns,
and shift eggs against the branch, slivered in the moon,
already deep under the roots from hanging
herself last Tuesday. The eggs drop in miniature parachutes,
break open like cream on a mother’s kitchen floor.
The nest is gaping black under an empty sky; it calls to the
groundskeeper, making his rounds at moonset.
He scoops loose feathers gently from grasping roots
and molded moss kissing tree-knots. He thinks
of his wife and how he loves her carefully—exquisitely—
sober and somber as if at a perpetual funeral
where the widow wears fake pearls that look like oysters
and a veil that hides her bird-eyes from the small death.
Remi Recchia holds a BA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University (WMU), and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University. Remi has been published in Gravel Magazine, Ground Fresh Thursday Press, 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 have poems forthcoming in Front Porch and indicia. At WMU, Remi was a reading intern for Third Coast, an assistant editor for The Laureate, and a student intern for New Issues Poetry & Prose. Remi was also announced as a Poetry, Fiction, and Playwriting finalist for the WMU Undergraduate Gwen Frostic Creative Writing Awards.