Two Poetry Pieces
Remi Recchia



From a Porch on Elm Street

I forgot my childhood zip code
before kissing streetlamps instead of you,
incense within a candle.
Your number a silhouette against my cheekbones,
two birdfeeders carved empty
on your grandfather’s porch,
glistening.
 
I asked your shadow to stay
and it told me there was light;
I asked it where and it
turned into a
 
raven. I melted my neighbors’
swing set into ash at moonrise.
A Colosseum birthed itself.
 
I thought your mother
was a ghost for the first twelve years
of loving you. And then she spoke
through the kitchen side door
and you swallowed
eggs from a jar,
yellow frothing.



Finding Charlotte Smith on a Lantern to Nowhere
​
You told me my handshake
was weak
when I stitched
scars across your forehead, counting
 
beats & measures against
my throat. Candied
cough syrup disarmed you & the stove –
you left the light on
 
all night, I watched the house burn up
like gingerbread,
through you in heat,
under charcoal
 
paintings that only work
if you’re sober.

About the Author: Remi Recchia is an emerging poet and an MFA candidate in Poetry at Bowling Green State University. He has been published in 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 Ground Fresh Thursday Press.

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