Your Dress Like Kerosene
I gave you the wrong directions
to my house,
my mouth.
I lay on the floor in the dark,
silencing the shutters.
Your headlights killed my
hydrangeas, melting
in the night,
and left my driveway to its peace.
The moon shuddered slowly
on its way to Zion,
sprouting tightropes from its roots
down to my chimney,
filling the soot with silver roses.
I laughed and my tongue
turned sour.
I laughed and my jaw unhinged,
became a beak,
became a hook.
It scooped up dried blood oaths
from your skin,
your lost corduroy pockets.
Strands of Hair, Tempest
I looked for feet I could breathe in
while you said you were running
on empty like your grandfather’s
lost car stuck on the road
outside of my left kitchen window.
I forgot to feed the birds,
I forgot to check the mail,
[there’s just nothing there]
I remembered to call you,
but didn’t.
Your suitcase packed itself
slowly, a defunct assembly line
bruising oranges and swallowing
hairclips.
Two door springs caught your perfume,
smoked, on the way out.
I hid your spare key on top of the roof
to tempt the moon back in for dinner.
She stood me up,
I sat down and wrote my own newspapers,
the print died under florescence,
the paper burned,
I laid down on the floor,
a yellow chalk outline.
About the Author:
Remi Recchia is an emerging poet concerned with the moon, authenticity, and breaking the rules. He has been published in The Birds We Piled Loosely, The Blotter, The Laureate, and The Poems That Ate Our Ears and has a forthcoming piece in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. He will begin his MFA in Creative Writing Program at Bowling Green State University in Fall 2016.
About All Accounts:
All Accounts and Mixture is an annual online feature celebrating the work of LGBTQ writers and artists. For this series, we seek work from authors who self-identify as “queer,” while acknowledging that this designation is subjective and highly personal. Our goal is to provide a forum for writers whose voices might be mis- or underrepresented by the literary mainstream.