Remi Recchia

Sailor’s Knot

 
As useless as a car wash in the rain-
storm, my body stands in the shower
 
without its brain. What I mean to say is my head
hurts. What I mean to say is some days
 
I throw up heartache. Orange flecks, curled
caterpillar bodies, flop against the toilet seat.
 
I was too slow to reach the porcelain.
I was too slow to raise my hand, declare myself
 
present. Who am I, if not the ghoul
you pretend not to hear through your satin pillowcase?

I have always been last, and not, I suspect,
in the way the Lord intended.
 
My name, impossible to pronounce, rhymes
with “last call.” It is possible to be blind
 
in love and to be hungover at your own wedding.
If St. Peter cards us at the door, you’re screwed for loving me.
 
The late-heat fireflies bob outside the window
like drunken ships. Or maybe they’re the light-
 
house, hazy, calling the last meal to shore. O,
sailor! o, siren! tie me or take me! Crush my skull
 
against thunderclouds and sink me with expired
treasure. Indenture me. Give me a rope
 
and I’ll craft the most perfect noose
these glittering Atlantic starfish have ever seen.

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When the world ended,
	Golden shovel after Emily Dickinson


we couldn’t find our passports. I
looked in the sandbox, in the shed—I heard
them crying out under the bed, maybe, like a 
child sick from nightmares. One fly
sticking to the window. We remembered the buzz
of a Sunday hangover, spiraling nights with friends when
we could afford such luxuries. Now I
am sober and the bars have died.

Bombs sounded across the
globe, ethereal creatures breaking the stillness
of heat. We couldn’t find our passports in
dusty attics or kitchen drawers or the
gas tank filled with fumes. Not in the lived-in room.

The recycling bin came up empty. The dog was
playing dead, as always, like
a corpse ballooned under a street lamp moon, the
mailman never sure what to say. The dog’s stillness
the first warning sign we missed. What is the cataclysm in

this life? When does a marriage become the
cutting board of two strangers? The air
conditioning sang timidly between
our arguments and ultimatums. The
vows we’d exchanged caught under our tongues, heaving
resentment, maybe. My mouth of
diamonds. Your mouth of storm.



 

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From the Author: The poems “Sailor’s Knot” and “When the world ended,” take an imaginative approach to alcoholism, marriage, and apocalypse. My work attempts to understand addiction through exaggerated or surreal imagery and impossible situations. I owe the form of “When the world ended,” to the poet Terrance Hayes, who invented the golden shovel (a form in which the poet borrows language from a different poet to pay them homage; in my case, I borrow language from Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz”). 

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