Remi Recchia

When we don’t invite your older brother to the wedding & your mother wants to know why,

​we’re not quite sure what to say. How to say
her son is not the man she thinks he is, to say
her son hates her youngest daughter, to say
yes, I suppose I’m replacing him.
 
You send your brother a letter. I send him a letter.
His letter-opener falls behind the stove, or the blade
dulls, or the letter gets lost in the mail, or he burns
the letter like a scarlet fever.
 
I feel an old bruise on my abdomen. I find
old paperwork, dig a grave in the backyard.
I drown my dead name, old driver license,
undergrad college degree in cow manure.
 
I get lost on the Internet for hours. Ohio
tells me we shouldn’t bother moving closer to my
parents. The state of Michigan tells me not to start
a family. You tell me you don’t sleep when I’m gone.
 
We keep a careful spreadsheet of bylaws, court
cases, political stances of house representatives.
You say I’m not the problem, & maybe
that’s true, & maybe I need your dad to love me.
 
We send your mother an extra Christmas gift
wrapped like a cobbler gluing shoes, silent work
under dim light. You are asleep & snow is tapping
the window, a quiet wind melting through the door.

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Remi Recchia is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. His work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, 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.