Remi Recchia
POETRY BY REMI RECCHIA
I clean the house
regularly when I quit drinking. I feed my cat & comb his bottle-
brush tail, freshly damp from a trip to the litter box, & I used to think that was disgusting
but now I see my own pupils, framed in dark blue, burrowed in crusted glad
offering of the nourishment I never knew I could provide.
I arrive on time to work now, but my boss complains I won’t stop
flirting. But I say, hey, there is so much beauty to appreciate & only so much
I can do to make up for lost time. & he says, Remi, you’re fired, & I say, Todd,
man, you’re fuckin’ killing me. Still I cardboard-box my Weeping Fig & inspirational posters.
I croon lullaby & salami breath to the glossy Ficus Benjaminae leaves, kiss its twisted
stem. Together the Weeping Fig & I return my keys to Peggy
who doesn’t blink a marble lash. I whistle like an overstuffed pigeon on the Paris
streets—I’d rather be fired at eight a.m. than roll, blearily, like a slug
yellowed & bruised late in the afternoon with tender sockets that were once eyes.
But that’s what we want, right? We want the drunk irredeemable, sinking,
shriveled under a stained down comforter, which, though his only family
inheritance, cannot block out the sun. We want maxed-out credit card, lost\
left shoe, stale voicemail to ex-girlfriend left after closing time by a left-behind ghost.
To put it simply: We want the drunk to act like a drunk so we can assign his redemption.
We watch his recovery arc. Nothing is more exhilarating than a stranger’s relapse.
Say what you’d like about personal accountability. One day I was sober & the next
I was not. Circus wheels lit up my brain, merry-go-round horses feathered my wrists,
elbows, shoulders, ethanol pleasure distracting me from the misfiring nerves set in my body
like a silent arthritis. As if by pimp or puppeteer. For years I gorged myself on pink
cotton candy from Pleasure Island. I emptied my pocketbook nightly, traded
rent money for carcinogens. Nausea, once emptied, was the trigger for round three.
This story is boring. I am boring myself. If you’ve watched one spiral, you’ve watched them all.
We want the drunk to get as close to a blackout as possible & doggy-paddle to safety
right before taking the sip. My cat knows I’m sober. Bean lays on my chest for our nightly
television ritual & sneaks hot chocolate, not beer. The vet says Bean suffers from whisker
fatigue, but I say, don’t we all? don’t we tire of this mortal coil, turning & turning in the widening
gyre? The vet cautions me against feline obesity. I don’t tell him obesity is the least of our worries.
Bean & I eat junk food instead of Caring Cat Kibble & vodka tonics. Does he remember
those days? Weekday mornings spent realizing that the urine on the floor was not his?
That I tracked mess everywhere because I couldn’t hold it or anything else? I wonder what Bean
thinks of the guys who sleep across the street, if he knows it could have been us
under that secondhand tarp. That I am not better than them, those men known by first
name only—there’s Peter, in his hoodie, waiting for the library to open again,
& John, in the orange pants, who’s been turned away from the shelter.
We have all made choices & have had choices made for us. Maybe I got lucky
ten times. Maybe they got unlucky once. This salvation is not my own doing but still
I’d like to dust it over their heads like a confetti halo, like a promise, like a rain-
coat. Like a surgeon polishing his scalpel to make the final, absolving suture to a brain
designed for pleasure but yearning, mostly, for the end.