Against Burial
“Recognition is the misrecognition you can bear.”
– Lauren Berlant
“It ain’t only the bad ones nor yet the dumb ones that gets sucked under.”
– James Baldwin
There wasn’t a funeral. His sun-stricken eyes never felt cool relief under red dirt or earth
embrace. His bones have surely bleached under the gaping Connecticut sky.
My brother didn’t tell me where he went. We didn’t share much, so now like a ringless
finger, I am left.
The afterlife is a war. My brother’s smile is gone, but so, too, is his anguish.
When I was young, I held my breath at the crossroads. I saw the track marks. I cannot stop
kissing the inside of my elbow. I throw away every pill bottle, transparent tricksters cylindrical
lying suns. I ask the pharmacist for extra Narcan. This request feels like theft.
I do not know how to write this poem. I do now know how to write this poem.
I do not know how to end this poem. I do not know if this poem will end.
I call myself addict when the more accurate term is drunk. Lush. A man with an inherited
blush. Our father passed down secrets & symptoms & songs. The murmurs slumber in our
seed.
\\\
For his daughter’s fifth birthday, my brother bought an enormous ice cream cake.
The icing swirled on her face like baptism. She is sweet & blonde & named after a color.
I know he loved her. I don’t know if he loved me or if we just resented each other
so perfectly that it looked like grace.
When strangers say how are you I tell them about my dead brother.
I tell them how he died, how his voice sounded like electric gasoline. How old he wouldn’t be.
I do not pick up the strangers’ face-shards. I leave their expressions uncomfortably
fractured, their jaws broken on the tooth-white supermarket tile.
I remember my brother keeling in a state-sponsored Salvation Army in secondhand
Aéropostale sweatpants. Alone at altar call. His thighs, once muscled animals, slight to the
bone.
I remember that our father did not stand next to him, & neither did I, & I remember their tears
smelled like fossilized snowflakes.
\\\
This is a projection. I remember my confusion hovering like a drying dragon-
fly over my chest. I remember that I loved both father & brother but did not understand either.
I understand little of the world outside me. But the world seems to know me. Nighttime Dog-
wood branches claw at my bedroom window. Snapping turtles threaten Michelin-
assisted suicide but inch back, miraculously, just before rubber thunder crunch.
Organs—both in the body of the church & in the body of the body—call to me.
What would I give for charity. What would I give for hope. I’m running low but my brother
did not. He kept coming back, kept looking for something higher than his own high,
a safe place or net in which to rest or tangle. Guzzled honey for his scratched vocal cords.
Crept in late &/or after hours &/or with someone he wasn’t supposed to know.
Lord, rebirth me. I want to be a honeybee. I want to pollinate everything: roses & sandcastles &
halfway
housing. I want to be anything with a stinger & a surplus of time. To give him a different
needle.
Remi Recchia (he/him), PhD, is a trans poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, Prairie Schooner, among others. His works include Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); Sober (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022); Little Lenny Gets His Horns (Querencia Press, 2023); From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures (Gasher Press, 2023); and Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us (Sundress Publications, forthcoming). Remi has been a Tin House Scholar and Thomas Lux Scholar. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University.
