Remi Recchia | Walking with You in Ohio | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Remi Recchia (he/him) is a Lambda Award-winning poet, essayist, and editor from Kalamazoo, Michigan. A six-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared in World Literature Today, Best New Poets 2021, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He is the author of six books and chapbooks, most recently Addiction Apocalypse (Texas Review Press, forthcoming), and is the editor of Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us (Sundress Publications, 2024). Remi has received support from Tin House, PEN America, and the Poetry Foundation. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in English-Creative Writing from Oklahoma State University.

Remi Recchia's Website

Also by Remi Recchia: Quicksand/Stargazing From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures Transmasculine Poetics: Filling the Gap in Literature & the Silences Around Us Little Lenny Gets His Horns Sober

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: I’m Sandcastled Sometimes, But Mostly Just Hungover Orlando, Florida, 2016

October 30, 2024

Remi Recchia

Walking with You in Ohio

We were late to class because we were in love & had lost your mother’s ring

while making love in my studio apartment

which became our apartment as soon as you’d cut my hair

at the kitchen table, set for no one but us, Blues

on the radio brewing trumpets & tempests

cresting like a New Age Shakespeare, which frightened us

but just a little because when you are in love

nothing else is real, though I suppose that is to say

when you are in love

everything is made more real,

even the two-headed anxieties & impossible quick-

sand threatening doomsday under a magic floorboard

similar to the panic-spiral of forgetting to turn off the gas

stove or flicking the light switch one time too few

so now something very bad will happen, which calls to mind the long

no-dinner hours of technical proofing I would later in life happily undertake

like an undertaker his corpse, a poet’s disposition of melancholy

determined to instruct, in perfect detail, how to tie a clove hitch

knot, which sounds like a suicide but is in fact a rescue

tactic well known to all EMTs, firefighters, & anyone else

trained to save a life —which should include priests & mothers,

who are, as usual, either ignored or exempt, depending on how

one looks at it—including your mother, as she has previously saved

lives, beautiful shrunken heads in a mason

jar, & I’m sure she would have had my head, too, had she known

I was responsible for coming home

in her daughter right when her ring

jumped ship behind the bed & clattered like a chicken

wild with hunger demanding that the hung-

over farmer move his hands faster to the feed, to the seed

stored in his sack, but I am getting behind myself: we are married now

and students no longer, I have given you your own ring,

but the only thing that cries is the seagull

flapping many miles from home

before he gifts you with guano, a biological

hazard, on the shoulder of your brand new

blue jean jacket, & then, because we used to be happy

people who had never met death

in real life, you kissed me.

”Walking with You in Ohio” was partially borne out of a formal challenge to myself: I wanted to see if I could write a one-sentence poem that held up narratively, conceptually, and grammatically. (Huge shoutout to my friend and fellow poet Jacob Griffin Hall, whose care and attention helped immensely with this venture.) When I initially drafted this poem, I was working as a technical editor for a company that produces fire protection manuals, textbooks, and related materials, so I’d been compiling a list of firefighting terms to use in poems. One of those terms was “clove hitch knot,” which appears in this poem (and which sounded vaguely threatening to me). One of my assignments at the time was to edit a manual on hazardous materials, so I was thinking constantly about biological hazards, which include bird waste, one of the final images in the poem. I didn’t fit in very well at that job, considering that the bulk of the personnel were some kind of combination of corporate, engineer, tough-guy firefighter, and/or bigoted “Family Values” advocate. I was sad. The feeling of exclusion is physically painful. I think that’s where the poem’s undertone of longing originated.