My father, standing, by the trash can. White cream
flowering his top lip like a jury summons. Gold
foil glinting under banana peel & unwanted
chicken carcass. My mother firmly
rooted by the fridge. Smoke
cascading from her eyes like a beautiful
accident. A house fire or temper
tantrum gone too far. My father, guilty as a one-
eyed snake at the casino. A crumb
crawling under the cupboard next to the rusted
sink. Both my mother & father white-
knuckled like brass or the mouth
guard I always forget to remove.
You might as well give the kids cancer,
she says, by which she of course means
cigarettes. The offender: high
fructose corn syrup, food dye number
one, number two, number infinity:
all the makings of a twinkie to span
my lifetime, my parents’ lifetimes, the life-
time of New York City & Bangkok & the Berlin
Wall. A 150-calorie monstrosity, sluggish
as a beached turtle—no, a lost whale—no, a poacher
stranded in the dark without his net or with a broken
compass that points north-south, the poacher calling
his mother after days of hunger. The twinkie will out-
live Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Second
Coming, Yeats’s wildest wilderness.
It shines like a silent witness
called to the stand but forever
immobile, unwilling to swear or affirm or touch
the good book. It will rot, but only
when no one is looking. Only
when no one else is left.
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, and Prairie Schooner, among others. Works include Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021); Sober (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2022); From Gold, Ghosts: Alchemy Erasures (Gasher Press, 2023); Little Lenny Gets His Horns (Querencia 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.