Ghazal for the End of the World By Remi Recchia

Ghazal for the End of the World
  
Let’s drink black coffee after our friends have stopped watching for the sun.
We’ll stay up and gaze out the window, wait for the sun.
 
The pool is empty, our living room pillows scattered
like many feathered carcasses that bake in the sun.
 
Your brain went quiet for two weeks this month and it finally
came back, stopped its progression, fake, to stop the sun.
 
Is the moon an angel? Is the front porch my guardian?
I remember how birds used to mate on the stoop in the sun.
 
When I was a child, I couldn’t stand the outside air.
Too bright, too loud, people and crowds, late in a million suns.
 
My wife’s belly is still not round, and we can’t fix it,
but still we buy baby clothes and wait for a son.
 
Our fathers are old, are mothers are young. Who
will COVID strike first with its lake fires of sun?
 
The night won’t fade until it’s called. We shudder
in the cold. I count my teeth and paint them for the sun.
 
I want to be your love song. Please hear me in the shower,
in the hall. My voice is too guttural. You may rate it against the sun.
 
My own reflection dazzles me: slight build of tremoring
white with blue eyes. I kneel before the traits of my father’s son.
 
Once I stopped the car too soon. We flew, suspended, over
highway lanes and motorbikes. I stomped the brakes under the sun.
 
My father would squint for the camera only reluctantly.
I don’t think he liked his face, a waste, under the sun.
 
It won’t rise today, Remi, you’ve fallen for a cruel trick—
not of the light, but of the dawn, the fated invisible sun.

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review. Remi’s work has appeared in Columbia Online Journal, Front Porch, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University.