Richelle Buccilli
Fish
Your heart wasn’t built for this.
It wasn’t even built for a man that loves you.
I suppose my heart began at two.
I learned the feeling of falling out of arms,
the hard air that pulled me
from someone I once grew inside of.
I took to the closets, the attic, small corners—
the places where darkness comes fastest.
The spaces to crouch and hug myself again,
it’s the way we begin:
folded into our own warm dark embrace,
the only time we may have loved ourselves—
darkness hides itself well.
Inside of your own wet mouth, the words
that come out like everything does at dusk,
the opened drawers, the ones not,
the way all the sounds of a house are brave at night,
I have loved myself.
It’s violence.
In all of the dark spaces I have loved myself,
gasping like a fish.
Richelle Buccilli's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Pittsburgh Quarterly, SWWIM, and NELLE, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, son, and baby daughter.
Return to May 2022 Edition
Your heart wasn’t built for this.
It wasn’t even built for a man that loves you.
I suppose my heart began at two.
I learned the feeling of falling out of arms,
the hard air that pulled me
from someone I once grew inside of.
I took to the closets, the attic, small corners—
the places where darkness comes fastest.
The spaces to crouch and hug myself again,
it’s the way we begin:
folded into our own warm dark embrace,
the only time we may have loved ourselves—
darkness hides itself well.
Inside of your own wet mouth, the words
that come out like everything does at dusk,
the opened drawers, the ones not,
the way all the sounds of a house are brave at night,
I have loved myself.
It’s violence.
In all of the dark spaces I have loved myself,
gasping like a fish.
Richelle Buccilli's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Pittsburgh Quarterly, SWWIM, and NELLE, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, son, and baby daughter.
Return to May 2022 Edition