Hey Jared, it looks like recent_posts() is a function unique to Thesis, so I'm not sure how much any of us can help with that. WP has it's own
wp_get_recent_posts() function which is basically just a wrapper for
get_posts().
But, I don't think you need to go about running two separate queries on this page, with one being a mere continuation of the other. Instead, you could just run one query and split the output in half. It would be especially simple given your intended markup, here. You could just delete the second instance of recent_posts(), move your prefix and suffix parameters into the output_template parameter, and increase the limit to 2.