Rickey Laurentiis
Little Song
Given what I am,if
not cannibal for, animal for: he
who let go a door in me, be-
cracked my sternum to a hundred flashing moths, oh handsome, oh—Truth
be told:I hungered this, needled it out, I
stretched for this. Always a field stirs, would
stir, for want of being filled. Dwell
of me, my Eden, my Hook. In
pleasure weren’t we founded? At the
start didn’t we blend and blur?I would be his bravery,
illusion
of his fearlessness and fear. Given what I amonly, of
meat: cut fire: the inconsolable: of these, Him.
Rickey Laurentiis is the author of the debut collection Boy With Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize chosen by Terrance Hayes, and a selection for the Pitt Poetry Series. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Rickey is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, New England Review, New Republic, Poetry, and elsewhere. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Rickey currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
“Little Song” appears in Boy with Thorn, by Rickey Laurentiis © 2015. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.