Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, forthcoming fall of 2015 from University of Pittsburgh Press. He is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the National Endowment for the Arts. New poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The New England Review, Fence, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boston Review. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, he currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.---------
Untitled (Fragment)
like each thrust where he thrusts
A new idea of you in you: is [
] to please [
] Then paradise—: anywhere where you’re urged
I mean [ ] so urged to name—
Your sounds
Sound wide:—“I [ ]” “I [ ]” you sing, and, singing it, you love
More and more of yourself [
] Yourself you more and more lose
Feeling Myself
(Foucault, Minaj)
So it’s true that the flesh
Must confess,
Must tell and tell again
How it hungers,
Has been moved by hunger . . .
But I see
That the flesh is not only—
Is not just a discourse, “flesh”—
As it is a means toward that
Feeling pressure,
That sense
Of another body’s orbit, so near,
Unimaginary,
Why not touch it—?
*
On my knees, then not
So much kneeled
As down, lying flat,
How I like it: my body became his observatory,
A way to knowledge—Oh
How I have wanted
A man to throw down
His strength onto the slight
Flare of my hips and spike me
To the known ground.