Rickey Laurentiis
Rickey Laurentiis grew up in New Orleans and earned an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. They are the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). Boy with Thorn also won the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and a Lambda Literary Award. A 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry fellow, they have also received awards from the Whiting Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. They are the inaugural fellow in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Source
Testament to the Agency of Man
On considering gender augmentation surgery
Do I change?
Do I go the—as you say—whole way?
The breast, a predicament of treatment:
Free Will,
It seems, be more than just the crow’s zigzag
In the wind,
But a thing like breasts, it hangs
There, even in the mind,
Behind the muscle’s freeze,
Homogenously patient for its sister—the breasts,
I mean; the Will, I was saying; but it seems I am
The crow, the same flying
Inside so many green and ruder choices.
Trans, a choice
Written on my body. And I’m allowed.
Trans, a fecund decision,
Androgynously made. No sin.
I pray to God I decide, Rickey.
Yes. I’ll go the whole way.
Let the scalpel in.
Published:
2023
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2024
Themes:
Agency
Body & Body Image
LGBTQ+ Experience
Literary Devices:
Couplets
two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit
Interrupted Clause
a word group (a statement, question, or exclamation) that interrupts the flow of a sentence and is usually set off by commas, dashes, or parentheses
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Transferred Epithet
When an adjective usually used to describe one thing is transferred to another.