Epitaph on a Stone — Blackbird Archive

← v15n2, Fall 2016

Like you, I was born underwater.

(I lied: there was never a stone.)

Like you, I was born but that’s not the half of it:

I lived. Lord, I lived. Like a cancer, I crept

sideways. Like a scorpion, I lied. I lived

the way a problem lives, openly, so much

earth wanted me closed. Don’t you know the dead

are not easy? Don’t you know they crave?

I stepped out of the water (I was made doing this) slick-

skinned, fluent, a character: my eyes twice

haunted, my humor, my voice—and can’t you hear

shackles running the length of my voice? I was born

in a minute, in a panic, on a whim. A mistake,

I mean. A choice between this world and a body,

pretty fault where a heart should be.

identity race body mortality

Rickey Laurentiis

Rickey Laurentiis’s poetry collection, Boy with Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), won the 2016 Levis Reading Prize awarded by Virginia Commonwealth University, and was selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Boston Review , The Kenyon Review , The New York Times , and elsewhere. His honors include a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, along with fellowships or scholarships from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Laurentiis teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College.