Mood for Love — Blackbird Archive

← v15n2, Fall 2016

(There I go.) I am the man

stepping onto the water (in the story,

water simply obeys) because

you’ve told me so, told me the duties

of the struck-in-love (as my soul

as I go will obey). Here is our house.

Here is the hole in the roof from where

we escaped our house (the water rising).

Here on this roof: I look out at the river expanded.

(I suffer, I’m that man anonymous in the waves.)

We need food. (I was there.) We need water.

(There I go.) I am the man stepping onto

the sick water (let it obey). And you are the man

who follows.

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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.