Writing an Elegy — Blackbird Archive

← v15n2, Fall 2016

But so tangled in the branches they had to leave it, the conquistador’s

black beard cut from his head whose neck had snapped,

his deadness the others had to burn then, for the wind to take evenly away.

If not for his lust, his sickness to chase, to claim her;

if not for that Native woman’s quick intelligence, out-climbing . . .

This is what I see: the Spanish moss

as convicted to its branches—gray, colonial,

but in my century now, suspended so close each vein might well be a whole,

hanging

fiction of my mind. The moss

is a fiction of my mind: a screen, swinging

on its gothic hinges, making the light fussier as it swags, giving not just the trees

but my idea of them a Medusa look. That man,

history violence race memory

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.