You go outside and the trees don’t know
You’re black. The lilacs will chatter and break
Themselves real bloom, real boon,
No matter your gender. You matter.
Who in you is most material, so
You matter. Your afro gone touch the sky.
Come up from the ground looking extra fly,
Come up from the ground looking extra, fly,
I will touch the sky. I—open my mouth,
And my whole life falls out.
Originally published at Poets.org.
Rickey Laurentiis (b. 1989, February 7) was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. Their writing has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded them a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, they traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laurentiis received a MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where they were a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where they read literature and queer theory. They are the trans author of Death of the First Idea, forthcoming in 2025 from Knopfs, and Boy with Thorn, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and a Lambda Literary Award. Boy with Thorn was also named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry book by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions.