• Home
  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
    • Gallery
  • Submissions
    • General Submissions
    • The Paris-American Prize
  • About/Contact
  • Home
  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
    • Gallery
  • Submissions
    • General Submissions
    • The Paris-American Prize
  • About/Contact


RICKEY LAURENTIIS

A Southern Wind


Quiet as a seed, and as guarded,
our walking took the shape of two people 
uneasy together. I had the feeling
that on the anxious incline of that hill we gave the hill 
a reason to be. What loneliness, what
privacy was in that? Hey, I said. Race me to the top?
Then is when I nearly tripped on the sly earth,
an earth shaping to itself again. A stone? 
But, no, picking it up, bringing the wormed-through 
black flesh of it to my height, I knew it for 
an apple and gnashed and let the juices freak and down
my face. Don’t ask me why I did it. I know. 
I know there are poisons like these we have
to feed each other, promises we try to hold--
though how can they be contained? I wanted to give you
what I could of me. To be personal, without 
confession. I wanted to believe in the constancy of that hill. 
Daylight was tiring. The air, secret, alone. 
I won, you said. You did, I said. So we stood there.




88     The Paris-American

Picture
Rickey Laurentiis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He's the recipient of fellowships  from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the  National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Chancellor’s Fellowship from Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. The author of the e-chapbook, Whipped, (Floating Wolf Quarterly), he has been a featured poet in the March 2013 issue of T, the New York Times Style Magazine, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Boston Review, Callaloo, Fence, jubilat, Oxford American and Poetry.

  
   Next week's poet:

 Farnoosh Fathi
Picture
The Paris-American
Copyright © 2025 The
Paris-American
   About • Contact • Submit • Archives • Support