—An argument in the Twitter Comments
Rickey Laurentiis
But “I make no sense,” or made, according to the Man.
But his typo made it Jade. I jack no menses. I sack no genius.
I gat no business, according the man, in this
Gender masquerade, accordingingly, I’m in.
I lack no decency. I wade no tact. I spare
No day these days that I, by my very being alive,
Have Been-beautiful, & I terrorize these lonelier men.
But I mack no men, says the Man, and gat no dignity, and gat
No place, so that now his Woman uncrosses her legs to join him,
She is so Mighty Real, so Natural Woman, she demands,,
That she must repeat the specious phrasing: Natural
Woman. It bares remention like wind does by each breezes’
Reinvitation remind you that it’s wind. Real is
(Not wild apparently?) but Real is a wind,
Her worry politics, her petty scorn. Cis,
I’m the one who make no sense, remember, who Jade no nothing
Like I sip no small sin, as I do not lake or porn. I am
A field with gross discipline in it. I am not the one
Trying repeatedly to reflect a superior sign, some gritty privilege,
More than I am the water of that lake arriving
As the shape the present moment makes it,
Transcendentalism’s riddim, a riddle, & a freaky Hymn.
Hmm. So whine a little I’ll be fire next; stag
And again I’ll flex some stone. Alone I idled
Into an easy crisis, because I can, because I decided to,
Crisis being what expedites Real learning, and became
That sex you have with yourself in earliest morning;
Alone I became a woman’s crisis of
Forever being looked at, the burden of a nude,
The rude, hard way a treebark talks
Its veiny passage into my eye as a dick and
Can I be so attracted to trees? Let me. So I idled—
Less to do with transition, less to question
Form, than I remembered I can transform: it’s something
That happens within—because I aubade so tense; I wince;
and gave the Man’s his early day relief from struggle, and spared
His lady, who is you. One can transform; chile, change yourself!
Just as this morning—solo, yolo, and still in bed, playing
the little Twitter game—I let the little online’s fight fire out
By agreeing with the man (so what?) so formed my peace:
Yes, I make no sense, I said to the Man, but I Jade it; yes,
I make a sense into deepest jade: yes, I raid your mind
For the jewel of it: in my hand, you would want to
Own it, you see something in me, something grand,
Your very cowardice yearns for; you
Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned,
It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly
Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then,
Stark middle of the field, fucking itself,
What a regimen! and blooming! So that we see
There’s risk in discipline does it bloom, a room
Of its own, breaking fear, being out, staying
In, and being so very Real and wilding and wooly
Wind, and enjoying the hops of wind, like
Baring your face up to it, sticking out
Your tongue to its lip, breathing back
Into your own mention, startling sense.
Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, as a New Creole. Her debut book, Boy with Thorn, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Levis Reading Prize, and finalized for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.They’ve partnered with the Carnegie Museum of Art and led a conversation at the Museum of Modern Art. Fellowships from the Lannan Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem and the Whiting Foundation have honored her, and she was inaugural fellow at Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh. Some call me Riis; their second collection, Death of the First Idea, is forthcoming from Knopf.