Rickey Laurentiis
The Night was Specific.
I was almost Raped. Once. It was Dark
Room Only. It wasn’t Murder. It was
Interruption. I was on the Crying room Floor.
Make poem. O was I so Owed this, too, this tense
of a Girlhood scorned?
Rape Poem. Everything slowed. Yes.
Make poem. Everything Took up with
A brief Light, then went Down Black again.
Rape poem. It was Horror to Be in and Suddenly
a Body again, so Specifically. I didn’t
Cry. Make poem. But as he tried (did I cry?) I tried Breathing— Rape poem—he tried—
Make poem— to enter into a girlhood in me.
I said, RAPE POEM. No, I didn’t say.
I said just one thing. I didn’t, swear
I didn’t give it up. WHAT WAS SAID? And so
I said, (tell the truth now),
Are you that Lonely? That’s when he ran.
Did he think I said, Am I that lonely instead?
Woman, — girl! —
This is not the difference between us.
for Chloe
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.