2019
Rickey Laurentiis
I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like.   Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze And Willie Brown him. You   Love how the blood muddies the original, The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching   Capital from his dying, Like an activist. I  know
I’m not supposed to sing
Of his ringing   Penetrability, some hole I open impose On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him,   As years ago it was rope. I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper,   If you’d like, an inch rougher, Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.
I could use the erotic,
If you’d like,   So ungarish, baring not too frank A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny   How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes, The way, say, my black   Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace I put in it is not.
I could yank and knot
The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment   In them trees, And the word “again” spelled out about his neck   Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and Fierce his moan.   It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know Already how he ends,
But I could make him
Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely   Canvas for your “empathy,” Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get   This blunt, Burnt lynched body up   From on Out the pocket behind my eye
All trees could be themselves again, all sound.
