The erotics of phrasing, the formal tensions of constraint and release, embody the queer politics of Rickey Laurentiis’ gorgeous poetry. In his new lyric, “Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame,” the reader can hear in the title a familiar logic among gay men, one where beauty and shame exist simultaneously as alluring and disturbing equivalencies. He is a poet capable of helping us to hear in language always a “woundedness revealed”—from the “O” that conjures poetic address as much as it does anatomy, to the subtle symmetry of his stanzas that mimic the alternating rhythms of sexual fusion and difference. Today, dozens of formally ambitious gay poets engage daringly with the subject matter of queer life and intimacy. But among the many, Laurentiis’ work feels to me among the most achieved, mature beyond years, mortal, muscular, musical. His psychological phrasing is incomparable.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame
The way he writhed
Beneath the other man
Argued his loneliness,
But he wasn’t just a blank measure
Waiting to sound;
However much an O
His mouth made,
He wasn’t just an O—
Thrusting back, up,
Against what is almost
Like a finger, though
It isn’t, always needing
To be touched
Like a finger, to be held:
—I’m lonely.
My waist cinched
Inward like some vintage
Japanese fan, the clever
Blade of my back,
Working inch-by-inch
Toward a pleasure
Half mine, the way fire
Pleases,
Wax pleases . . .
What does possession mean?
No, really. Tell me.
That at this moment
Someone beside myself can feel
How many times
I shudder?
Asked if I like it,
I like it, I speak out
Those few syllables, mess myself.
The point is, I think,
To empty—?
It feels good.
To be two men
Interlocked in a sentence
Still forming. We
Danced the dance that says I want you,
Come closer,
Come in me.
No, really, he said
As a whisper—Boy,
You want to be possessed.
Because, you see, he’d been removed
From his body then,
Per usual,
His beauty, like a talisman, offered,
His woundedness revealed—
