Because we love each other
The weather is rude today, too full of good
color and cheer, and makes me want to be out
of here, out of the interior time pandemic time
trauma has made me. I would sing as the canary
passes gently thru the break of my vision; I would
listen as the cat’s ear stings patiently at its Lord;
I would gorge deeply on my own fruit’s womb;
I would entomb blind joy in its spell: et benedictus
fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Iesus is us, and he isn’t,
anymore than Byzantine raised halos and bronze
disease is us, and they are—though most I enjoy
these hiccups come also witty with the breast, with
the breath, in the idea disease, ease, and that we
might just be metal too close together that will infect
each other, brother, brother, sister, sister, sister,
brother, comma, comma, trans—with revision then,
reglistening, which is love, becaused.
Copyright © 2021 by Rickey Laurentiis. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 16, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Still early in the pandemic, around May 2020, I had a phone conversation with my friend, Sanchita Balachandran, associate director at Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum, who taught me about 'bronze disease,’ a term borne out of a belief earlier conservators had that certain corrosion products in bronze were the result of 'a communicable biological contagion spread from object to object’ kept 'too close together.’ It’s an idea, now disproved, that still struck me, knowing that for the conservator corrosion is enemy, but what if the corrosion was love?”
—Rickey Laurentiis
Rickey Laurentiis
Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Death of the First Idea (Knopf, 2025) and Boy with Thorn (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize.
Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans.