From “De Jure Sanguinis”
You won’t feel like this forever, unless
forever is here. Follow the dark blue
blades of kale, the flat dials of sunflowers
leading back to speech, or its underside.
Love translated you across an ocean
& now you cannot really come away
or say how, exactly, your love began.
Was it music in the mouth, or weeping
in the blood? The ancestral body splits
into water & seeds, pure syllables.
Copyright © 2025 by Kiki Petrosino. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 23, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I wrote this poem to reflect on de jure sanguinis—Latin for ‘the right of blood.’ This legal principle allows some countries, including Italy, to grant citizenship based on ancestry rather than place of birth, though recent changes in Italian law have made these pathways more limited and complex. As an American poet of Black and Italian heritage, I’m drawn to how the metaphor of ‘blood’ opens questions of diaspora and inheritance. Using imagery of plants, water, and syllables, the poem explores lineage as both material and elusive. It asks what it means to belong—to places and histories shaped by movement and translation.”
—Kiki Petrosino
Kiki Petrosino
Kiki Petrosino is a memoirist and a poet of Black and Italian American heritage. She has authored four poetry collections, including White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Sarabande Books, 2020) and Witch Wife (Sarabande Books, 2017). She is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is a professor of poetry at the University of Virginia.