Conditions for a Southern Gothic
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Conditions for a Southern Gothic
Therefore, my head was kingless. I was a head alone, moaning in a wet black field. I was like any of those deserter slaves whose graves are just the pikes raised for their heads, reshackled, blue and plain as fear. All night I whistled at a sky that mocked me, that fluently changed its grammar as if to match desire in my eye. My freedom is possible, it said. As if my torn-off head in that bed swamped and whelming then with water had one wish, and it did: to think stranger stuff, to break that boring need to always have a shadow trail its maker, such that:
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1. The shadow snaps, rising to kiss the head;
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2. The kiss lands, the head flies up in airy revolt;
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3. Cracked from the head come the crows of its thinking;
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4. Three crows move in minstrelsy against the night;
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5. And the head still singing: Last night, a Negro was axed . . .
Who among us were made to scratch a myth? Speak. If God made us in his image, it was the first failure of the imagination. [End Page 522]
Rickey Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Boston Review, Fence, jubilat, Oxford American, and Poetry. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor’s fellow.
