It’s a perfect temperature in hereAnd everything is cleanExcept the soulsWhen you open the cabinetsThere’s every can imaginableRows and rows of tomatoesThey ask me to make themBread and eggsBut all that I can seeAre cans and yellow traysEveryone starts singingIncluding the hungryMy soul is as cleanAs the refrigerated wallsAnd I tell them all soSuddenly eggs appearI crack each oneInto a yellow trayYou know I loveA tortured love storyBut this isn’t what I planned forIn the middle of the accidentI crack another eggOn the head of a disbelieverEverything is perfectly adequateI stir my lukewarm cerealMy soul is as clean as the springI tell no one thatBecause no one ever listenedI crack an egg into the airIt drops like an accidentBecause no one ever loved itI say to no one at allYou know I love a tortured storyI think to write it downInstead I crack this eggHere for youSo don’t be sorryJust take the lukewarm puddingAnd think of meI’m all alone hereMaybe for foreverI crack this lukewarm storyInto your bowlAnd you sop it upI know you love a love storyYou sop up my blood puddingWith my head
Food Court
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- January 20, 2024
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“Food Court” from THE SHINING: by Dorothea Lasky.
Published by Wave Books on October 03, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Dorothea Lasky.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of six chapbooks: Matter: A Picturebook (Argos Books, 2012), The Blue Teratorn (Yes Yes Books, 2012), Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), Tourmaline (Transmission Press, 2008), The Hatmaker’s Wife (2006), Art ( H_NGM_N Press, 2005), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004).Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in New York City.
As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.
Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.
"Laugh, cry, or shake your head, Lasky cuts to the chase."
—Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail
"If the essence is not in what she says, Lasky’s poignancy is the result of subtle insights, both endearing and intuitive, suggested by what language leaves out."
—Sophie Sills, Jacket2
"She will force you to acknowledge the blackness of the blood pumping underneath your skin or the claustrophobia of loneliness, but she will not allow you to forget there is light, and that it can exist in knowing another person."
—Kristen Evans, Rain Taxi
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