The Process of Explication

By Dorothea Lasky b. 1978 Dorothea Lasky

Students, look at this table

And now when you see a man six feet tall

You can call him a fathom.

Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff

Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun

And the alphabet is full of blood

And when you knock upon a sentence in the

Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags

Likewise, hello and goodbye.

Nick Algiers is my student

And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide

And so, I am the one in front of him

And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire

And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed.

Likewise the distance between us then

Is the knife that is not marriage.

III

Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess

Like making love or writing a poem

Or drinking wine on a tropical island

With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.

I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous.

And in dreaming myself upon the moon

I have made the moon my home and no one

Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.

And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you

You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is

That I will never win.

Dorothea Lasky, "The Process of Explication" from Awe. Copyright © 2007 by Dorthea Lasky. Reprinted by permission of Wave Books.

Source: Awe (Wave Books, 2007)

Biography

Dorothea Lasky was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She earned a BA at Washington University and an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has published two collections of poetry, AWE (2007) and Black Life (2010), as well as several chapbooks, including the polemical Poetry Is Not a Project (2010). Her poems have appeared in a number of prominent publications, including the New Yorker, Paris Review, and . . .

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