The poetry of Dorothea Lasky is about taking implausible risks, of restoring the vernacular, even its supposed vulgarities, to the life source of poetry as lived, spoken, incantatory speech. Her poems don’t just attack the jugular, they are the jugular: a major artery that runs from Catullus to Bernadette Mayer, from Sylvia Plath to Audre Lorde. In Lasky’s new poem, Kill Marry Fuck, a schoolyard game of chances and permutations is raised to the savage agony of existing in a world of celebrity sex and death, of choosing against the male gaze’s stale objectification towards something far more fluid, feminist, destabilizing, and sometimes, no less brutal. This poem asks no permission from us. It cares little whether we see it as prank or skit, all while its relentless line breaks and juggling names reprogram what it means for a poem to sing, to chant, to bring back continual life to the often colorless trappings of formal (read: male) poetry. Electrifying, nihilistic, humorous, Lasky is our great living poet of compulsion and drives, be they sex or death, or both at once, all at once. As the defiant poet declares, “I’d fuck them all.”
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
KILL MARRY FUCK
It’s a game
Have you ever played
One for each
I’ll start:
Jack Nicholson in The Shining
Jack Nicholson in One Flew
Jack Nicholson in his bathrobe
It’s blue
Kill Marry Fuck
Amy Winehouse
James Merrill
Freddie Krueger
Goodbye
Kill Marry Fuck
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres’s personal assistant
Phil Collins
Ashton Kutcher
A rainbow
My rapist
And Big Bird
Yeah
I’d fuck them all
But only Ellen DeGeneres
And only in that sailor suit
Ok, one more
Kill Marry Fuck
The postman
An isosceles triangle
My eggs
I mean my ovaries
Sunday afternoon in the park
With eggs
Not my ovaries
Wait, hold on
Do you want me
I want
Fish
A shining magenta clownfish
The taste of milk, sweeter than a cow
Jacking you off
In the yellow chair
With too many dressers
Kill Marry Fuck
All of it
And none of it with you
None of it with you or Charlie Sheen
Bill Clinton
Your leg in the air
Flopping in time
The dream of the unrecited
Me in the bathroom
And everything
With serial killers
With daffodils
You going down on me
In the back of a cab
Me shampooing your head with pine
No you hate oral sex
My breasts
Oil on your head
20 seconds
40 seconds
60 seconds
Sixty years later
A bomb of women
An entire country of women
Two women in the countryside
A pale green tapestry
Washed white by the seashore
The world
Kill Marry Fuck
A white star
The red dwarf
Time
I’d fuck time
I’d marry red
I’ve married anything
Holy Holy
Matrimony
Fiestaware
I’d kill them all
I have
Holy Holy
Day
The day that she was born
The intensity of birth
The incessant witch
It’s over
So over
It never began
Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
Kill Marry Fuck
All of it
All of it
Or Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
Whatever there is to do
I’d do it to you
The yellow kitchen
A knife
A veil
Jack Nicholson
In your blue robe
I’d do it
All of it
For you
Feature image: detail from Sex and Death, Bruce Nauman (1985)
