WHAT IS THE ZOO FOR

WHAT?
By Korotchenko Oleksandra
 Patricia Lockwood
‘[…]The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone

first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day[…]

The feeling you get after hours of scrolling that all your thoughts have been replaced

with cotton candy — or something even nastier, like Runts or circus peanuts — as

opposed to the feeling of being open to poetry, to being inside the poem, which is the

feeling of being honey in the hive.The single best way to give the morning back to

myself is to open a real book as I drink my first cup of coffee. I’m not sure why real

books are best. I think the pages remind me that I have fingerprints. I think I like to

see what I have read lying sweetly by the side of what I’m about to read, like a

wife[…]’

- How Do We Write Now?

Sext
 The word ‘zoo’ is a zoo for the zoo.
A fountain is a zoo for water, the song
is a zoo for sound, the harmonica
is a zoo for the hot breath of Neil Young,
vagina is a zoo for baby.
Baby, girl baby, is a zoo for vagina.
The rose is a zoo for the smell of the rose,
the smell of the rose rattles its cage,
the zookeeper throws something bleeding
to it, the something bleeding is not enough,
a toddler fell into the cage of the rose,
the toddler was entirely eaten. His name
was Rilke, it was in all the papers.
A Little Pine Box is a zoo for him now,
it said in all the papers.
Then all the kids started doing it. Falling
into the violet’s cage, approaching the cave
where the smell of violets slept, getting
their whole head clawed off by it.
Neil Young did it to a buttercup
and his face got absolutely mauled.
The music that was piped into the zoo
let all the longing escape from it
and it ran riot over the earth, full
of the sight of the smell of a buttercup
rearranging the face of Neil Young,
attacking pets at random, attacking
me in my bed as I slept, attacking
the happy wagging ends of my poems.
Can I put Neil Young in a poem.
Will he get trapped in there forever.
My voice is a zoo right now for this,
and this paces very much inside it,
it would like very much to escape
and eat hot blood again and go home,
and right down to the restless way
I walk I am an argument against zoos.
Zoo is very cruel. Let everything out
and live in the wild. Let it hunt for itself
again. Get the stink of human hand off it.
But the hand is a zoo for hold.
 RESOURCES

Patricia Lockwood: 'That's what's so attractive about the

internet: you can exist there as a spirit in the void’ | Books |
The Guardian
Patricia Lockwood Has Always Sounded This Way | The New
Yorker
Patricia Lockwood – Wikipedia
WHAT IS THE ZOO FOR WHAT - Patricia Lockwood - United
States of America - Poetry International
How Do We Write Now? - Tin House
Patricia Lockwood - WHAT IS THE ZOO FOR WHAT -
YouTube