Ask the Author: Patricia Lockwood

Patricia Lockwood’s incredible poetry is featured in the July issue. She talks with us about canaries, mines, false alphabets and more.

1. What happens when a canary dies in the fact mine?

A Tweety shirt shrinks in the wash. A stuffed Tweety spontaneously bursts at the seams. A baby barfs on its Tweety blanket. An old man forgets the word Tweety. A Tweety thong disappears up a woman for good. When a canary dies in the fact mine, canaries disappear all over the face of the earth.

2. How does one ensure the safe working conditions of a fact mine?

Hahahaha safety is not something we worry about. We employ soft slow dumb workers made of a kind of upright worm material. They have big empty brains full of old phone numbers. They eat enormous lunches. They make moaning noises to communicate, they have names like Steve and Belinda, and they only live about 80 years anyway, so when one of them dies in a cave-in it’s not really a problem for us.

3. How would you tell a pronoun to stop being so damn possessive?

I would text it nothing but the words “y u so jelus im not ur betch” all day long until it disappeared from the language, believing the language to have evolved past needing it, believing itself dead or released into space along with the words “thine” and “yourn.”

4. Would you bring the father of the fictional alphabet on Maury to establish if he is indeed the father?

YES. And when Maury says, “You are NOT the father,” the machine will completely FREAK OUT and shoot a bunch of cuckoos and springs and ball bearings and run around the studio on its little wheels just squealing and throwing hunks of steel wool at people. And then it’ll skid to a stop in front of its so-called “father” and spell out “I A-L-W-A-Y-S H-A-T-E-D Y-O-U D-A-D” with movable type right in his face. It will be the best show that has ever aired on television.

5. You have an incredible reservoir of imagination in these poems. How do you keep it full?

Reading! Plus it helps to almost never move. I keep my body prone at all times, in a sort of pile of harem pillows. I try to read while moving only my eyes, otherwise my skull squeaks on its neckbones and distracts me. If I even turn my head to one side ideas leak out. If it were possible to have books broadcast straight into my mind while suspended in a sensory-deprivation tank, I would probably do that. I think about these guys who get their ideas while walking and I just laugh and laugh, and then I try to stand up and I instantaneously collapse to the floor.

6. How does one become the emperor of ice cream cakes? How do you stop coups?

I am a very cold cow and both the cream and the sugar come out of me. The children bring me their cakes and I pump the ice cream directly into them. Once people see a very cold cow pump his fresh ice cream directly into the birthday cakes of children while wearing a Burger King crown they pretty much understand that that cold cow is not to be fucked with. My sovereignty, moo, is safe.