Laughing Gravy - Analysis

A crisis that behaves like a person

The poem’s central move is to treat anxiety as something social and opportunistic: a crisis that doesn’t simply happen, but looking for someone to blame and even trying to blame itself on particular bodies: you, I… That odd phrasing makes guilt feel airborne, as if it can land on whoever is nearest. The tone is half-alarmed, half-wry. Uh oh sounds like a cartoon sound effect, but it also captures the weary recognition of a recurring cycle: the crisis has just passed and is already returning. The ellipses keep the sentence open, as if the speaker can’t quite finish the list of potential scapegoats—or doesn’t want to.

The crowd presses in, and the speaker asks for permission

Immediately, the poem swells with unnamed bodies: All these people coming in… The phrase feels like a doorway being breached—by society, by witnesses, by consequences. Yet in the middle of that influx, the speaker veers into private memory: The last time we necked I noticed this lobe on your ear. It’s a startlingly specific detail, almost tender in its precision, as if focusing on the ear is a way to steady oneself when the larger world becomes unmanageable. But the tenderness is tense: the speaker follows with Please, tell me we may begin, which sounds like asking permission to resume intimacy, or to start a performance, or to enter a ritual. The contradiction is sharp: the speaker remembers physical closeness, yet speaks as if closeness is gated by rules and an audience.

The ear lobe as a small, controllable truth

That ear lobe matters because it is a detail that can’t be argued with. In a poem where blame sloshes around and people flood in without faces, the lobe is a single, graspable contour. It suggests the speaker’s desire to locate something unmistakably personal inside a public emergency. But it also has a faintly clinical feel—an observed lobe rather than, say, a kiss—which hints at distance inside desire. The speaker can notice, catalog, remember; what they can’t do is simply act without asking: tell me we may begin.

The wolf factory: violence paused and institutionalized

The final image jolts the poem into allegory: All the wolves in the wolf factory pause at noon for a moment of silence. Wolves are typically the opposite of factory products—wild, hungry, singular—so turning them into factory laborers makes predation feel manufactured, organized, and normalized. A moment of silence is a public gesture of grief or respect, but here it’s performed by creatures built (or employed) to devour. That creates a bleak, comic chill: even the machinery of aggression has protocols, scheduled pauses, a midday civic piety. If the opening crisis looks for bodies to pin itself on, the ending suggests a whole system designed to keep producing the conditions for crisis, with brief, ceremonial interruptions.

Who is we when the wolves go quiet?

Read straight through, the poem keeps shifting the scale of responsibility: first a roaming crisis, then a room filling with people, then an intimate recollection, then an industrial pen full of wolves. The tense question underneath is whether private tenderness can meaningfully start—we may begin—inside a world that is already organized around blame and predation. And that last pause at noon feels less like redemption than a reset: the wolves stop, acknowledge something unsaid, and then (the poem implies) will go right back to work.