Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in 1970 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She attended the University of California-Santa Cruz and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Conjunctions, Jubilat, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, and have been recognized with a fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and a Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her first book of poems is Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000). Shaughnessy lives in Brooklyn, where she teaches at Lehman College, CUNY, and serves as Poetry Editor of the magazine Tin House.

Your Name on It

Let this one clear square of thought be just

like a room you could come to in. An attic room,

after you’ve swiveled over to the wrecked

corner of the champagne. After you

hand-rolled cigarettes and ass and sold

your best midnight speech to a slick jack

of clubs. For a stingy cut: a wet, bony

kiss. You have nothing left to say

and nothing to say it with. Mouths,

whole faces even, have been pilfered

in prettier ways. For everyone who ever

looked at you and thought that one thinks

it’s so damn easy, you don’t have to look

back at them. Ha! It is easy. This room

has no mirror, no leap-leer to strain

or stylize the fuzz of your body through

the razor of your eye. This room is dark,

and high. If you spit out the window

you could kill a bug. There’s the document.

There’s always the window, your signature.

Epithalament

Other weddings are so shrewd on the sofa, short

and baffled, bassett-legged. All things

knuckled, I have no winter left, in my sore rememory,

to melt down for drinking water. Shrunk down.

Your wedding slides the way wiry dark hairs do, down

a swimming pool drain. So I am drained.

Sincerely. I wish you every chapped bird on this

pilgrimage to hold your hem up from the dust.

Dust is plural: infinite dust. I will sink in the sun,

I will crawl toward the heavy drawing

and design the curtains in the room

of never marrying you. Because it is a sinking,

because today’s perfect weather is a later life’s

smut. This soiled future unplans love.

I keep unplanning the same Sunday. Leg

and flower, breeze and terrier, I have no garden

and couldn’t be happier. Please, don’t lose me

here. I am sorry my clutch is all

tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed

kind of muscle and alone.

I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine

in another room. In another’s.

Postfeminism

There are two kinds of people, soldiers and women,

as Virginia Woolf said. Both for decoration only.

Now that is too kind. It’s technical: virgins and wolves.

We have choices now. Two little girls walk into a bar,

one orders a shirley temple. Shirley Temple’s pimp

comes over and says you won’t be sorry. She’s a fine

piece of work but she don’t come cheap. Myself, I’m

in less fear of predators than of walking around

in my mother’s body. That’s sneaky, that’s more

than naked. Let’s even it up: you go on fuming in your

gray room. I am voracious alone. Blank and loose,

metallic lingerie. And rare black-tipped cigarettes

in a handmade basket case. Which of us weaves

the world together with a quicker blur of armed

seduction: your war-on-thugs, my body stockings.

Ascetic or carnivore. Men will crack your glaze

even if you leave them before morning. Pigs

ride the sirens in packs. Ah, flesh, technoflesh,

there are two kinds of people. Hot with mixed

light, drunk with insult. You and me.

You Love, You Wonder

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked-

out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth.

You love how she only wears her glasses with you, how thick

and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you she wants to see.

You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her

scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut.

How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her

to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud,

you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love. Any expert, observing

human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all.

But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must

become suddenly very clumsy at recognizing beauty if you are to keep her.

You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you

want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed, from the eyes down.

You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you, you will know

everything about love. If she’s leaving you now, you already know it.

Panopticon

My bedroom window can be seen from the viewing deck

of the World Trade Center. I’ve seen it.

What I saw?

My roommate experimenting with my vibrator.

She looked lovely through sheer curtains

on my creamy bed. Is she thinking of me?

I am thinking of her and I left bread crumbs on the telepath.

She can feel it, my seeing, even through a trance of fog.

I’ve lit her with it.

It is her blindfold, her sweet curse, her ration

of privacy spilled like flour as she imagines

the miraculous bread is rising.

I decided on three possible reactions:

To keep watching her and, when I go home, to mention

the strange vision I had, describing

what I saw in detail.

To feed the telescope with quarter

after quarter, and read a book while the time ticks.

I have been blessed with seeing, as with a third eye,

without the compulsive mimesis of appearing. The luxury

of an octopus is never using any legs for walking.

Or, to stay home with my own

pair of binoculars, in the dark, watching whoever is

watching me, watch me.