Our Andromeda

by Brenda Shaughnessy

All at once a million kinds of calendar.

  2. MOTIVATION

  Ask yourself:

  What is my longing?

  Answer yourself:

  I long for the world, in the form of a person, which is me, in the form of a new world, in the form of a new person, which is the new me, in the form… ad infinitum.

  3. GOALS

  Stop staring out that old woman’s window like a cat.

  4. DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN “SAYING” AND “DOING”

  “Everyone dies”

  is different from

  “Everyone died.”

  5. SELF-ABSORPTION

  This inner spinning, that petty city

  the mind built,

  robs the psalm of its robe of calm,

  my naked voice thin and shrill in the wind.

  6. DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR

  I’m such a fraud

  I can’t even convince you

  of my fraudulence.

  7. EVERYDAY MAGIC!

  The new burn on my knuckle,

  white, shiny, raised:

  our dinner’s afterlife, lingering ghost.

  Karaoke Realness at the Love Hotel

  At the microphone, suddenly—oh no—

  is Sandra the Available,

  in her endless yellow dress

  and award-winning earrings,

  about to sing Rose Dickey’s unrecorded

  cakewreck of a hybrid poemsong,

  “Sheep Child o’ Mine.”

  Now watch her win the night

  before it’s all over. She’s no loser

  with a fever but no lover.

  Not like me. I live in a hotel

  with no rooms, just a lobby and lifts

  leading to experiences.

  Time to ask another person,

  someone who’s been outside

  the fishbowl long enough

  to wonder if there will ever again

  be enough water. Rat race,

  hamster wheel, dog run.

  (Okay, dog run’s different.

  It’s not for people.)

  I’m not a real people-person.

  Just like reality is not really realness,

  people. Just try and point out to me

  what’s not fake or paste or false?

  Or trick or replica

  or denial or dream or drama

  or simulation or reenactment

  or knockoff or artificial, a ruse,

  a work of art, illusion,

  a lie, a mistake, fantasy,

  a misconception, missed-connection,

  delusion, hallucination,

  insincere, invalid or invented,

  a rehearsal with no performance?

  A viable world with no excuse to exist?

  In my hotel the sleep is free.

  In any hotel. Why shouldn’t it be?

  And that old girl Sandra?

  Turns out she can really sing.

  Outfoxed

  Red foxes are not allowed

  to mate with white foxes

  because the offspring

  would all be female.

  And we can’t have that.

  Blue foxes are not allowed

  to mate with red foxes

  because the offspring

  would all be gay.

  And we can’t have that.

  Brown foxes are not allowed

  to mate with any other foxes

  because the offspring would all

  be, well, brown, in such variety

  and number we’d never know

  what was what anymore.

  And we can’t have that.

  What we can have is affordable

  fox fur, plentiful fox soup,

  invigorating foxhunts

  all brought to you by Fox News.

  Inappropriate Dreams

  I can’t tell you

  how often.

  You in the grocery store

  embarrassing

  everyone with

  the lettuce.

  Elsewhere, food

  in the file folders.

  It’s not supposed to

  be there, get it?

  Another time you

  were rolling down a hill

  like a blueberry

  rolling toward

  me, a bear who will

  eat anything

  this time of year

  but wants

  just you. Then

  you are not you but

  the plum of a pebble

  that I skipped

  into the lake

  and found somehow

  night after night.

  Products of Perception

  Perhaps an implantation.

  Perhaps there is no soul. And biotech

  metaphysics can’t prove I’m whole.

  If there were clear demarcation

  between me and why me

  then why wine and why whine

  and if so, why not all the time?

  Since flavor is olfactory

  and pleasure in the brain,

  does it make sense for the mouth

  to open and admit blame?

  Fluid body, fluent tongue,

  flu-like symptoms hide a hole

  through which a neutered fever catches

  neutered cold. I’m told a kind of eerie light

  flicks on when mind becomes itself.

  Like when a book is opened,

  and read, or just falls off the shelf.

  Miracles

  I spent the whole day

  crying and writing, until

  they became the same,

  as when the planet covers the sun

  with all its might and still

  I can see it, or when one dead

  body gives its heart

  to a name on a list. A match.

  A light. Sailing a signal

  flare behind me for another to find.

  A scratch on the page

  is a supernatural act, one twisting

  fire out of water, blood out of stone.

  We can read us. We are not alone.

  Big Game

  after Richard Brautigan’s

  “A CandleLion Poem”

  What began as wildfire ends up

  on a candlewick. In reverse,

  it is contained,

  a lion head in a hunter’s den.

  Big Game.

  Bigger than one I played

  with matches and twigs and glass

  in the shade.

  When I was young, there was no sun

  and I was afraid.

  Now, in grownhood, I call the ghost

  to my fragile table, my fleshy supper,

  my tiny flame.

  Not just any old but the ghost,

  the last one I will be,

  the future me,

  finally the sharpest knife

  in the drawer.

  The pride is proud.

  The crowd is loud, like garbage dumping

  or how a brown bag ripping

  sounds like a shout

  that tells the town the house

  is burning down.

  Drowns out some small folded breath

  of otherlife: O that of a lioness licking

  her cubs to sleep

  in a dream of savage gold.

  O that roaring, not yet and yet

  and not yet dead.

  So many fires start in my head.

  3. ARCANA

  Of one order are the mysteries of light

  and of another are those of fantasy

  Rider Tarot Deck instructions

  Card 5: Hierophant

  I sit looking

  around expectantly,

  though really I want

  nothing but I’m

  so accustomed

  to waiting around

  I’ll just take whatever

  shows up. Or I look at

  things I don’t understand
r />   and want them

  though what I want

  is understanding.

  I take them anyway,

  turning them over

  and over in my hands

  in the dark

  as if holding such

  things can give me

  back some sense

  of what it was like

  to really want something

  regardless of what

  I had already

  or how long I’d waited.

  The wheels on the bus

  go round and round.

  Round and round.

  But I am going nowhere.

  I’ve not been waiting

  for no bus.

  Card 12: The Hanged Man

  It seems unlikely that so much literature

  could be made from twenty-six letters.

  Doesn’t it seem it could all be boiled

  down to one sentence?

  After all, the entire volatile cosmos

  seems to circle and spin and rotate

  so you’d think round and ellipse

  were the only shapes possible.

  You’d think a square was an ungodly

  fluke, an aberration, not the life force

  behind writing tables and scaffolding.

  Not the product of a natural human math.

  The kind of math that says: if you

  are sentenced to be hanged

  and the rope breaks in the middle

  of your hanging, you are free to go.

  Such a sentence, though uttered

  without error, doesn’t say what it

  means: life may be a circle, but death’s

  elliptical, swinging and missing.

  Criminal, hangman, judge, and witness,

  each matchless and speechless. Why say

  anything, ever again, after such luck?

  Why not shut up and run?

  Card 0: The Fool

  Yes, you, fool. You don’t fool

  me, you fraud. I’m the fool.

  I don’t care. I run without

  pants in winter, cock

  tucked into my asshole

  for warmth and a fun feeling.

  It looks good, right? I take

  my feet in my hands

  and fringe the public scaffold

  with my skunked stuff. Sexual

  and digestive. It’s so funny.

  Are you embarrassed?

  Why? You didn’t do

  anything but like it.

  Foolish reader, can’t like

  what you like.

  Like what you want to like.

  Do what you want to like

  to do. Don’t do what you don’t

  want to like to do.

  Card 20: Judgment

  What did the stand of pines say

  to the herd of elephants

  wearing swimsuits

  and carrying large suitcases?

  “Nice trunks!”

  Card 14: Temperance

  The everyday truth

  of the night’s delectations

  appears for us in our dream.

  We all ate the same food

  and made the same love

  so we dream the same dream,

  which was: the infinite wine

  was rank, undrinkable, lost

  to a rot somehow familiar,

  a delusion or virus, perhaps

  from childhood, parents

  deep in their cups.

  It could have been worse.

  Upon waking, we might not

  have had or needed wine.

  Card 7: The Chariot

  I smoke between one and three

  cigarettes a day.

  Sometimes a whole pack will last

  a week, sometimes three

  or sometimes I don’t keep track,

  just give them all away.

  I can always get them back.

  There isn’t a tree

  on the street I haven’t given

  the time of day.

  Time for us to meet, or maybe

  eat, between one and three.

  A cigarette or two or three

  with you can’t be beat.

  And sometimes I forget to eat,

  forget the pack, and that too

  is okay, you always say.

  What other way, but to

  forget, is there to endure

  the day, the street?

  Card 9: The Hermit

  I burned a living rose in the fire,

  its fleshsmell human.

  The baby’s breath also reeked

  burnt. I learned the tarot

  in one sitting—arcana slipping

  into my mind like a beloved

  hand under my pillow.

  When I woke I was so hungry

  I ate the last pear. Last for the year,

  another rotten year in which

  I don’t need to save the pear for you.

  It didn’t matter how I sat with you.

  I didn’t have to cover my thighs

  or make attractive angles.

  I could look like a black spider

  with flesh pockets

  or a hairy, scrambled woman

  and you would reach for even that.

  I burned the pillow too,

  so many objects here in the cabin

  seemed to me akimbo

  and interlocking. I put

  everything in the fire

  because it was too confusing.

  Card 16: The Tower

  What did the fatal illness say

  to the nonfatal illness?

  “Are you still working on that platelet

  or can I get rid of it for you?”

  Card 19: The Sun

  When you show yourself to the woman

  you love, you don’t know your fear

  is not fear itself. You have never been good,

  but now you are so good,

  who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin

  that bathes the world for you,

  or her face, captured like a she-lion

  in your own flesh?

  This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring

  upon ring of wedding, the kind

  that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind

  with no contract,

  the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.

  Cloud covers and lifts,

  and sleep and night, and soon enough

  love’s big fire laughs at a terrible burn,

  but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess

  joy and you shouldn’t flaunt

  your treasures in front of all day’s eyes.

  Card 6: The Lovers

  When standing naked, no mirror,

  this is just me. Just me, justly

  before a lover who breaks

  this wholeness as if

  he were a mirror

  but with his mouth.

  When you say I am beautiful

  suddenly I stop being so

  because you have claimed that.

  Card 17: The Star

  I know where you go when you’re hoping

  to be happy: to your large, dark envelope,

  pricking points of light with your tiny pin.

  You call us stars, and use infantile words

  like twinkle and wish, and faraway. But we’re far

  from far. We’re in. And we’re old.

  We’re the deep, hot gleam in your wet, cold holes.

  We call them “eyes.” They are our only homes.

  We shine nowhere else. The sky is a smother

  of blank dust and explosion and vapor.

  In your “eyes” we see fear, what you call sparkle.

  We know it’s fear because we already died. We know

  how it felt. Listen: I am dead and you can’t see it.

  Do you know what this says about us both?

  I’m begging: please choose
me to be your star.

  Wish on me. Love the oh-yes of my being dead

  enough to call it brightness. If I can’t be yours,

  I am just a dark scar pulling the skin of the sky,