Two Poems By Brenda Shaughnessy
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
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.
(OK, 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 re-enactment
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.
The World’s Arm
A strong, pale wind on the thighs,
it was no seaspray, no A.C.,
but cold mnemotic, a breath
of spotless decision,
a kind of bulk, a true surface
thickened by foreign pears
as if winter brought its fruit
first to me for approval
before it let December
fill its basket to capacity.
I spoke too calmly for one
who didn’t believe in anything.
Mouth full of pears,
full of promises I’d no way
to speak, much less keep, I tended
to gesture toward a Universal
Field of Grass, hoping to break
as many blades as my wide self
could in one pass. One pass —
but we’re wasted with feeling,
breathing funny and stuck rough
like an IV into a paralyzed arm.
And that’s the World’s Arm
that can’t write anymore,
or sign its name, or pick
the thickness from the trees.
My fingerprints transform
into proboscis, by degrees.
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Her third collection, Our Andromeda, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012.
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