Brenda Shaughnessy

The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world always do sound like diseases. It’s because they are engorged. G., I am a fool. What we feel in the solar plexus wrecks us. Halfway squatting on a crate where feeling happened. Caresses. You know corporeal gifts besmirch thieves like me. But she plucks a feather and my steam escapes. We’re awake each night at pennymoon and we micro and necro. I can’t stop. But love and what-all: the uncomfortable position of telling the truth, like the lotus, can’t be held long. If she knew would she just take all her favors from my marmalade vessel and chuck them back into the endless reversible garment which is my life— an astonishing vanishing. G., I know this letter is like a slice of elevator accident. As smart folk would say, “Everything is only Nothing’s Truck.” I would revise it and say that everything is only nothing, truncated. Love, Your Igor

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.

is my heart. A stranger berry there never was, tartless. Gone sour in the sun, in the sunroom or moonroof, roofless. No poetry. Plain. No fresh, special recipe to bless. All I’ve ever made with these hands and life, less substance, more rind. Mostly rim and trim, meatless but making much smoke in the old smokehouse, no less. Fatted from the day, overripe and even toxic at eve. Nonetheless, in the end, if you must know, if I must bend, waistless, to that excruciation. No marvel, no harvest left me speechless, yet I find myself somehow with heart, aloneless. With heart, fighting fire with fire, fightless. That loud hub of us, meat stub of us, beating us senseless. Spectacular in its way, its way of not seeing, congealing dayless but in everydayness. In that hopeful haunting (a lesser way of saying in darkness) there is silencelessness for the pressing question. Heart, what art you? War, star, part? Or less: playing a part, staying apart from the one who loves, loveless.