Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy Page A

bacteria or no bacteria,
    life against life, this world
    butted up against the next.

    Simultaneity aside, we are all next.
    All go to the light.
    Heavily, with our childhoods we go.

    I’ll go with my stars,
    and my sorry body, stranger
    to myself, will say go.

The World’s Arm

    A strong, pale wind on the thighs,
    it was no seaspray, no AC ,

    but cold mnemonic, 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.

This Person-Sized Sky with Bruise,

    simultaneously orange and violet
    (though my eyes are closed), is

    either my inner color (that covered mirror)
    or simply dusk.

    An opaline sheet
    pulled because the night is ashamed

    to come in front of everyone,
    blacking out in joy.

    Too shy to spill its milk on the stained
    tablecloth of strangers

    as I have. When it’s finally dark
    outside, it’s finally

    loose inside and the doubleness
    of things seems too true to be good:

    my way
and
the highway.
    Night. It has two hands

    I can use. Its fingers in a plum
    too ripe not to split.

    I had to split it. It was so much
    itself—bloody flesh,

    wild purple skin. A fistful
    so lush it was almost imaginary,

    smelling of love, it didn’t matter whose.

Glassbottomed

    Amplified blueness,
    that is to say, I can hear it,
    though it isn’t music

    or a voice but a self
    apart from self itself. A handiwork.
    Its horrible it-ness.

    If only the plain brown splotch—
    my home, my head—had a place,
    a say, the way rancid meat still

    has protein. Something to offer.
    A little brown dog waves its paw
    as if to say, I know all about it.

    The it-ness. Broken into bits
    so sharp everything gets cut to
    sharp bits. Anything small has a kind

    of integrity—whole, ridiculous—
    god simply cannot have.
    I mean, where’s the magic

    or the logic in being It
    and hiding It? In seeing
    foolishness, remaining wise?

    Everyone’s mouth of music
    swallowed with salt. Oh, to be
    in those waters when it matters.

    A prayer is like a fishmouth,
    opening dumbly onto just more
    water at best or a hook

    if it really wants an answer.
    God (his blue holiness, his dry
    drunk) is no real mystery,

    unlike the wind-taut sail
    and shining gulls and tiny souls
    at everlasting work on the plain

    brown boat in a bottle on the sea.

Streetlamps

    The unplowed road is unusable
    unless there’s no snow.

    But in dry, warm weather,
    it’s never called an unplowed road.

    To call it so, when it isn’t so,
    doesn’t make it so, though it is so

    when it snows and there’s no plow.
    It’s a no-go. Let’s stay inside.

    And here we are again:
    no cake without breaking

    eggs, unless it’s a vegan cake
    in which there are never any eggs

    only the issue, the question,
    the primacy of eggs,

    which remains even in animal-free
    foods, eaten by animal-free

    humans in an inhumane world, lit
    with robots breathing

    powerlessly in nature.
    O streetlamp,

    wallflower clairvoyant,
    you are so futuristically

    old-fashioned,
    existing in the daytime

    for later, because it becomes
    later eventually, then

    earlier, then later again.
    And a place is made

    for that hope, if I call
    it hope when half the time

    is erased by the other half.
    Light becomes