INTERIOR WITH SUDDEN ... DY BR END A SH AUG HNESSY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY Interior with Sudden Joy BR END ASH AUG HNESSY was raised in California and is a graduate of Columbia University's writing program. She lives in New York City. INTERIOR WITH SUDDEN JOY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY [ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York] Contents I. SYNESTHESIA StiU Life, with Gloxinia, 3 Letter to the Crevice Novice, 4 Fetish: The Historical Orphan, 6 Lure, Lapse, 8 Jouissance, 9 Farrar, Straus and Giroux Vapor through Various Satins, 11 19 Union Square We.st, Hew Yor! 10003 Afterlife, Her Empty Dress, 13 CofrJnghl C 1999 by Brenda Shaughne.sS] AU n,/Il; rnervtd What's Uncanny, 15 Printed in the United StaltJ ofAmen"co Transpassional, 16 DtJigned by Cynthia Krupa! Fint publiJJud in 1999 by FarTar, Straus and Giroux SweU, 17 Dear GonrJya, 18 Library o/Congros Cataloging-in-Publicotion Data ShaughnmJ, Bmuta, 1970- You're Not Home, It's Probably Better, 20 Interior M:th suddtn joy / Brenda Shaughnessy. - 1st ed. p. an. Rise, 21 ISBNO-S74-52698-2 (PhI.) I. Title. Fortune, 22 PSS569.HS5J155 1999 8IJ'.54-ddl 98-50010 Glossary, 24 II. DARK CHURCH OF HANDS III. PROJECT FOR A FAINTING Middle,29 Projectfor a Fainting, 51 Your One Good Dress, 30 Perfect Ending, 53 Your Name on It, 32 The Lamp Garden, 54 Simulacra, 33 Ten Jennies, 59 Rosarium, 34 CaUing Her Home, 60 Lacquer, 35 Musee, 62 Epithalament, 36 You Love, You Wonder, 64 Thirteenth Summer, 38 Voluptuary, 66 Starting Here and Going Back, 39 Mistress Formika, 68 Parallax, 40 Panopticon, 70 Cinema Poisoning, 42 Ever, 72 Postfeminism, 43 Sleptember, 73 Wrongbodied, 45 Illumine, 76 Arachnolescence, 46 Interior with Sudden Joy, 79 The Question and Its Mark, 48 Acknowledgments, 83 [ I] Synesthesia Still Life, with Gloxinia I will make something ofyou both pigment and insecticide. Something natural, even red, like serviceberries. Which a cloister ofyoung Benedictine nuns, in exile and drought, found and brilliantly crushed into a blessed moxie wine. With terrible pride, with gloxinia, the slipper-shaped flower, served it bitter and staining in the chalice. By evening chapel, habits thrown up and still, their insides found all blue, as suspected. I am cold now and I cannot paint or move you. Letter to the Crevice Novice I wanted nothing. I am not a stray mule than six feet is bottomfeeding. Deeper & gaudy caravan pulling a big skirt, than that, the proxy eros is tricking us open legs, a head ofwire. good: tight No-Iove-you's in a tongue I want singers to shear your eye from the flocking thicker than water. Bluer too. ofmy city ofsuperior grammar & wincmg. To keep you blind, my alabaster scourge. It must be a Love, this crackpot ofheart, my sterling & cashmere & no money. You my fat bad fricassee, cough ofa candle. Through snow, my little weather, you are gone through the cravesty turnstile to my other kind ofhomemaking. I've always been home outside. Night likes me. Vampiring I would have killed all I loved & kept all our lives for centuries, crypt-crock. Love was death enough. How deep is the Mariana Trench? For the crevice novice, anything more [5 ] Fetish: The Historical Orphan Czarina! Tell me you're not giving up the rogue May Mother Russia lie burnt inside your shepherdess red rule for a cottage edged with timothy and vague skirt. May your meager nest be filled with peahen whortleroot. Make room for me in your scullery, as good a meal as I have been for your uniformed surrogates. strange queen ofSiber with your hand stroking the back Someday may your icy love know the afRiction ofMongolia. It is too Iowa land and the dear ofthe abandoned, ofthe sexual underchild: cyclopia, intima ofyour delicate organs will brush a fusing ofthe retinas, to see yourself as I see you. desperately against your blue inner skin. I would volunteer myself, ifI weren't such a trollop on queue for the strappado. In my heart, I'm a candidate for the spoon ofstrychnine in my tea. I would choose that, ifyour well-missed wonderland ofpunishment were here. But it's not. You have left me to the rack, which I will accommodate. My journalbox oflove letters to you is bursting. Someday my family will slide out around these censors, scoundrels, and send my devotions, like a sea ofraving quillfish, an imbroglio ofplainstone and flogging, to you in your exile. [6 J [7J Lure, Lapse Jouissance There is no style in sleep, Your phantoms hang neatly from skyhooks, only the sense ofnethers startled ready to be veils, ready to disembody you. up from the supple interior. You have shelled yourself ofthis curved room Guarded handsomely, I am awake and the smell is ofburnt door, (for a baker ofcourse in love with a painter will mix too hard) slackbelly, hot. It is an abattoir, lacking its usual firmness. and preening in the lord-loud and ecstatic doubt purchased from all last nude cringing. Your ordinary sweet kinesis, peevish in the crumble and whetstone ofyour body. Dull bronze cowbells for hands is what I want. And so you go. Every city has a place called the Roxy. Go. To keep from the quicksand ofthis: The serious honeycomb leaking, I would streak you with yellow bruises. Unbearable curl. Tender leviathan in the last Your garland, my shaky lamb, window, crimson facing west. we are close in this How could you? You are Gundella. slow evening gown, You are anyone's Maria. we are growing down, Electric to perishing, your more auxiliary lovers, our winter-slung bodies fooled like pralines or quaaludes, cannot touch you. and necklaced with furious morning. [ 8 ] [9 ] Vapor through Various Satins No teasing or lockjaw. Caustic. All ofyou, even shadow, I have been so dirty must be bull's-eye. Your shaggy, skeptical in each place you've looked quasar has died the way Andromeda dies: my body has absorbed so very late at night. You are disenchanted. the light, the iris stain, You are all rain-collected, in a butterfish sac and marked me. Mud. opaque and draining. Bruise. Calendar ofsalt The description of this you hold under and faith. I will try, like a genius in dark water. in the sun and in lesser fire, to blot this slur, flaw discolored, with the speckled cloth ofnear origin: our bedclothes, those trophies fringed flat and holy. Such a ripe display. Starling, skillbreast, swathed too clean and brief-handed, [ 10 ] [11 ] Afterlife, Her Empty Dress fall over yourselfleaving, I lie quiet among my possible suits, your hinged, your blurred feet to head, feet to head. Blue, black, white, red. silhouette etched, rising more visible, more liquid. I am grim at the waist, squandered through the legs. Watch with a turned-in face. Lie with a design on my back, a spade in clover. Been given a flat ofstone to line my fortress, and a curtain ofprivacy for your old sweet water. Can you see me on the other side ofthe jumpy garden coiled out to you? Blind as a wedding, so white you're blue. Little fog queen, without a corpse, I take you peeled [12] [13 ) What's Uncanny too bright.l throw you starved ofair. is the body's wiry edge singed & dried, I kiss you still warm, touched at last by the curious colored with ash. gloves ofthe question guard. lleave you under a cloud, but I carve Too much choreography. you in night, that finer edge, the old arc ofyour hand. Hamstrings, half edible & music, stretched like catgut, the sad-animal pull. Our knees two peculiar systems oflocking, oflooking. Too little dance. Compulsion is always narcissism: I miss you, admit it. I'm gifted, I give in. I give you all myoId synesthetic fire. Loved-body smoke is terribly popular in dry neighborhoods, and our lungs are succulents. We share this loss ofbreathing. Listen for it. [] .5 1 Transpassional Swell Perfection is the campsite for those who have stopped halfWay. Svelte with eventual sex, who could help I've melted my silver for you. but gorge herselfon low violet leaning everywhere? Belonging is invisible: this can be seen at the proper distance. The shine and shifting slate ofthe sky murmurs I've burned my blue curtains its irresistible confession: I am more than blue and spent myself on an intricate openwork ofrazor wire, to cut ifyou are the violent imprint. I am swollen, vexed endlessly and only skylights for the honeybees in webs. finite against your bodies. I'm living alone in a kind ofcube which is barely electric, the hot This slim stalk ofsilhouette slides via nimbus plate blows the tiny fuse down the eyelights without a skirmish. Glossy with sly undoing, blisterlike. but I have noodles and wine and a nice singing voice. Ifyou came back I could make you We are disheveled, though too skeptical to abandon our dimpled limbs a necklace. The small planets drop by every few months, slivered; the big ones never and never and fill the insides ofslips with mere threat and strop of thunderpeal. do I feel abandoned. Belonging is invisible: I, on the other hand, We toss freely with fever this mirror am merely shielding. desilvered. And break into rain upon finding such umber yielding offrost to febris. This strumpet muscle under your breast describing you minutely, Volupt, volupt. [J 6 J [17 ] Dear Gonglya, The most inscrutable beautiful names in this world I would revise it and say that everything is only always do sound like diseases. nothing, truncated. It is because they are engorged. G., I am a fool.