Our Andromeda by Brenda Shaughnessy

we
are
home,
    if God will let us live here,
    with Andromeda inside us,

    doesn’t it seem we belong?
    Now and then, will you help me belong
    here, in this place where you became

    my child, and I your mother
    out of some instant of mystery
    of crash and matter

    scattered through the cosmos,
    God-scooped and poured toward
    our bodies. With so much love,

    somehow. I am so tired
    I cannot beat my own heart anymore.
    Cal, shall we stay? Oh let’s stay.

    We’ve only just arrived here,
    rightly, whirling and weeping,
    freely, breathing, brightly born.

About the Author

    Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of
Human Dark with Sugar
(Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
Interior with Sudden Joy
(FSG, 1999). Shaughnessy’s poems have appeared in
Best American Poetry, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review,
and
The Rumpus.
She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.

Acknowledgments
    I wish to thank the editors of the following magazines:
The Awl, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, Slate,
and
WSQ
(
Women’s Studies Quarterly
).
    Enormous thanks to the MacDowell Colony, for exquisite hospitality, beauty, magic. And gratitude to the Corporation of Yaddo, for generosity, time, space. This book wouldn’t exist without residencies in both places, and was in large part written in MacDowell’s New Jersey and Barnard studios and in Yaddo’s West House. Much work was accomplished thanks to the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation at Brown University. Thank you, American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of American Poets.
    And with personal gratitude:
    To Deborah Landau, Paul Muldoon, Hilton Als, Meghan O’rourke and the Pretendettes, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, James Richardson, Susan Wheeler, J.D. McClatchy, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alice Elliott Dark, Rebecca Horne.
    To Ann Hood, whose work and compassionate conversation gave me the courage to write the title poem. (Though she didn’t realize it and therefore shouldn’t be held responsible for its failures.)
    This book is especially indebted to the beloved Members of Team Cal: Sami Akbari, Imelda Laborce, the Roosevelt School, Dr. Joseph Levy, Dr. Elizabeth Fiorino, Huck Ho, Tami Gaines, Robyn Uslip, Lindsay Orcutt, Lauren Joyce, and my family. And to the special moms who have really been there: Molly Peryer, Leonie Lewis, Eliza Factor, Aine Carroll, and Jamie Mirabella.
    To Dr. Andrew S. Gardner, for Simone.
    To Craig. I just love being with you. Even here, on the acknowledgments page, I am glad to be talking to you. You make me happy, and you make our kids happy. That’s all the kinds of happiness I need in this life, my love.

Copyright 2012 by Brenda Shaughnessy
All rights reserved

    Cover art: Rebecca Horne,
Untitled
, 2010

    ISBN: 978-1-55659-410-6
    eISBN: 978-1-6193-202-84
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