But what’s a girl to do?: On Cristine Brache’s Goodnight Sweet Thing – Jacqueline Lucente
October 21, 2024
But who are these gods
that replay my life and question it?
All along I thought I was safe.
I thought god knew I was a very good girl;
idly begging for an overdose,
a final movement of peace—
god, let’s settle it, let’s make a truce:
There’s no rapture like the body,
no war like the mind.
—Cristine Brache, “Gone Girl Summer”
Goodnight Sweet Thing, writer and multimedia artist Cristine Brache’s second collection of poetry, works through the dichotomies of womanhood—how it feels to slip along the spectrum of object and subject, navigate the bliss of fantasy against the texture of reality, strive for perfection and fall short of it. The collection gathers over two decades of work—the eponymous group, written over the last five years, and Poems, Brache’s out-of-print debut, written between 2008-2018. The poems are dramas that maneuver between the fickle and often volatile power dynamics that determine societal roles and dictate the rules of the game. Brache often identifies as the speaker of her poems—like her visual art, she treats her writing like a diary, a record of desires, memories, fantasies. She writes from the illusory and devastating space between longing and disappointment—the first poem, “Happy New Year,” is a wish, a prayer, or a joke: “Please don’t hurt me. / Please don’t hurt me. / Please don’t hurt me.”
Brache began writing the Goodnight Sweet Thing poems during the pandemic, when mortality was front of mind. A poem of Dorothy Stratten’s—a Playmate who was killed in 1980—serves as the collection’s epigraph, situating the work in a surreal “Disneyland” with a glimmer that shields its secrets. The collection has a found footage feel—like developing a forgotten roll of film or clicking through an old handycam’s library, memory flooding through each frame. Some of the things you’ll run into in Brache’s universe: animatronic dolls, UFOs, tabloid headlines, high school foreplay, spins on Girls Gone Wild, near death experiences. The poems are clever, with titles like “Always Such a Doll, Always Ready to Be Played With” and “Some People Use You??” The humor (what else can you do but laugh at yourself?) is balanced by a meditation on life and death that cuts away the noise to the prime denominator of love.
What Brache does brilliantly is show the duality of the performance of femininity—the story you’ve been fed will fail you, and you know better, but you try anyway. You try anyway, because there isn’t a clear way out (contradictions abound!). You try anyway, because maybe you will win, and don’t you want to know what the prize tastes like? There’s the mask with the lipstick mouth, and then there’s the face underneath. There’s the action, and then there’s the time between the acts, which lacks stage directions. These liminal moments are the most revealing—take “Self-Reflection Figure,” where she writes: “I organize my delusions / and wonder if I’m haunting myself” and “I move through life like symbols in a painting / But what do I signify?”
I read the collection in a couple of sittings. My copy is dog-eared and annotated, because so much of the work felt familiar. I remember the big yellow letters on tabloid weeklies, announcing scandals and overdoses over grainy paparazzi photos, ways to lose weight fast, tips for better sex (guaranteed!) at checkout lines as a child, a teenager. Turning myself into an object was once the go-to coping mechanism, consoling any rejection or disappointment until, tired enough, the facade crumbled: I would walk home alone, wipe away the mascara smudged beneath my eyes, and ask: What am I even doing? The poems reminded me of film scenes where the performance begins to crack, betraying the truth: the final sequence of Cronenberg’s Crash, when James finds Catherine by her wrecked convertible moments after he runs her off the highway—I think I’m alright, she says, bruised and bloodied, looking in the opposite direction as James, disappointed, kisses her neck and feels up her shirt; Laura Palmer swaying in the hazy light of the Pink Room, playing the bad girl with wet eyes, days before Pete discovers her blue body in plastic.
If the world, as Brache writes, is a “thief,” maybe it’s because meaning is slick and elusive. Fewer things are guaranteed. Were they ever certain? Nothing—not beauty (“the Eighth Deadly Sin”), not a person, not a story—will save you. Thinking again of Stratten, she reflects: “The thousands and thousands of lives you could have lived. / Time is knowing you can never go back to a place / That can make you feel whole again.” Maybe the point is for all of this matter a little less—“the only thing / I can say I’ll truly / miss is my skin.” Maybe what matters are the things you can promise “Even when existence is a dark / and godless hole,” as Brache suggests in “God is the Space Between You and Me”:
An owl’s flight is silent sometimes like
I love you
in broad daylight and
I love you behind your back.
Have trust;
have faith—
not in god, but in love
(with me).