- Prayer: Syrinx, and Swanplume Boy's Epithalamium
I've had enough of gods of dipping lips to pondwater & receiving soundless ripples in response Let this psalm call to my body instead How she stiffened in his arms Became phloem & marrow then phloem again A field salting itself before being plucked fallow How pinned beneath him she witnessed the hoopoe stalk a pair of nightingales The hawk lance voles on its talons The thrush shake seeds from its feathers
My body my thorned membrane is there a story where he not us tapers & snaps into a new shape Where we leave him an uprooted reed to shrivel on the sun-parched bank [End Page 26]
Swanplume Boy's Epithalamium
Wanting the down, the purple, the blood of me dazzled & swelling,you bite costume rubies into my hips. Nebula,full-bloom. We wake to
coronas scratchedacross lids, flanks, ribs. The spirit
rising into welt, as water expands &crowns into ice.
Am I lake & drain & plug enoughfor you? Pull
this strap-on, thistucking, this harness till I unravel—Seven shades of red. Flush & sinew. Teething moon,
can you hear the drowned hound moaningunder my collarbone? Can you
hear the skin cry—Night, graft meto you?
Say you're a carnivore. Say you'llwound where I want. Say
your love, too, lashes itself to a flooding barn & inhalesthose searing, those burstingblues. [End Page 27]
Cassandra J. Bruner earned an MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University. A transfeminine poet and essayist, their work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Adroit Journal, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, Muzzle, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and elsewhere.