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  • Prayer: Syrinx, and Swanplume Boy's Epithalamium
  • Cassandra J. Bruner (bio)

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

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.

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