AUBADE WITH BALL GAG
“Masturbathon” is the ideal form of sex activity for this trans-gendered subject.
-Slavoj Žižek
Love in this omnivorous air
this weave of straps & copper we must look like
a lone woman who can’t stop
touching herself
A tangled braid
of bone A prairie of orchids
speckled in amber in pudendum
in hooks Please lean
closer & hear the cries crackle
along my jaw like hooves The spit
circle my throat like a supplicant
Before re-entering the world that makes
a husband of me you clench
the absence of my breasts
At the unclasping our twinned watermark
our afterimage fading
This selection comes from the book, The Wishbone Dres, available from Bull City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Sarah Clark.
Cassandra J. Bruner‘s The Wishbone Dress was the 2019 winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition. She earned her MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University where she served as Managing Editor of Willow Springs Books. Finalist for Black Warrior Review‘s 2018 Nonfiction Contest, their poems and essays have appeared, or are upcoming in The Adroit Journal, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Muzzle, Ne
w England Review , Ninth Letter, and Pleiades among others.
Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. She’s edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.
