PRAYER: SYRINX
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 then 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
This selection comes from the book, The Wishbone Dress, 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.
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