Tag: Bullcity Press

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Wishbone Dress by Cassandra J. Bruner

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, New 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.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Wishbone Dress by Cassandra J. Bruner

WHEN I DEFEND MY NAME IN COURT

I arrive smeared with filth
& crushed
asters Palm pressed
to a leather bible I say
my goddess is a nest of grime my worship
a cheap strap-on pursed under the tongue
The jury of gleaming women staple my birth
certificate to my forehead reciting
the deadname while by hand or
by vise witnesses
fail to pry my hips wider Without
verdict the judge recounts
stories of women hexed
by the sun’s spit of women never
believed Locked out
on the courthouse steps my love
watches transfixed as a shrike
pins robin hearts to her left index For want
of relief for want of a branch

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, New 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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Wishbone Dress by Cassandra J. Bruner

THE ANTLERED DOE

A man doused in roebuck piss says
I saw it as I skinned its thighs
& laughs.

Your death always a joke, the shock
of womb, a punchline.
Darting through

underbrush, your hooves
resounded like cackling children.
This velvet crown, not always a betrayal—

In rutting season, the tongues
of stags & doe alike climbed
your hind leg, crying
I opened for my beloved but she was gone.

Now is the hour of moths
& the body remade as
a sack of buckshot.

A child bundles you in sweat-stale
flannel, lifting you onto the truck bed
like a distant sister. Nestled

against your snout, he mouths
a wish for recognition, for his budding breasts
to hide themselves away like fawns.

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, New 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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Wishbone Dress by Cassandra J. Bruner

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, New 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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Wishbone Dress by Cassandra J. Bruner

FRONTISPIECE

I think of how gods prefer their oracles
blind & their prophets impotent,

how two milligrams of estrogen
was enough to mold Eve from a shard of bone.

If only the world would hush,
I could hear my skin thinning.

Listen: sleep is a wasp’s nest inside the mouth.
Come morning, I am doubled over

the sink, spitting stingers & wings. Each heave
a prayer for a homeland,

a recitation of the Song of Songs.
In this manner, the body learns its shape.

As I scrub the lining of my cheeks
with lemons,

the rinds speak
in my great-grandmother’s voice—

Child, your hips have already fused.
A gash in my mouth sings

of all things made new
as it hardens like a cataract.

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, New 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.