Ohio moons:
the child we could not bury
and the child
like it
a ghost crying over the loss of a plain colored pet
unmothered sisterlight
the time between oranges
Ohio aggressions:
I’ve only to pinch myself
to get into
the dream
into the drop of blood that loves my eye
and I hope
it is there
my brother’s
suicidal
chameleon
there,
in the lap of my mother
who was the last
thing noticed
by time
Moods for closure and then the thing itself:
The one I’m destroying and the one you’re saving are not the same. I was ugly, once, but they called me a lifetime behind my back. Poor, twice, but took over for a clown abused by a ghost. On three, my sister’s flashlight takes its little spot from the world. Many of our dead will switch gods.
Ohio religions:
someone I don’t know
described you
to me
not
recently
but anyway
there were animals
not created
by god
confused
by the naming
make death
fear you, not me
we all hear
that kid
& poetry
can’t be
the birthplace
of god
I thought having the child
would change
the child
old soul, some said, and sickness
a dream
god rents
to ghost
Ohio puberty:
they sing
in the locker room
to what
is mine, a scarecrow
for insects
etc
and then
they are saying
it backward
my safe
word
The Wishbone Dress
poems, Cassandra J. Bruner
Bull City Press, 2019
~
I worry sometimes that I have been invisibly abandoned. That a context left unsaid has given its art to a museum obsessed with displaying beginnings. Beginnings only. And then, but then, there is work devoid of panic, work unlike, work with words not so much chosen but words more revealed, work that enters the dead and encodes the universal to amplify the specific, work that with its subtle harmony of discovery sings as to horn a ghost a backbone and then lures that ghost into the modified regions of beauty and transitional creation, work that asks existence for the emergency past imposed on another’s sudden body, that asks of our being here what violence we interrupted, work that is only named The Wishbone Dress, and is called into sound by Cassandra J. Bruner. Work I wish you…
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there were three in the garden
they were sharing
a cigarette
their god
had said little
no names, no pets
no lonely, allergic
baby
kingsoftrain 