Psalm at the End of Cicada Season
BY R. CASSANDRA BRUNER
Four months the swarm fattened the air
with noise with the wax membrane
of their wings Now they’ve buried
their young silence opens its forceps
in the hollow of afternoon Underfoot
amber husks chime once more Is it
wrong god to want a body
emptied of memory Here rain
bloats an exposed beehive A collarbone
sinks with the heft of its disappeared
necklace & I’ve spent seventeen years
translating the tymbals humming beneath
my tendon muffled & promising
as cricketsong heard underwater My next
lover will call me her girl watching
as I molt dresses over doorknobs & bedposts
How do I explain the before—
The prophets at the family barbecue
plucking tonguepink coals
from the pit How I swallowed
each one searing ready to dissolve
into its answer Or the plainer history
stippled down my flank Its pockmarks
& half-filled ditches—
I’ve been a student of ecstasy so long I’ve
neglected what comes after Those words
we bury into mattresses trusting they will
return as butter congealing on dinner plates
Fugue with a Procession of Visitors
BY R. CASSANDRA BRUNER
First comes the memory of the pastor,
the family friend who once traced a goat’s head
in the constellation of my freckles. Son, he warns,
you have the gift of visions. I leave hot water
running, let steam occlude every mirror. But come evening,
the serpent my father feared would seduce me
cinches a harness around my breasts,
biting my neck till I sigh my darling,
my provider, my Nyquil. By the third endearment,
the door splinters & a robber presses
his knife beneath my chin. He demands diamonds
but there are none left. As the blade enters,
I wake floating in the bathtub, a moth-winged angel
overhead. Outlined in her fur, the faces of friends
lost to madness. She extends
a palmful of percocet but I deny it three times.
The fourth, I relent, weeping as each pill pupates,
turns into living, silver hairs. After flushing them down
the drain, I wipe a patch of the mirror clean, forgetting
my reflection. Stamen stalks erupt from her mouth
as the face, paper-like, peels back
into a corona of petals. My lily-headed double
raises her hand, scrawling a message in the filth-dusted glass:
We have rolled back the partition so you might
pass through. Fearful & sincere, I paint the mirror
white, a frost no bulb could sprout from. The body,
a bag of manna, gone stale & stolen from heaven.
