Cassandra J. Bruner
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   &   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
from the journal NEW ENGLAND REVIEW
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"This piece was part of a larger series imagining femme chimeras (including Medusa and the Lamia) and how they'd live today, most of which ended up scrapped. But this poem, this voice, lingered. With most of the original trappings faded away—the modern context winnowed to past tellings of the myth—Syrinx's mind and language clarified. Even though the poem restricts breath, her language sharpens, calcifies." 

Cassandra J. Bruner on "Prayer: Syrinx" 
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Illustration of a ship in high seas at night
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in 2020

"The murdered albatross is a bottomless symbol: It stands for everything you greedily grabbed at, everything you squandered or spurned, every ornament of the ego, every plastic water bottle, every corrosive pleasure, every idle meanness, every dead and bleached-out lump of coral on the Great Barrier Reef."
 
via THE ATLANTIC
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Cover of Christina Rossetti's Complete Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
Ana Božičević on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”"


"I can’t underestimate how much this kind of spelled repetition, the shifting meter and rhyme patterns following their own emotional logic and the music inside the words, influenced the way I write in English—Rossetti’s “irregular measures” that John Ruskin amusingly declared a “calamity of modern poetry.” But they also found a kindred bell in the ear as I simultaneously read the anonymous Croatian poets of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, poems of chant and repetition, epic simile and Slavic antithesis."
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