Cassie Pruyn


Buried Pistol


I dug it up near the base of the back deck.
Its dirt-caked weight has surfaced and resurfaced
in dozens of drafts over the years.
No one remembers it but me.
Is it a fiction?
I have no memory of my implement,
or intent, just
the small black machine emerging.
I ran inside, panicked
and panting, to hand it over—
yet even in that pacifist household,
no one can recall it.
That part of the deck was trellised
and draped in Concord grapes,
their vines curtaining into a room,
filtering the sun into lace.
Why does the memory return and return?
Maybe because it’s the only time in my life
I’ve held a gun. It was a lady’s pistol
I somehow guessed—
its petite heft, its hammer
curling upward, jaunty
as a head feather.
Was it warm? Was it cool with earth?
Why would I concoct this danger—
sized just for me—only
to surrender it as
urgently as I’d
brushed it clean?


Body Unmoored from My Body


miniature automatic
Your head when you emerged soft and dented as a snake’s egg
bobbing blindly
Your hand in my hand: tiny terrain

As a child I felt so lonely after guests left
Sadness in my belly standing in their empty room
the bed made differently than Mom made it
historic object echo of their gestures
a sock left between the nightstand and the wall
residue of their scent

The room which had readied itself with clean sheets
awaiting their arrival had swelled to hold them
Now it sat stretched out and silent
the kind of silence that reverberates
in the fresh absence of sound

I wasn’t expecting you to leave so early so abruptly a stranger
at first
I missed the you that had been inside me
the you of your body in my body
My body: a haunted house

Cassie Pruyn is the author of Bayou St. John: A Brief History (The History Press, 2017) and the poetry collection Lena (Texas Tech University Press, 2017), winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in numerous publications, including AGNI Online, The Normal School, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, and others.

ISSN 2472-338X
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