Women In Horror Month - Pixie Bruner

Excerpts-Poetry and Prose by Pixie Bruner

Dutch Wife

I came to co-exist with
you three prior Winters ago,
and in the wrong hemisphere.
It was freezing, yet you still wrapped
yourself around me as if I was openwork, and you--
a furnace. I have the necessary holes, eyes, nose, mouth,
ears, the same as all other women who ever wed. As you stir in your
dreams, mumble at the ceiling, this night, this Dutch wife sneaks off to weave
herself solid from the slender long-abolished, blood-welting bamboo cane switches.

From “Our Choice!” Edited J.L. Lane

And He Held

He clamped her wrist like a manacle as he played the Russian game- click- click- click- clack- silence, as
the blade slid into a knuckle. The red pool was still just a line of a couple fingers. He pulled the knife
from her meat and bone and it took seconds for the pearls of deep red to well up as the next clicks began
with the blade poised over the back of her spread hand. The slipped spot flopped open — a gill taking in
oxygen and dripping red jewels.That click -click-click of the knife — dangling gems clacking against
themselves on a costume jewelry necklace. In the end, he had a pair of earrings and a set of knucklebone
polyhedral dice. She had no hands.

Once We Were Mermaids
We were mermaids once,
floating on turquatic seas,
we looked forever shoreward.

Or rather merfolk,
forgotten naiads,
cast off spawn of Poseidon
who chose to bifurcate
our Selves to walk on land.
Some of us lost our tails,
took on human forms without larynxes,
while others chose to go deeper
burrowed in anemones
and thermal vents on the sea floor,
crushed to microscopic scale
to remain whole,
but a few of us
chose the other option,
now we wash up on the beaches,
muscled legs, genitalia,
with the iridescent
bodies of fish,
our gills sucking at blue skies,
trying to extract the
air that completely surrounds us
and are unspoken of,
shame of land and sea alike,
Neither fish nor fowl,
but foul monsters,
fish out of water,
floundering to exist,
our petrified bodies copper ore veined
semiprecious stones and sea glass
landlocked over the epochs.

From The Horror Zine Fall 2024

Crash Landing Aria I

Write home with centrifugal force,
to scrawl with gravitas without gravity
Poem as centrifuge to separate
solids
from
plasma.
Flesh

bone
fascia
from
muscle
and
bone.
Find your perfect moment to fall apart.
Sever
into
wings
and thorax,
Find new lifeforms.
Embrace having form.
Isn’t it delicious?
Crash down landers
Graphene insects leave you
shattered like cheval mirrors
freed from ovoid shells
nearly eroded on
shard
blade
shores,
the incisors
of acidic seas.

From Space & Time Magazine Fall 2024

Pixie Bruner (HWA/SFPA)  is a writer, editor, and cancer survivor. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her doppelgänger and their alien cats. Her collection The Body As Haunted was published in 2024 (Authortunities Press). She co-curated and edited Nature Triumphs : A Charity Anthology of  Dark Speculative Literature (Dark Moon Rising Publications,) to benefit The Nature Conservancy. Her words are in Space & Time Magazine, Whispers from Beyond and Hotel Macabre Vol. 1 (Crystal Lake Publishing), Star*Line, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Dreams & Nightmares, Angry Gable Press, Punk Noir, and many more. Many are forthcoming. She just received her her Pushcart Award Nomination from Star*Line, the Journal of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Not bad for the first year submitting poetry since 1992. She wrote for White Wolf Gaming Studio. Werespiders ruining LARPs are entirely her fault.