Cynthia Cruz
Two POEMS
SELF PORTRAIT: LAKE CONSTANCE
In the vast garden
Outside grandmother’s mansion
Under the willow
Near the aviary
Eating pastries from their small pink
Paper boxes.
Wearing dead
Marianne’s fox fur.
I listen
As God slowly begins.
SELF PORTRAIT WITH FACE COVERED IN TINY WHITE DIAMONDS
I wrote the Book
Of the End,
Charting its movements
Like a weather.
I listened to its white
Annihilating music,
And was lowered slowly down,
Into the sickly sweet
Specter of childhood,
Its thick white cream
Of regret. The black
Boat of death, just a dot,
Moving slowly
Toward the shore.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of How the End Begins (Four Way, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, will be published in the fall of 2018 along with a collection of essays on silence and marginalization, Notes Toward a New Language (BookThug). The editor of an anthology of Latina poetry, Other Musics, which is forthcoming in 2019, Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University.