Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Cynthia Cruz : Three poems

 

 

HOTEL LETTERS

Piles of magazines and a suitcase
labeled danger with pamphlets

on death and transformation.
 

Bright plastic bags of candy,
make up and medicine.

Like children, I roam
from room to room,
itinerant music playing in the background.

The windows of the hotel
room are cracked open

in the distance is the city
s
Mercedes and fernseher.
 

I am inside the parked sedan
outside the high-rise, waiting.

Nomadic, my entire life, I have been
packing my things and leaving.

In the hotel room in the short black and white film,
I am the one,

the girl, the blur,
the pretty blonde
smear in the background.

 

 

FRAGMENT

Why do I have these hands, this face
that changes everything? And where
did I misplace the letter I thought
I sent but then never could locate or replace.
Why when I read

do the words become sounds

or blocks of color or music.
In the letter I dreamt
you wrote, you told me everything.
The words broke open like words

cut from paper or collaged

onto silver metal backing,

affixed with blue duct tape,

bright pink and beige matte

paint brushed all along the back.

In the film clip in which I don't speak

but move my lips, as if whispering.

 

PHILOSOPHY

In the German film in which
I am disguised as the blonde actress
who portrays the activist turned anarchist,
I am wearing a blonde wig,

disguised as a German film actress.

When I was sixteen I lived

in an abandoned house

with other young anarchists.

We lived inside a small dream

in which we lived

with each other

inside a kind of sweet dream.

But then the boys turned

to heroin and then to ways

of making money to pay for it.

When I asked, they would not say.

But you can see shame and sorrow

when it appears in the face.

I loved them

but by then there was nothing left

of who they had been.

By the time I left

most of them were dead.

I don't know

what to do with this passion.

It wants things I know

I can
t handle. But the opposite
is a passive death I cannot accept.

When in the film, the actress

is finally hunted down and sent to prison,
she lives inside her cell
reading and listening to news
of the world on her transistor radio.
Living a kind of death

I know already

all too well.

 

 

  

Cynthia Cruz is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. Cruz is the author of six collections of poems: Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012) and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006). She is also the editor of Other Musics, an anthology of contemporary Latina poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in the spring of 2019. The Melancholia of Class, her second collection of critical essays, an exploration of melancholia and the working class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021.