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.

 

 

Carrie Olivia Adams, Cynthia Cruz, Wendy McGrath, Niina Pollari + Franklin Bruno: virtual reading series #13

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Carrie Olivia Adams : “from Borderland”

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago with her husband and two cats. She is the Promotions and Marketing Communications Director for the University of Chicago Press and the poetry editor for Black Ocean. Her books include Operating Theater, Forty-One Jane Doe’s, and Intervening Absence as well as To be a thing of memory (forthcoming from Tolsun Books in 2021) in addition to the chapbooks Proficiency Badges (forthcoming from Meekling Press), Grapple, Overture in the Key of F, and A Useless Window. When she’s not making poems, she’s making biscuits.

Cynthia Cruz : “In the Porcelain Room,” “In the Porcelain Room,” from Guidebooks for the Dead

Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poetry: Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018) and Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020). A collection of critical essays, Disquieting: Essays on Silence, was published by Book*hug in 2019.  Her second collection, The Melancholia of Class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021. A novella, Steady Diet of Nothing, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. Cruz's background is in German literature and philosophy. She regularly publishes essays and art writing in The Brooklyn Rail and Degree Critical. Cruz is the Kowald Visiting Writer in Poetry in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the City College of New York. Cruz for Fall 2019/Spring 2020. Cruz also teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Columbia University Graduate Writing Department.

Wendy McGrath : “Lights” and “The Drive-in,” from A Revision of Forward (NeWest 2015)

Wendy McGrath’s most recent novel Broke City (NeWest Press) is the final book in her Santa Rosa Trilogy. Previous novels in the series are Santa Rosa and North East. Her most recent book of poetry, A Revision of Forward (NeWest Press) was released in Fall 2015. McGrath works in multiple genres--Before We Knew is her latest poetry/music collaboration with musician/producer Sascha Liebrand. She has also completed a collaborative manuscript of poems inspired by the photography of Danny Miles, drummer for July Talk and Tongue Helmet. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has been widely published. 

Niina Pollari : “Self Love is Important,” from Dead Horse

Niina Pollari is the author of Dead Horse (Birds, LLC 2015) and the translator, from the Finnish, of Tytti Heikkinen's The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal (Action Books 2013). Her latest is the split chapbook Total Mood Killer, written with merritt k and out from Tiger Bee Press in 2018. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Franklin Bruno : “Villanelle”; “Lub-Dup”

Franklin Bruno is a writer and musician based in Jackson Heights, Queens. His poetry collection is The Accordion Repertoire (Edge Books).