GUIDEBOOKS FOR THE DEAD
And the enchantment
of children’s hospitals.
Somewhere there is a god,
I swear.
Someone must be
in charge.
What is the word, again,
in Spanish
For useless?
SELF PORTRAIT IN BLUE SÉANCE ROOM
Mother and God:
I am alive, still
And childless, in Brooklyn. My entire world
Its endless failures and humiliations, driven inside
The dioramas of my pretty poems now:
Solitude, finally
Inside my white castle of glass.
This is it:
Death, the new medicine.
–Cynthia Cruz
***
Cynthia Cruz is the author of four collections of poetry: Ruin, The Glimmering Room, and Wunderkammer. Her fourth collection, How the End Begins, was published in March of 2016. Her essays, interviews and art writing have been published in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and Hyperallergic. Cruz has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in writing and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
