2 Poems by Cynthia Cruz

Fragment: Small Talk on Melancholia

In Lars von Trier’s film, Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst’s 

character, Justine, tries to keep one step ahead of it. 

You can see this in the first half of the film

where, at her own wedding, she keeps moving.

From room to room, guest to guest, through

the many rooms of her sister’s mansion

as if moving back in time to her own beginning

until, in the end, she finally collapses. Moving through

rooms and rooms of the mansion like endless

rooms of memory. And what is it

she collapses into? She loses herself inside a kind of small death, 

not unlike what happens when one eats sweets, or dreams,

or the moment when an idea enters the mind. Her madness

is no madness, it is a reprieve, a tiny sleep, a space

she forms out of nothing, and then enters, an in-between. 

Where do I go when I drop into sleep? Where

does my mind vanish into?

When I tasted the cake I went away for a small moment,

I was erased. I entered something else, a next-to

world. Or, when I leave the body and lose time

in thought. It is the body that leads me,

though I always want to anchor myself in the mind.

Justine wants to leave the world she lives in—

its small rules and hard corners. It isn’t death

she envisions, but a tiny collapse, a din to drop into.

Death, or eating, a dream, or what happens

when, animal-like, one feels one’s body,

the centering mechanism of the body,

pulling to someone else’s, magnetic, spectral,

not of this world. A small blur. a move, but

infinitesimal, like a yawn, but barely.

Like music, when you first heard it, indiscernible,

when it happens, like that. 

Milkweed Lullaby

The days were endless,

magical. 

The violence, a golden thread 

stitched through everything.

We played horses. 

I chose the most 

delicate, the most 

dangerous.  And at night

ice cream and birthday 

cake, a riot 

of tiny white flowers.

Bright paper masks

to hide the mind behind. 

At the edge of what

I can not ever

remember—

Plumbago, lantana, trumpet-

vine. A glorious magenta

bougainvillea.

I don’t think she had a good friend,

animals, maybe. 

We never left the house 

and were raised 

in absolute and utter

isolation.

Animals. 

People coming in the summer

to visit. And never

came back.

And in darkening weather

I cower inside the yellowing

field, listening—

I am crawling 

the long corridor 

back to the room

where the shattering 

begins. 

Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poems. Hotel Oblivion, her seventh, is forthcoming in the spring of 2022 with Four Way Books. 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 2019. The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class, an examination of Freudian melancholia and the working class, was published by Repeater Books in 2021. Cruz is currently at work on a book exploring Hegelian negative freedom and the working class and is also pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School, where her area of research is psychoanalysis and philosophy.

7 February 2022