Three Poems by Cynthia Cruz

Terror Lullabies

Nude on the hotel plush
I eat red jam from glass jars
warm cream with my fingers. 

Genet, I ask
what will I do
with this body.

Monstrous, he murmurs
in the middle of a speech
on Hölderlin’s voyage
into the white annihilation
of the mountains.

Blonde orphan and saint
of silvering spit and Italian
silk panties. 

Girl-child, wrecked
in sweet black boots
and crimson halter,
he whispers in German. 

He steals and lies
and tells me things
that have no meaning. 

And at night he vanishes
back into the yellowing
skein of the dream,
its vapor-thin membrane. 

Lees and fox and mice.
Starved, feral creatures
darkening at the hurt
margins of the mind. 

In the morning
I eat penny candy

then spend what little is left
of the money. 

Decadence and poverty. 

Burning down the world
so I can enter
into its hot blue flame. 

My body, now
skater boy-thin,
a small girl-child. 

And the mind,
pushed far past
the threshold of what
I ever could have handled. 

Alone now
in this emptiness
and never.

Skinny, Finnish waif
frozen in the mind’s
black forever. 

Ugly, stupid
bastard child. 

Self Portrait: Hotel Berlin

At thirteen, in the bedroom
in a hotel in Berlin

the man whispering,
trying to touch me,

calling me
Candy. 

Slipping something
darkly magnetic

into the pink hush
of my dreams.

The porcelain sink
filling with ash.

The tiny scar
in my left wrist,

evidence:
the incision

from which he drew
the blue

milk of memory—
everything that ever

occurred before that night—
out.

I am always at the precipice
of what I can never
remember,

always staggering
back into that

black corridor,
the bleak and freezing night
that never ends. 

Drive

I lost track.

And now

I am lying again
on my back

upon the soft black leather
inside a white noise
of silence.

Escape—but to what. 

The body isn’t really
a form of transport, is it.

The body, it’s just
another means
of holding me back.

Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems. Guidebooks for the Dead, her sixth, is forthcoming in the spring of 2020 by Four Way Books. She is also the author of a collection of critical essays, Disquieting: Essays on Silence, published by Book*hug in spring of 2019. The Melancholia of Class, her second collection, is forthcoming in 2021 by Repeater Books. Steady Diet of Nothing, a novella/memoir, is forthcoming from Four Way Books.