Cynthia Cruz

The Cinema Room

Horse, master, boy--
How did God get
Back into you?

Bad dream, you
Collapse into me. Germ
Warfare flashback. Eel black

The eyes: an asylum window. Glass
And liquid as child's final
Fever. And the city will burn.

Bad blood, come to me.
Sirens at dawn,
A metal wing burns in the desert.

Train ride at midnight, let us
Live there. Red empire
Of your talismanic mind,

Acropolis of underwater plants,
Ermine and honeyed lace.
Brave saint of nosebleeds,

Little brother, take me.
The world will surge,
And the moon

Pull its yellow ocean back.
Machine-gun sonata, we never
Signed up for this.

Stroke the bright piston
Of the machinery, fold your secret
Into me.

Each frame kills the one
Before it. Since
When did death

Arrive in a child's
Horse-drawn carriage,
Its eye a blink in the center of this?

My life was not
Wasted: you waited
For me.

---

Cynthia Cruz was born in Germany and raised in California. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Grand Street, AGNI, Chelsea, Pleiades, the New Orleans Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Black Warrior Review and others, and are anthologized in Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. Alice James Books will publish her first book, Ruin, in the fall of 2006. contents | next