SELF PORTRAIT: POLAROID
Our very own Pharmacopoia blonde
In blue powder eye shadow, or
Luminous nurse of the locked ward,
This sweet, licked delirium. Of teeth,
Dirt, and seed. Alone, in my dream
Room, listening careful
For the second coming.
ARE THEN SEEN AND PURSUED
Cords of voices are unspooling inside my head.
White-gloved as beekeepers, three men arrive
Removing the pleat of my body.
I dreamed the earth burned down, a bleating
Lamb hungering at the edge, like a dark thought, repeating,
If I can trace the continent of this angel
The string will surely drag me back.
SELF PORTRAIT IN PORCELAIN TUB
After the medicine of magazines and television, after
The gauze is taken off:
Bewildering mishap,
My long dirty blonde hair pulled back,
And broken in the fevering light
Of morning.
No beauty in this
Dust-marred diorama.
Slide after slide displays
Goya’s black painting
Of Saturn devouring
His own children.
Dirt, seed, silver
Scintilla. The music
Box of death
Is inside me:
And the blank moon,
Moving like a lost god over me.
Cynthia Cruz’s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and others. Her first collection of poems, RUIN, was published by Alice James Book and her second collection, The Glimmering Room, was published by Four Way Books in the fall of 2012. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives
in Brooklyn, New York.
