I sit on the soft pale plush
of the hotel room
counting the hours.
Eating mouthfuls
of sweet bright candy
warm pudding by the spoon.
Reading nothing.
Smoking for hours,
speaking in German
to Lenz,
in the white light
of the German city
on the water.
I’ve dropped down
into the wet weep
and abyss of everything.
I ever
asked for.
And now there is nothing
I want.
Where is the body
of my mother?
A child in cream
ballet leotard and thick
cotton tights. In the backyard
of the steel factory town,
in white wings
beneath the yellowing
sick yellowing of morning.
Her body
is still
in Völkingen,
glittering
with all the other
un-dead.
And I am
walking into that
glimmering
glitter.
Phosphor, and the glistening
of its soft white foam.
At night the silent
horses arrive
like the trace
of a child’s dream,
It is true I wanted to die
inside that room:
the silver tubes of ointment
Now stars of blood.
The thick infantile
cream of sleep
its exquisite and medicinal music
lumbering endlessly into me.
Velvet and dormant. A beautiful mass
of breathing animals
at the edge
leading me
into the emerald glimmer
of that far off field.
Origin is the goal. —Karl Kraus
Racing the sheer cliffs
and silvering
Pacific.
If I could just move through
to the other side.
In the hotel bathroom,
I can feel my heart
start. By the end
I am a child, again.
Quilted, in the intricate
patchwork of girlhood and father’s
black work boots.
Protection.
But from what?
And danger,
everywhere.
On the hotel plush
I eat red jam from glass jars
warm cream with my fingers.
In the morning
I eat penny candy
then spend what little is left
of the money.
Burning down the world
so I can enter into
its tremendous
blue flame.
Cynthia Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German Language and Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focuses on Hegel and madness. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Berlin, Germany.
Neil Rick is a gardener and photographer in Tennessee. He grows flowers and then photographs them, overlaying the photos but doing no post-production altering. His images have won multiple prizes at American Rose Society Meetings in Tennessee and Kentucky, including Best Novice at a national ARS meeting in 2019 and “King of Photography” at a 2022 show in Bowling Green, KY.
