Two Poems by Cynthia Cruz

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CORRESPONDENCE

Drowsed in crimson and sun bleached
flowers, in bright pink glitter, black and silver
swimsuit. Glistening cream buckles,
butter leather Mercedes back seat.
In the montage-collage of myriad
experiences: the tiny chapel in Prague
and opaque Warsaw skyline, the pool
at the roof of the Intercontinental,
I pasted you back
into the pretty discotheque-
like diorama I had been working on.
One hand on my Fiskar scissors,
another on the precious blue- paste,
or child-style, Uhu, what was left
from the boxes I brought back
from my brother’s enormous flat
in the former East, Berlin.
And the plastic-wrapped
EP records I’d kept
from that strange phase of when.
Athletic, I have always been
a strange, always hungry, animal.
Sleeping in the back seats of parked sedans
and, speaking by not, by pasting
one image next to the other,
a slide show, a montage of
bright photographs doing the work
that words cannot.

*

FRAGMENT

What happens in that moment,
that flash of phosphorescence.

Like sleep, when light’s
semblance enters.

The way a dream
enters the sleeve of the body.

I am trying
to archive this moment.

Gather, collect and keep
every disparate thing
that lives within it.

But each time
I move near

the elements,
and then the trace
vanishes.

Who are you.

And what language.

What body, and what
strange series of syllables

is that
speaking through you.