the louderARTS Project

Cynthia Cruz

Cynthia Cruz has been published in the Paris Review, Boston Review, Grand Street, AGNI, the Colorado Review, Chelsea, and others and her work is anthologized in Isn’t it Romantic? 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets and the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. Her teaching experience includes teaching creative writing and literature at Sarah Lawrence College and Queens College and she has brought writing workshops to homeless shelters, psychiatric hospitals, orphans in the West Bank, children in the New York City Public Schools, and high risk high school students.

Self Portrait in Horse Hair Wig

In the Next Life in an absinthe slip

Of ribbons, water-silk coat, glass seeds

Like water at the throat, I’ll be adored

By a kneeling army of boys.

In a blue-blood summer, you’ll be criminal:

Clyde-like, dark-eyed and timid.

Your face will be of brilliant countenance.

There will be no dour consequence to our secret

Meeting. In the evening, we will be astonishing

As ever in perfect dress, minds spinning

With whirlwind of the world’s questions.

In a room of hard-pasted porcelain and water-clocks,

You’ll press your slender fingers at the hinge,

Discover a hidden winter trapped in a snuffbox.

© Cynthia Cruz

Previoulsy published in The Paris Review and anthologized in Isnt it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets (Verse Press)

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