Lamb
After Marni Ludwig
Always, there is the wish to vanish.
And the problem of not enough.
Then, death as the means of reversal.
Sorrow can’t be located,
Only traced to a childhood
Gesture enacting the night
Of the world. I told you
Loss can draw a secret
To its birth. But I was blonde
And I was lying.
Clinic
The star, reversed,
Means no hope.
All promise offered
Can only be false.
The answer to the question,
A shining list of symptoms.
A tremendous red ribbon
Coming down from the sun.
This ecstatic suspension
Between two worlds.
Untitled
Songbird
In the city garden
Sounding at night.
Singing something
No one understands
But nonetheless
Hums along:
Because the world is gone.
The world is gone.
Untitled
Death on the line,
Murmuring its obscene
Numbers.
We never had any money,
Always selling something
To eat something
Or another. Ho Hos or a cola.
Cold coffee and American cigarettes.
Sitting outside the food store,
Counting numbers: dollars,
Pennies, nickels, quarters.
Money whispers.
It has nothing
But death
On its mind.
ALL OF US OR NONE
After Brecht
And we made a tunnel
Through the darkening
Darkness. You and me
And all the others.
The blackening
Gelatinous junk
Funnelling something
That is nothing
Coating over
Everything.
Nothing left
But this invisible.
Supreme static
Radio coming in
Through the breaking
Rooms of glass
Windows. F16s
In the English-language
Dropping smouldering
Leaflets, warning
Of the coming—
We were
Hungering
For something,
Reduced
To nothing.
Mere animal.
Crawling
In the interstice
In the in-between
Interstice between
Worlds.
Swimming
In the warning
Of what was once
America.
I was so filled up
With its excess, its
Nothingness
There was nothing
Transposed, then
Transformed into quickening
Melody, something
Repetitive and speculative
Like this: We were
So filled up with the nothing
There was nothing
But leaving
Left. Moving from
One city to another
Moving through
One world
Into another. One
Of us, and
All of us
And always
More of us.
It is only those
Who have nothing
Who can save
Those who have
Nothing.
Everything or nothing,
All of us or none.
We were poor when we were
Born and we’ll be born
Again, when we’re
Born transformed
As the next
Form. Human
Desire for nothing.
Human drive
To follow that desire
Tethered to nothing.
Just only tethered to
One another.
And as we die
Through the darkness
Moving our bodies
Through the blinding
Tunnels under what’s left
Of what was America—
You and me
And all of the others.
Everything
Or nothing.
All of us
Or none.
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.
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Reprinted with permission from Sweet Repetition by Cynthia Cruz, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.