Cynthia Cruz

Self Portrait with Face Covered in Tiny White Diamonds

I wrote the Book
Of the End,

Charting its movements
Like a weather.

I listened to its white
Annihilating music,

And was lowered slowly down,
Into the sickly sweet

Specter of childhood,
Its thick white cream

Of regret. The black
Boat of death, just a dot,

Moving slowly
Toward the shore.

Read "Self Portrait with Face Covered in Tiny White Diamonds" and "Self Portrait: Lake Constance" by Cynthia Cruz in the print edition of The Arkansas International 5.

Cynthia Cruz is the author of How the End Begins (Four Way, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way, 2012), and Ruin (Alice James, 2006). Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, will be published in the fall of 2018 along with a collection of essays on silence and marginalization, Notes Toward a New Language (BookThug). The editor of an anthology of Latina poetry, Other Musics, which is forthcoming in 2019, Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University.