In This Light the Junk Undergoes a Transfiguration; It Shines

In the interview recorded the night before
His final death, he said he was almost adjacent

To being human. In the basement apartment
My mother tells me

On the long distance telephone
My body is slowly filling with light.

I don’t believe I have ever
Told you that I never

Look at my own face
In the mirror.

The rain outside is starling. It is
The color of the silver

Fur of animal the woman wears
In the story where she becomes

The animal. Last night’s dream
Is entering my body again,

Retroactive like the dream
Between the end and the beginning

Of history, which has yet
To begin. The world, still in its pre-historic

Silver-dawn atmosphere.
In the broken glass of the last

Atmosphere someone finally
Calls out my name. I am

Finally becoming
What I was meant

To become.
Disintegrating what’s left

Of the blonde girl I thought
I was. In the clinic,

Deniz is becoming
Thin from the leukemia. Hello,

He says, Hello.
The last time I saw him,

His delicate and otherworldly
Black and white drawings

Of houses on fire
Taped with Scotch Tape

To the walls
Of his locked bedroom.

Wandering the long locked halls
A child locked inside the body

Of a man locked inside the body
Of a beautiful and lonely child.

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“With this poem, I was thinking of repetition and how it manifests in capitalism’s structure of infinite repetition, but also how repetition brings about novelty. I’d been reading a lot of Liam Rector’s work and Brecht’s, both of whose work utilizes repetition, critiques capitalist society, and brings about something new in its poetics. All of this was going through my mind while I was writing and revising this poem.”
—Cynthia Cruz