"In This Light the Junk Undergoes a Transfiguration; It Shines" by Cynthia Cruz

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October 31, 2024 
 

In This Light the Junk Undergoes a Transfiguration; It Shines

Cynthia Cruz

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.

Copyright © 2024 by Cynthia Cruz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 31, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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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

Cynthia Cruz
Cynthia Cruz is a novelist and the author of eight poetry collections, including Back to the Woods (Four Way Books, 2024) and Hotel Oblivion (Four Way Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and Princeton University, Cruz lives in Berlin.

Back to the Woods (Four Way Books, 2024)
Back to the Woods
(Four Way Books, 2024)

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Thanks to Sarah Gambito, author of Loves You (Persea Books, 2019), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Gambito’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.
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