Don't Ask Me Where the Dream Went because It Never Spoke to Me Again

Cynthia Cruz

You are a car, you are
a hospital,

warm lights
at the edge

of a deathless
highway.

You are a truck
stop, a star.

You are water,
an engine

pulled out
from a car

and laid out
on a mountaintop

in a heatwave
in the middle of summer.

Compression, you are
death, benevolence

the blue of the moon
hovering over

the forest.
A child

fevered and loved
down to essence,

a silvery cream
like substance.

Rabbits and endless
land

a gun,
loaded.

You are a town
in the south

abandoned.
You are sweet

coma,
the godly

swamp
of overdose.

A boy on silver
motorbike

racing through
the locked

wooden closets
of his childhood.

You are a girl
in a yellow dress

walking through a field,
humming. You are

a strong god-like
medicine

administered
by the nurse’s sweet hand.

 

 

Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems including Dregs (2018). In spring of 2019, her first collection of essays, Disquieting:Essays on Silence, was published.