Ruin

　　Reader, take heed: These are no ordinary poems about childhood. In a series of secular prayers, Cynthia Cruz alludes to a girlhood colored by abuse and a brother's death. A beautifully understated sense of menace and damage pervades this vivid, nonlinear tale.

"January"

A California of snow and the surprise

Of illness. I throned myself in the white

Noise of its silence and watched as the world

Fell away. All the silver flickerings of possibility

Going out like the sound of horse hooves

Clicking into the distance. It is almost the end

Of the World. Anesthesia of medicine and me,

Beneath its warm bell of milk. My girlhood was

Microscopic: a locked window overlooking the

Sea. An atlas of the disaster: an un-lit hall and

A shift in the waves of the field. Blue bedside

Porcelain. Michelle, my little sister, silent as

A weed. I took all the things I loved and

Smashed them one by one.

　　Cynthia Cruz holds a BA from Mills College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and has received several residencies to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Isn't it Romantic: 100 Love Poems by Younger Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.