The Birthday Ceremony
~Cynthia Cruz

 

Seventeen rooms of long maroon

Tables, of endless

 

Raspberry cream cake,

Cheap California

 

Champagne, and stacks of magazines and childhood

Photographs

 

On the pale pink plush.

White as milk, and cold

 

As the hand of God,

That locked empire

 

With its slumber of ghosts, its dead

Engines. The uncanny

 

Always comes back. What white darkness: pearls,

Porcelain, and medicine.

 

The mansion of childhood

Is shattering.

 

A sentinel, I stand at the entrance

To the burning fortress.

 

 

Cynthia Cruz ‘s poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and others. Her first collection of poems, RUIN, was published by Alice James Book. Her second collection, The Glimmering Room, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton for the year 2010-2011.