Deathscape Lullaby

Cynthia Cruz

Broken crimson
Mercedes sedan.
Cotton-wood, milk-weed.
The taste of cold metal
and the repetition of three AM
sirening ambulance rides.
Yellow cream, three-tiered
birthday cake.
Cherry lip balm.
Pale blue satin shorts
and matching jacket
with my name embroidered
in hot pink, Cindy.
Poochie, my childhood
beagle, whimpering inside
the locked rooms
of night. A field of black and white
dappled ponies. Blinding,
the silence.
An orange plastic
lighter, and red
gas station
canister
of kerosene.

“With this poem I wanted to convey trauma, which is to say, I wanted to convey the way in which memory, when it is intercepted by trauma (and shock), fractures. To paraphrase Freud, when we encounter trauma it results in shock because the traumatic event is too much for the psyche; the trauma is repressed in the unconscious. What we have, then, after a trauma, are the fragments of memory which appear, most usually, as images. This is not unlike the trace of a dream we encounter when we awaken: most of the dream memory is gone when we wake, all we have left are a few images or even, at times, just the affect without any images; a visceral sense untranslatable into image or language. In essence, this is what I was aiming for with this poem.”

—Cynthia Cruz

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Friends came to our house for a holiday social.  What is the chance that circumstance has brought the twelve of us together?  There is no calculating of probability, that our paths would cross,- and yet it happened.  Our ancestors called it fate.  Presences in a room, telling stories, memories of occasions of past employment that shaped our lives, helping to make us the persons that we have come to be are becoming.

The meaning of life is one of infinite possibility.  May we continue to take our chance(s).