The Game is over

This is the second underworld
My nurse whispers,
Dragging me down further.

Pretty Harvard hipsters
At the Casablanca.

Bloomingdales and Silver Hills, burning down
Every wing.

Another brother’s suicide, another
Cigarette left lit while sleeping.

Staggering through a lifetime
Of hospitals.

The glass doors swing open.
But where, may I ask,

Have they buried
My beautiful children?

Originally published in Bat City Review Issue 8

Cynthia Cruz is the author of six collections of poems: Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books, 2020), Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018), How the End Begins (Four Way Books, 2016), Wunderkammer (Four Way Books, 2014), The Glimmering Room (Four Way Books, 2012) and Ruin (Alice James Books, 2006). She is also the editor of Other Musics, an anthology of contemporary Latina poetry (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays exploring the concept of silence as a form of resistance, was published by Book*hug in the spring of 2019. The Melancholia of Class, her second collection of critical essays, an exploration of melancholia and the working class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021. Cruz co-edits the multi-disciplinary online journal, Schlag Magazine.

Cruz earned an MA in German Language and Literature from Rutgers University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the European Graduate School where her area of research is psychoanalysis and philosophy. Cruz teaches at the City University of New York and in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. She is also a mentor in the Low Residency MFA Writing Program at IAIA and a visiting writer in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.