"Riding" by Cynthia Cruz

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend July 29, 2019   Riding   Cynthia Cruz

I am better when I am dead or when I am dreaming. Having finally entered the carboned pistons of your machinery. You, as a boy, racing through the warm excess of night's soft decline. When I rise I kerosene my fingers place my hands flat on its weeping branches. The music is smashed Wurlitzer, trashed and drug up from a landfill in Tazewell. Earth mixed with quell and the bright peal of a mangled glockenspiel. In the winter hills of summer, a sick foal in the barn, and an old farmhouse with all its clocks pulled out. Its cold room filling miraculously with the slow sediment of forget.            Copyright © 2019 Cynthia Cruz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About This Poem   "The poem, 'Riding,' is from the manuscript I am currently completing. It occurred to me that my work had veered away from my origins: the place where I come from, the objects and landscape of that place (working class, rural), and all that make me who I am. In this manuscript, currently titled Back to the Woods, I am returning to that place, whether that be a real or imagined rendition of it. In this way, the poems in this collection,'Riding' included, are a return, in a sense, to my first two collections, Ruin and The Glimmering Room, but a return after many years. A return to my origins but a return with the vast sorrow of having turned my back on my origins. At the same time, this 'return back' is a kind of triumphant homecoming." —Cynthia Cruz   Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems, including Guidebooks for the Dead, forthcoming in 2020 from Four Way Books. She teaches at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Poetry by Cruz   Dregs (Four Way Books, 2018) "I Cannot Be Quiet an Hour" by Mary Ruefle "Jeju Island" by E. J. Koh "A Memory" by Saeed Jones July Guest Editor: Paul Guest   Thanks to Paul Guest, author of Because Everything Is Terrible (Diode Editions, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Guest about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038