Five Poems
Letisia Cruz
To Still a River
Along the creek
we discover that water flows,
as if for the first time. That fish have gills.
That hooks wound. Hold on,
you say. Or am I the one
looking for rocks to cling to?
What does it matter—
to want the sky to be as it once was,
to want the earth to hold still.
A limpkin soars
gracelessly onto a branch
and my legs stir. I run inside,
shuffle furniture from room to room.
Pack and unpack boxes until my arms fail.
Hold on,
I say. Until you can no longer.
Until our hands slip
and life flows away from me
as if for the first time.
Lost Swamp Trail
Our house has suffered
more than one abandonment—
a claim lien for overgrown grass,
neglect, sustained chaos,
wood rot.
We walk for the first time in weeks
and my legs have become waterlogged.
My brain wanders back to the house
where sinks need replacing
and petunias threaten to overtake walls.
It occurs to me that one day
the thing I love most
will be a collapsed wall.
You say look,
as an osprey takes flight.
I wonder if you will love me
when my arms are a hardwood forest.
We circle another mile (not lost,
just disoriented) and everything
keeps failing—
my eyes, my mouth, my legs.
A White Ibis smiles unperturbed
surrounded by pickerelweed.
Her house has suffered
more than one abandonment
too. She blinks repeatedly
the way birds do
with the understanding
that decay is inevitable.
Another Fork in the Marsh
Spring was your body buzzing.
Smoke circle prayers
and unmanifested rivers.
When rain poured
every flower stilled.
You cast then—
but not so far downstream
that you couldn’t see the bait.
Of course, nothing bit.
At least a dozen years passed
before you understood why.
History Precedes the Void
We never start clean,
my girl,
just over.
Most mornings
it is easier to remember
what’s fluid
is your ability to collapse,
your voice
discovering its own limits.
Maybe violence
was the purest form of expression,
once. Tomorrow
we start over.
How to Garden
Lift a stone
and uncover a leaf.
Lift a leaf
and uncover wet earth.
Dig your hands into the earth
and uncover roots.
(repeat)
About the Author
Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is the author of Migrations & Other Exiles, which won the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry and The Lost Girls Book of Divination. She is the recipient of a 2022 artist grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance and was selected as a 2022 Dali Dozen Emerging Artist for her project Rituales: An Exploration of Faith in the Caribbean. Her writing and artwork have appeared in [PANK], Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, Saw Palm, Third Coast, Duende, Moko, 300 Days of Sun and Black Fox Literary Magazine, among others. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
