* — January 16, 2020
Cynthia Cruz — Little America

Girlhood, locked inside a wire box.
At thirteen, she was mute.
The LA doctors watched
Truffaut’s Wild Child for clues
On how to cure the feral girl.
Reporters and neighbors warmed
To the story, camped outside the girl’s home,
Stood on the dead, brown lawn.
Then, went. Pulled the string marked, Next.

Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 3. View full issue & more.
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Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems: How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, and Ruin. Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, was published in September of 2018. Her sixth, Guidebooks for the Dead, is forthcoming in spring of 2020 by Four Way Books. Steady Diet of Nothing, her first novella, is also forthcoming from Four Way Books. Disquieting: Essays on Silence, a collection of critical essays, was published by Book*hug in spring of 2019 and her second collection of critical essays, The Melancholia of Class, is forthcoming from Repeater Books in 2021. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University.