Now I hear the good voices.

Go, they say, to the holy place,
The sick child dying in the barn.

This is the vocabulary of killing.

All of this waiting
For the world to begin.

Author Image

Cynthia Cruz’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and others. Her first collection of poems, Ruin, was published by Alice James Book, her second collection, The Glimmering Room, was published in 2012 by Four Way Books. Her third collection, Wunderkammer, is forthcoming in 2014. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Photo courtesy Greg J. Miller

Erica Wright
Erica Wright is the author of the poetry collections All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned and Instructions for Killing the Jackal. She is the poetry editor at Guernica magazine as well as an editorial board member of Alice James Books. Her latest novel is The Granite Moth: A Novel.