Post-apocalyptic Poetry

How the End Begins by Cynthia Cruz

Soon the ambassadors from the Netherworld
Will begin

Their jet-like descent. Death,
Disguised inside me, already,

As sleaze.
Grime and her magnificent seed. Brother Rainer

Clutching his Bible, hallucinating helicopters.
Brother Rainer, child-like and wrecked.

Infamy, and the cosmology of chronic
Raveling and unraveling. Or,

Displaced insanity. Dirty Cindy, little
Glitter of her father’s

Spit: invisible, androgynous, a fragment of
His, found at the bottom of his dream chest.

Draped in my black cape of smut glue and
Subterranean, they mistake me for

A man in drag in my nasty
Boots. Why just look: a manifestation

Of stars. Or, appoint me hustler of
Brutal Rainer and his kinky noir

Scheme: me, at thirteen, on the beach
In a candy-striped bikini.

In time or out of time,
Glamorine.

Groom of the Underworld, please
Come with me

To the discotheque at the end
Of the world. Piss-

Elegant at the halfway
House for the trashed and gone galore.

Meet me in the love-
Burned orchard

Where the beautiful doomed
Meet at last.

~ from The Glimmering Room

Oof. Powerful.