a poem by rachelle cruz

Imelda is an electrified snail


Imelda Snail sips glucose from a mug fireworking Reno, The Biggest Little City on Earth!!!  Her shell is electrically taped and hooked up to an external grid lined with moss and lines of coke. Scientists proclaim her electrical output while squeezing their toes in the mud bath beside her. They even replace the gel masks in the freezer.  She can produce 7.45 microwatts by the hour, while charging and reserving her power. No need to lift an antenna.  Cockroaches no longer squirm to compete.




Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California.  She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press,2012).  Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in As/Us, New California Writing 2013 (Heyday Books), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Yellow Medicine Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Lit Pub, The Bakery, Stone Highway, The Collagist, Bone Bouquet, PANK Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Splinter Generation, KCET's Departures Series, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others. She hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour on Blog Talk Radio, and is the Podcast Editor at The Collagist.  She is a recent recipient of the Manuel G. Flores Scholarship from PAWA (Philippine American Writers and Arists, Inc).  An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives, writes and teaches in Southern California.

a poem by rachelle cruz

What My Father Read


  Hayward, California


Without reason, he collected
books and didn't read them.
But his daughter did.  She read
about falling angels, the lashings
on a girl's back, crime driven
by passion, a yellow shirt
stained with black tea, the men
who lived like brothers
on Cannery Row.  Alice tumbling
down a rabbit hole,
King Solomon choosing between
feuding mothers and deciding
to split the child in half,
the incantation of Genesis,
Joseph and his journey of dreams.

Her father washed his hands
exactly five times before dinner,
plucking pinchfuls of rice from
the family plate with his fingers.
After dinner, he scrubbed his mouth
with a lemon, did exactly three
loads of dirty laundry, ignoring
the daughter's stained underwear
from a first year on her cycle,
the grass-stained jeans which meant
she was still a girl.  The father
scrubbed Palmolive on his fingertips
and in the darkening dusk, hung
the wet clothes on a cherry tree,
the ants crawling on the shiny
bark, latching on.

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California.  She is the author of the chapbook, Self-Portrait as Rumor and Blood (Dancing Girl Press, 2012).  Her work has appeared in Muzzle Magazine, Splinter Generation, KCET's Departures Series, Inlandia: A Literary Journey, among others.  She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio.  An Emerging Voices Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a VONA writer, she lives and writes in Riverside, California.  

two poems by rachelle cruz

Scratching Jesus


It began with an innocent nick
from the crown of thorns.
Then our fingernails
brimmed with blue paint
and his invisible left eye
laid broken in my hand.
In my parents' bedroom,
the statue stood between
two mirrors over false
wooden drawers,
his hands heavy with air.
Every day, after school,
a scratch from his callused
feet, a comb of fingers
over the grooves of his hair.
My sister and I couldn't
explain the rainbows
of archeological dust
on our cheeks.
Even after our mother spanked us,
(the Slipper or the Belt?)
we swiped tiny curls
from the sacred heart, burning.
We wanted to dig for the fire
that made the heart beat.
Our hands open to the beauty
of ruin.







After Sylvia Sukop’s I forget myself (I forget you)


Walking to the office, a man forgets his leather
watch, his valise and climbs inside a billboard,
stapled with night sky and stars. He is tired
of losing. The stars are lined up, ready for
their labor of dark, aching. There’s no moon
here to guide them, some romantic notion.
They’ve punched their gas, their glint like nails
through a tin lightbox. Outside, the day is hotter,
brighter, and the man notices his hands
for the first time. His body unknotting from
the concrete, then nothing, nothing. Air.




Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California (in the Bay Area). She has taught creative writing, poetry and performance to young people in New York City, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio. An Emerging Voices Fellow and a Kundiman Fellow, she is working towards her first collection of poems. Please check out her blog here.