Hunger

Letisia Cruz

Paco de Lucia’s guitar is the Monarch migration—a butterfly in my mouth,silent cross offerings.We stand at the altar praying. You saythe opposite of loneliness is.You say the rumors are.And milkweed is nearly vanished.We stand at the crosswalk waiting.Cars soar by and the skies swell.You say you smell rain and wereach out our hands.

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Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is the author of Bigwig’s Illustrated Guide To Birds (Tolsun Books, 2024), written and illustrated from the perspective of her cat, Bigwig Smallfry. Her collection Migrations & Other Exiles was selected by Dzvinia Orlowsky as the winner of the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry and published by Lost Horse Press in 2023. Her first book, The Lost Girls Book of Divination, an illustrated narrative poem loosely inspired by the Tarot’s Major Arcana, was published by Tolsun Books in 2018. 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 Saint Petersburg, Florida with her partner, their three cats, and several dozen plants.

Scio, Oregon

Winner of the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2022
Selected by Final Judge Dzvinia Orlowsky

"With a Bachelardian dreaminess and a poetic language that is both sensuous and incisive, Migrations and Other Exiles questions the contradictory nature of human love. Right from the opening poem, 'Promise,' the speaker attempts to shape an unidentified other into a graceful swan-like survivor only to renege: 'I carved her neck long/so that when the rains came / she might hold it above /water. You will not drown, / I promised her. But then her/ mouth and eyes filled and I/let them.' What begins with hope, complex and lucent—a flight of spirit—often ends with the rarity or inability to fly: 'Remember that one time / we flew? Like we were birds/ with thrift-store wings.' Other times, it’s the literal, hard-hitting world of self-harming burns and gunshots that violate the boundaries of self. Precise and elegant, redemptive in its musicality and stunning imagery, Migrations and Other Exiles is a remarkable, stand-out, collection."
—Dzvinia Orlowsky, Final Judge for the Idaho Prize 2022

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