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apocalyptic lyric

a line break is a kind of lie my friend says

yet still he writes

an encore over and over the lyric

a border wall topped by concertina wire

improbably survives

as does the sound of honeybees

and monarchy

as did the man on the Golden Gate who leapt

after he fed the parking meter

Copyright © 2022 by Cintia Santana. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 14, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Cintia Santana — Photo Credit: Rewa Bush

Cintia Santana is a Latinx poet and interdisciplinary artist living in the Bay Area on unceded Muwekma Ohlone territory. The recipient of fellowships from Djerassi and CantoMundo, she is the author of The Disordered Alphabet, forthcoming in 2023 from Four Way Books. She teaches fiction and poetry workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation courses at Stanford University.

About Cintia Santana

Themes

About this Poem

“For some time, I’ve wondered how and why the lyric continues to survive in a world of unremitting violence. In a workshop led by Brian Teare, I gathered seeds scattered in my notebooks over the years: a comment made by my friend, the poet Brian Cochran; an encounter with the word ‘concertina’; a moment of disbelief while tuning in to The Crown; and the news, the news, the news. The oldest seed, hardly dormant, was an interview I’d heard around 2008, with a man who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and survived. The poem insists on a syntax both indefinite and, I hope, unpredictable.”
—Cintia Santana

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