welcome to the blue

Cintia Santana

hour, welcome to the final
destination, the body’s home
address, there are rooms here
you will never want to know
but now you know: glass–
paned and built in shade of
shipyard, someone else at the
prow, oh god you say, oh god,
by which you mean your
mother’s name, dial it down
now, yes, you hear me, dial it
down; the wattage of the world
turned up, all knives in sharp
relief; time and the turning of
the page, how once you were
attached to her and now, now
this, the plating of the head;
red barn is being razed; hard
to find fresh flowers on a grave
—sweeping, so much sweeping—
east house is down.


Cintia Santana teaches translation, fiction and poetry workshops in Spanish at Stanford University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Linebreak, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, RHINO, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. C.D. Wright selected Santana's poem, “Qasida of Grief,” as the winner of The Sycamore Review’s 2013 Wabash Poetry Prize.

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