Originally from the Dominican Republic and a naturalized American citizen, Alba Cruz-Hacker straddles borders.  She has lived and traveled throughout North and Central America and the Caribbean.  She was awarded the 2007 UCR Poet's Laureate, the 2007 Tomas Rivera Endowment Poetry Selection, and has been previously nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Her work appears in The Caribbean Writer, Canadian Woman Studies, Spillway Review, DMQ Review, Pacific Review, and Miller's Pond, among others, and is forthcoming in the anthology Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Gary Young, and in the Hispanic volume of the American Encyclopedia of Ethnic Literature.

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Black slacks and a power-red top
face off all day
with this sage nylon housecoat.
Don’t ask me how I do it—
square heeled boot on one side,
bare foot on the other, but I feel
as though I’m straddling a chain link fence.

Perched on steel, I am a seesaw.
I plant one sole on a concrete slab
then lean to sift warm earth with naked toes.
Like a centaur or a mermaid, I live the blessed curse
of dual breeds: half-woman, half-mother,
shapeshifter, Janus-faced.
Don’t ask me to explain the weight
of pages, blank and expectant, on one hand,
and the heavy tolls
of this eager full house, on the other.

These lin
s, they’re warm
or cool against my flesh,
depending on what is and was
or what might come:
the mountain of dirty laundry
on my bedroom floor, the dripping nose
and spiking heat on my son’s small forehead last night.
So today my eyes burn as if Clorox
were sprayed on them. Yet I ignore
the dirt-caked jeans, click
the TV screen away from the body count
mounting like driftwood on far away sands,
and instead choose to view “24”
and visualize the mushroom cloud
that might swallow it all one day.

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