DURAS (THE MUTE)
“Writing also means not speaking. Keeping silent.” M.D.,Writing.
MD is mute. She throws her voice into the text and there, her voice, resides. There, in the book, we hear her screams, we hear her weeping. But alone, in her giant white mansion, she speaks to no one. She paces, endlessly, the only sound, the sound of flies and death emanating from within the cracked walls.
DURAS (SICKNESS)
Alone in the white mansion, M.D. lives, alone. Nothing. No-thing. Just booze and books and old broke vases of long dead roses. She paces. She drinks the cold liquor. When she does, the world is made manifest. Booze is the hinge upon which the world breaks open.
DURAS (THE WORD)
The word, Duras, another word, not hers.
Donnadieu, her surname. Duras, the name of her father’s village.
She renames herself. Quiet death.
“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
Duras, Duras. The name becomes her.
DURAS (THE MYSTIC)
The absence Duras describes is the absence of the Thou, of the lover.
God is the Thou.
DURAS (THE MYSTIC)
God is in the bottle.
The word is made manifest when she drinks the sweet liquor from the bottle.
Magic.
Cynthia Cruz is the author of five collections of poems: How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, and Ruin. Her fifth collection of poems, Dregs, was published in September of 2018. In April an anthology of contemporary Latina poetry, Other Musics: New Latina Poetry, Cruz edited will be published. In addition, in April Disquieting:Essays on Silence, Cruz’s first collection of essays, will also be published. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. Twitter
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BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
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