Cybele Zufolo

Cybele Zufolo is a graduate of Columbia University Teachers College with a Masters Degree in English, and a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Currently, she teaches at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Cybele was an Adjunct Instructor of Literature and Poetry at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College since 2006, and the New York Institute of Technology since 2007.

Cybele authored Ocean Sounds in New York: Poetry and Non-Fiction Prose on Dance, Family, Love, Identity and Performance. She’s a former dancer with the New York City Ballet where she danced for seven years growing up, and also danced in Japan and in off-Broadway plays. Her poetry has appeared in Out of Our Poetry Magazine, Passages on the Lake, Sparkle and Blink, BMCC Inquirer, and Sacred Grounds. Cybele has also acted in films, television, commercials and voice-overs.

She is the founder and curator of Word Performances reading series, and performs original work based on her life.

Poem

INCONGRUENCY
For New York City

Envelopes and old letters spiral a double helix
Your face floats past my window
Unhinging of time and meaning
Sheets of metal to sleep on

And so sleep will bring you back
This is a deafening procedure
Severing jagged landscape of day into night
A brick wall to project my life scenes in spray paint

Urban grey buildings hide their meaning
Like a tea pot bubbling too long to scream
The grafting of a cryptic existence
Amid roaring zooms and blinding lights

Your smoke finds me in the dead of night
Singes beneath black silk that I’m wearing
To the sly smirk on my lips
Past the neon air and bleak density

The rain is glass that cuts clean and smooth upon these streets
Filling a reservoir for hydraulic power
My running grows numb to a pulsating buzz

Into an unacknowledged place
Where gravity betrays us

Copyright © 2022 by Cybele Zufolo. This poem originally appeared in MiGoZine Spring 2020. Used with permission of the author.