Poem of the Week: Brenda Cárdenas

                 

Nexus

(after Ana Mendieta's Silueta series, earth-body works, 1973-80)

This body always compost--

hair a plot of thin green stems

snowing a shroud of petals,

skin mud-sucked to bark,

trunk only timber isthmusing

river banks, each finger

a dirty uprooting.

How many stones did I have

to swallow before my legs

believed their own weight?

Dropped into silhouette

of thigh and hip, a ridge

of ossicles crushed to fine

white whispers. Offering Cuilapán

their orphaned pleas, one

twin lingers outside the nave, one

cloistered in a vaulted niche,

its ledge of red roses edging

her blood-soaked robes.

Meat, bone-a deer's skitter

and bolt from the arrow,

an iguana's severed tail, spiny tracks.

They say we dig our own graves.

I have laid me down

in a Yagul tomb, outlined

our island arms with twig, rock,

blossom, mud. Our pulse with fire,

glass and blood. I've raised

myself in the earth's beds, left

this map, this exiled breath.

-Brenda Cárdenas

Used by permission.

*An earlier version of this poem was published in Cuadernos de ALDEEU, Fall, 2013 and as part of Mind the Gap, a portfolio of poem-print translations, Eds. Tim Abel and Sara Parr, 2013*

Brenda Cárdenas has authored Boomerang and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. She also co-edited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mind the Gap: A Portfolio of Poem-Print Translations, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in Chicago's Urban Wilderness, The Golden Shovel Anthology: Honoring the Continuing Legacy and Influence of Gwendolyn Brooks, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, Pilgrimage, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. She has given readings widely, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Tempe Center for the Arts, Brooklyn College, The Milwaukee Repertory Theater, the Chazen Museum of Art, and the Bryant Park Reading Room. An Associate Professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-2012. Brenda co-created and co-taught the PINTURA : PALABRA workshop at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

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