Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration: Brenda Cárdenas

On the Coast in Pedasi

by Brenda Cárdenas

 

Beached boats litter coves,

            sails sprawled like abandoned skirts

of lovers asleep on the sand.

            The empty zocalo simmers—

a secret waiting 

            to be whispered,

Café Tiesto’s shutters and doors

            anchored open to release

its brick oven heat. Through

            a streaked windshield,

you watch a woman sweep

            the dusty veranda,

wipe tables spruced   

            with buds drooping

into an afternoon still

            as a breath held.

 

If you exhale now, a tornado

of bees

           will careen

around the corner,       swarm

the plaza,       blackening its sky.

            The woman will drift

inside,    gently latch shutters   

             as the funnel cloud

                        drones      

                through town,    busy

                with the work

of finding home.     Once the horizon

          has swallowed all of them,

you will part your lips,

          release the locks,

                      exit cover.  Watch

your step.     Every migration

bears its fallen,

          those that drop

                     to the dirt.

Across the plaza, the woman will push

            the door    open          

hum as she sweeps.

 

 Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009) and the chapbooks Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison (2011) and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (2005), as well as a co-editor of Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuvten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (2001). Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Latina/o Poetics: The Art of Poetry, The Golden Shovel Anthology, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Pilgrimage, RATTLE, and others. Cárdenas served as the Milwaukee Poet Laureate from 2010-2012, and in 2014, the Library of Congress recorded a reading of her work for their Spotlight on U. S. Hispanic Writers. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "On the Coast of Pedasi" was previously published in Verse Wisconsin. Issue 109. Summer, 2012 and in Cave Canem Anthology XIII: Poems 2010-2011, Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2015. 

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“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles.

 

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles.

Comments

[Maureen]

Beautiful poem.