Brenda Cárdenas
Inverse
(after Amy Cropper’s Inverse, painted ash and hawthorn, 2011, Lyndon Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, WI, and Ana Mendieta’s Body Tracks, paintings, 1982)
Cropper stripped the Hawthorne
of her skin, excised
arms, painted war
on her flayed torso
until she blazed--a squat flame
igniting weeds, yellow
leaves, even the snow mounting
her lap. All year long,
naked boughs glistened
like a flock of bloody wings.
But when May pushes green
through cracked lips,
blossoms from a torch
of lacquered limbs, I wait
for Ana Mendieta to step
out of the knotted wood,
trunk simmering, arms raised
in the V of free-
fall to our knees, broken
stems regenerating.
Spiral Unwound from the Inside Out
(after María Magdalena Campos de Pons’ Constellation, instant color prints, 2004)
When she whirls against time,
Anansi climbs her thatch to the sky,
traps crow talk in his weave.
Snagged twists, tangled kinks
grow their own feet,
arms and legs akimbo.
Her crown of serpents
uncoiling, questions stretch
across pink sand,
snap back to lasso twigs,
rinds, straw binds her nest--
a home fleeting as dream.
Black egg waits in a branch
to hatch--feed and fly or starve,
fall into open mouths.
Braids scream like sprung
whips, barbed wire, frayed
ropes flung and dangling
J-hooks, bound loops swung.
Whose eyes appear in clouds
floating on the skin of water?
River runs low, step its stones.
Follow the trail inked thick
as a runaway dreadlock.
You may carry this knot
as blood clot or embryo.
Either way, she’ll break free.
Come close: hive vibrating
with sweet bees, mesh
of thorns, cyclone.
Loaded ship lost in the curl
of whitecaps, crew hurls
its cargo into a howling sea.
Yemayá’s winds lift you
from the waves by your tresses,
aerial roots rising in a lilac sky
until they sever the snarl at its
neck. Hang its gnarled head
like a peach pit, a talisman.
One day you’ll tie the banks of re-
member together. She’s tossed
you the cord. Hold tight.
Fading sun, island afloat
in a milky sea. She releases
her mother’s hand, drifts away.
You keep, secret as dark
stars or distant planets re-
turning again to their origin.
Chiral Formation
(after Roy Staab’s July 2012 installation on Little Lake, Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee, WI)
Buckthorn saplings curve
into hoops, linking boughs.
Ring around the rosy.
Four staked crowns etch
surface. Barbed shiver.
Pocket full of hands.
What do you net
in the intersect
when you walk on water?
A forest, my haunted face
crowing, cumulous algae?
Our ashes, child slim as a reed?
Where does a lemniscate drift,
chiral twin wander
when the sun falls down?
****
Down falls sun
wander in chiral
drift scate where
reed child our
cumulous crowing
haunt my forest.
Walk you
intersect
Do what?
Full pock
barbed face
etch own ake
rosy round ing
ink oops
pling.
--
Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Boomerang (Bilingual Review 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). She also coedited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (2001). Cárdenas’ poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Latina/o Poetics, The Golden Shovel Anthology, City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latino/a Writing, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Pilgrimage, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and RATTLE, among 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 in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.