Trace

Brenda Cardenas

Description

Through image-rich poems regarding migration, transcultural identity, loss, connection, dream, and aging—some translingual, some ekphrastic responses to ephemeral and surreal works of art—Brenda Cárdenas’ Trace explores conditions of displacement, liminality, and mutability. These poems transgress illusory borders between lands, languages, humans and the rest of the natural world, waking and dreaming, and the living and the dead as they unearth traces of experience that shape and haunt us, traces we leave behind for others to encounter. Although elegy resurfaces throughout this collection as does a poetics of social consciousness, Cárdenas also embraces moments of levity, story, and an effervescent internal music that balance her steps through fraught yet bewitching terrain.

Sujets

• Aging
• Chicana (automovilismo)
• América
• Ageing
• Ephemeral
• Multilingualism
• Hispanic and Latino Americans
• Transcultural
• Earthworks
• Code-switching
• Immutable object
• Hispanic
• Loss
• Mythology
• Poetry
• Places
• Ecology
• Mexico-Américains
• Animals
• Latina
• American
• Grief
• Earthwork
• Body
• Latino
• Myth
• Place
• Elegy
• Migration
• Alternance de code linguistique
• Dream
• Death

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781636280943
• Langue: English

Extrait

Trace
Copyright © 2023 by Brenda Cárdenas
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book design by Mark E. Cull. Layout assistance by Cid Galicia.
Cover art by Roberto Harrison
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cárdenas, Brenda, author.
Title: Trace: poems / Brenda Cárdenas.
Description: First Edition. | Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022044714 (print) | LCCN 2022044715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280936 (paperback) | ISBN 9781636280943 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3603.A7345 T73 2023 (print) | LCC PS3603.A7345 (ebook) | DDC 811/.6—dc23/eng/20220928
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044714
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044715
Publication of this book has been made possible in part through the generous financial support of program sponsor James Wilson.
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Meta George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
for Roberto,
y el hogar que tengo en ti siempre lleno de libros, arte, música, y amor
and with gratitude to all of the visual artists and writers who have inspired these poems
Contents
The Body and Its Rubble
I
Nexus
Cien nombres para la muerte: Las jodidas/The Screwed Ones
Cien nombres para la muerte: La hilacha/The Loose Thread
Our Lady of Sorrows
Psalm
Ofrenda de Otoño
Cien nombres para la muerte: La zapatona/The Fleet-Footed Woman
Brother,
Ofrenda for Daniel
In Veiled Voices
On the Coast in Pedasí
Thin Air
Still Life
Shadow Dancing with the Living and the Dead
Ghost Species
Chiral Formation
Lampyridae
Catch and Release
Yegua’s Daughter
Inverse
Against Insularity
II
Because We Come from Everything
Ars Resistencia
Placa/Roll Call
Public Promise
Punk en Español
#Petrochemicals
Our Teeming Shores
Sand Baggers’ Knockdown
Trespassing
Top Fifteen Reasons Mexicans Love Tortillas
III
Below
Bucketsful
Under Water
Miniature Witch
Rupture
Body as Torture Chamber
Sweet Sixteen
Helpless
This Is Why
Sisters
Laughing with You
Coco Pie Road
Misdirection
Keys
Remodeling
Close the Door, Don’t Touch That
The Red Fox Who Toys with the Dead
Good Boots
Tranquilo
Unruly Urban Youth
Because Home Is You
Bookman
IV
Middle Age Dreams
Subtraction and Addition
Chivalry
Peep Show
Endless assemblage,
Question the benevolence
Going under
Shipping and Receiving
Mirrors
Vexed
Notes
Acknowledgments

The Body and Its Rubble
El cuerpo, a labyrinth
of cicatrizes zig-
zagging through its muddy tierra.
Suspicious scratches, yellow lumps
invitan la bruja y sus susurros
o la calaca con un ojo
llena de la luna ámbar,
el otro de vidrio—evergreen
window refusing to shutter itself.
What is the timbre of a new wound?
Of a song that stings before scabbing?
Excavate with me the ruins
of our purple terrain—
its kingdom of rubble.
I
“If the memory of an event is a ‘trace’ in the land, the actions that took place long ago are ‘etched’ there, but ‘long ago’ may become tomorrow at anytime!”
—Cecilia Vicuña, from About to Happen
“Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.”
—Jacques Monod, from Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology , translated by Austryn Wainhouse
Nexus
(after Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, earth-body works, 1973–80)
“I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me, using the earth as my canvas and my soul as my tools.” —Ana Mendieta
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
riverbanks, 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
my island arms with twig, rock,
blossom, mud. My pulse with fire,
glass and blood. I’ve raised
myself in the earth’s beds, left
this trace, this exiled breath.
Cien nombres para la muerte: Las jodidas/The Screwed Ones
(after the drawings La Jodida, Las Huesos, and La Cargona by Erik Ricardo de Luna Genel)
We are bent from the loads we’ve carried
strapped to our bony backs—sacks
of maíz, hierbas, frijoles; bundles
of firewood; jerry jugs of precious agua.
Each Saturday, we haul tall stacks
of caged birds to the mercado to sell
their captive songs—their laments,
our heaviest burden.
Hobble a mile in our ragged huaraches,
holes in their tire-tread soles. Follow
us to the village of whispers
where the only gritos belong to the wind,
empty doorways grown over with weeds,
our men’s dusty boots waiting years
for their return. Look into the cenotes
of our eyes. You’ll find no fish,
no flores, no monedas. Only sacrifices
with their mouths full of mud
and the dread of our itchy grins.
Then tell us you would never risk
wrapping your little lamb in a rebozo,
grabbing your withered staff, and heading
north—devil sun, scorpion, migra
be damned. You’d fly for the birds
whose latches you could not unlock.
You’d fly so the only satchel your daughter
hoists on her shoulders is heavy
with libros, lapices y sueños. You’d fly
never believing they would wrest her
from your back and lock her in a cage.
Cien nombres para la muerte: La hilacha/The Loose Thread
(after a drawing by Erik Ricardo de Luna Genel and in memory of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and Valeria)
Ix Chel, skeleton moon at her loom,
wipes her furrowed forehead, daddy
longlegs dangling like loose threads
from the corners of her eyes dark as ditches.
She stitches crossbones into skirts,
weaves skulls into blankets she will trade
with travelers. “Mantillas, rebozos!”
she’ll sing, unfurling her wares for parents
to wrap around babes she has guided
from their mothers’ oceans to Earth.
Under one moon, a Salvadoran father
and mother cannot wait any longer
in the winding lines of starved
asylum seekers ordered to halt.
So their daughter, not yet two, wraps
her tiny arms around the bough
of papi’s neck, clings to his trunk
as he wades into the big river, swims
strong as salmon, against churning currents.
But when he spills her on the bank, warns
her to wait, and lunges back into the torrent
for mami, the little one panics, follows.
Under one sun, the river carries them
away, defying the border
it never meant to become.
Ix Chel’s waning crescent finds them
first, face down in the mud,
wrapped together in the black shroud
of papi’s shirt. And from her great jug,
holding all the waters of heaven,
she spills storms to wash away
the lines we’ve carved, dug, drilled,
the walls we’ve built in chain link, barbed
wire, concrete, and steel between desert
and desert, river
and river, earth
and earth, between father
and mother, mother
and child
under one moon.
Our Lady of Sorrows
(after Ana Mendieta’s Untitled , Silueta Series, 1980)
has appeared to the mountain
dwellers, her grief engraved
where stone softens to clay. Keep
your eyes sharp for a dagger.
In its hilt, you’ll find her face
pressed to the earth’s cheek. Kiss
this sacred spot before the rains
wash it away like her orphaned
feet. Notched heart cradles
a planet heavy with night-
mares flying into empty mouths.
Listen for their thirsty murmurs.
She’ll push her ponderous child
into the dew of a San Felipe dawn,
name him Salvador. They’ll rest
beneath a web spun umbilical,
eclipsed from our human eyes.

Our Lady
stone             clay
earth
rain
orphaned
heart
eclipsed
Psalm
You sit in breath’s beat,
hands washed with sage and ash,
circles tattooed
on the padded palms.
This is a psalm for the mouth
that opens in the om of your fist
and says nothing
as it stretches
into a psalm for silence,
chatter scattering like mice
when you step
into the vanishing field.
This is a psalm for pollen
drifting in a symphony
you cannot hear, its sex
in every pore, every hair
lifting. This is a psalm for wings,
for the helium and string
that releases you
from yourself. Like water,
this is a psalm for healing
without being held.
Ofrenda de Otoño
A flurry of chickadees unfurls
from birch trees as red fox
loiter in a commune of sunflowers—
zorro scattering xochitl seeds—free-
fall of food we will squirrel
away for the months when snow crags
climb to garage roofs.
Oso, gather your ripe berries. Venado, your red
maple leaves. Murciélago, your mosquitos.
Chapulín, your tiny violins. A traffic
of bitter winds y carámbanos
are knocking at our doors. I offer you
this molcajete de cominos, crushed cloves
y coraje, chile ancho, hechizo de bruja.
This stone has hissed like a radiator,
crackled like a hearth, s