by Brenda Cárdenas
Petition
Lord, sanctify the bee in my sister’s shoe
‘cause she can re-skin after the sting,
but we can’t pollinate the blueberries
and broccoli without that hive, Lord.
Yahweh, bless the indigo bunting
for its borderland of wisdom, for its song
that peels away the gray layer of smog.
Without, how will we face the doleful day?
Allah, ennoble the twister’s arc away
from land, its volta into the great blue
that chews on our storms, gulps them
down like lemonade on a summer day.
Vishnu, we need no syrupy snow
cones, shaved ice melting in our mouths,
but flash-freeze the glaciers, please,
until their bones crack and groan.
Green Tara, self-minted, send
fire from the forests to our bellies
where it burns clean our filth,
re-births us seed, stalk, forsythia.
Teosinte
Even corn has an ancestor, teosinte.
Tall, naked stalk of grass hiding its grain
took 9000 years to grow
ears that listened only to the prairie
wind’s advice on how to sow.
Heard only the prairie pleading
for palliative care after settlers
had plowed too much acreage, stuffing
it over and over with their sour seed.
When these squatters began to cramp
and lose each harvest to malnourished soil,
when their milk spilled black and all
they had to eat was the last fatty sow
and a wilted cabbage or two,
the witchiest women buried
their placenta in a whorl of hair,
belly button dust, salt, and spit,
spine of a crow’s feather, grief.
The earth sizzled, then undulated
like a great lake. Storms flooded
the fallow furrows who took their own
soggy time to mate with the wind,
its whirl unfurling native seeds,
and the prairie birthed bluestem, aster
beebalm, blazing star, teosinte
almost as tall as the empty silos.
It had listened so long to promises
that it once again grew ears.
Duende Poems: Coal Mining Women, Rounder Records, 1997
The Coal Mining Women’s twang croons
raspy and hard lived as coffin wood, pings
off the tin Budweiser sign, row of Kentucky
Bourbon bottles lined up like dusty targets
behind the bar, cigarette stink and piss smelting
in the corners. Jack Kerouac has nothing
on these paisley-scarfed nomads stoking
the hot coals of cave-ins and coal tattoos,
of fingernails that never come clean,
of night skies everywhere their load is lit,
black lung coughing up pyres. Their strained
harmonies, each note shoveled up from the gut
and wedged in the throat like a pick-axe
hanging on a ledge by its claw, ask us
which side we are on as they conjure draglines
and wedges in the Earth—depressions
only they with their duende can name.
Communion
When gold leaves parachute from a pucker
of elms, fill footprints, drench the mossy
clearing where deer bed down for the night,
they light the way to stepmother’s
bungalow, swoosh and land in her lightning riot
of hair. Bread pretzeled like crossbones
in the oven coaxes tears from spiderwebs
of frost tucked in window corners.
Something here simmers. Something slithers
while the twins fatten, licking sugar
from their lips, plump fists full of candy corn.
Ding dong, the witch is dead, or is she
waiting in the closet for communion.
Eat of this body. Eat of this bread.
In Fire, In Ice
Snowshoeing across blue ice in 20-mile-per-hour gales
we witness the not future of our broken oath
A blizzard erases moose tracks genius beast
at the rim of a world that sheds us like a slough
No rack no crown to be found
striated and swollen ice burned into antimatter
A fist reaches through fog extremities frozen luminescent
Can we still smell pine pitch Arctic sage bear-
berry taste purple saxifrage on this not planet
or is it/are we the last epistle written in the journal
of one who left wool socks and blanket near the remnants
of a fire scar faith deleted will shelved surrender
consumed in mice sized bites of not now not ever
Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press), a finalist for Foreword Review’s Indie Poetry Prize; Boomerang (Bilingual Press); and three chapbooks. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary journals and anthologies, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Braving the Body, Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry, TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, among others. Cárdenas has also enjoyed collaborating with musicians, composers, visual artists, and choreographers. In 2023, her poem “Para los Tin-Tun-Teros,” set to choral music by Daniel Afonso, was published by Hal Leonard Music and in 2024, performed by the National Concert Chorus at Carnegie Hall. Cárdenas has served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate and currently teaches at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.