Brenda Cárdenas

Lacandona, the rain forest,
is a woman draped in solitude,

her hair a translucent cocoon.
In her lungs, a clearing

where stone pillars
hold arches of sky.

As tangled roots and loneliness
fill her tilted womb,

she turns her back on waiting.
Her dark shoulder passes

through temple walls
to the internal refuge

where she shapes masks
of creatures she imagines

spawning from her,
hatching from the splintered

shells of eggs
too thin to incubate.

There is a man under the tent
of her eyebrow,

an old ghost
in the slit of her stare,

There is a rustling
beneath her skin.

Axolotl, the lizard, slips
like green corn into her mouth,

clicks his toe nails
against her teeth,

nestles in the harvest
under her tongue,

twists down
the stalk of her spine.

She searches for his tails
lost in her limbs,

caught on the branches of her ribs,
medicine to clear

the red clouds from her eyes,
draw the poison

from her punctured flesh
before it swims

into the seventh generation.
Sometimes, dusk soothes

her slashed back, cools its burns,
peels away the day's pain.

And if we turn
in the evening mist,

we can hear her
whisper our names.

Brenda Cárdenas holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and is co-editor of Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). Cárdenas’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, RATTLE: Poetry for the 21st Century, Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry About School, Under the Pomegranate Tree: The Best New Latino Erotica, Prairie Schooner, and Latino Literature Today, among others and also comprise a special chapter in the Book of Voices. With Sonido Ink(quieto), a spoken word and music ensemble, she co-produced and released the CD Chicano, Illnoize: The Blue Island Sessions (DeSPICable Records) in 2001. Cárdenas has received an Illinois Arts Council finalist award. She teaches Creative Writing; Composition; and Latin American, U.S. Latino/a, and American Literatures at Wright College in Chicago.