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.
“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.