Brenda Cárdenas
WHAT A MOLCAJETE HOLDS
Despite my drawers full of knives and spoons,
cutting boards, spatulas, ceramic ramekins,
when I blend spices, I must place them in her
molcajete, press the three-generation pestle
against cloves to shatter them, grind cominos
y ajo in the same circular motion as the tides
that softened stones fused to form its mortar.
I fold my right hand over hers and hers and hers,
their wrinkles a reminder that the skin is now
loosening from my carpal bones, every piece of me
pulled toward Earth. Although she stands behind
me, and another behind her, and another,
our shadows osculate on the tile floor, skin smoothed
in silhouette, coffee-colored heads blocking light.
We have always stood on the verge of fracture,
voices flitting like wings away from seams between
the stones tight in our palms. But hummingbirds
feast every ten minutes, so we crush the flavors
into our membranes, feed one another.
Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and silver winner of 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. Cárdenas is the 2025-2027 Wisconsin Poet Laureate and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.