Brenda Cárdenas

You shout my name from beyond my dreams, beyond the picture window of this Rosarito beach house. Rushing from bed to shore I glimpse their backs— volcanoes rising out of the sea. Your back, a blue-black silhouette, feet wet with the wash of morning waves. Fountains spring from mammal minds, my hands lifting a splash of sand. I'm on my knees, toes finding a cool prayer beneath them, fingers pressing sea foam to my temples, while you open arms wide as a generation, raise them to a compass point, dive. If you could reach them, you would ride their fins under the horizon, then surf the crash of waves left in their wake. And if I could grasp my own fear, I'd drown it, leave it breathless and blue as this ocean, as the brilliant backs of whales surfacing for air.

Placa/Rollcall, 1980, by Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez If the city was a body, graffiti would tell us where it hurts. — Charles “Chaz” Bojórquez And this block would shout, “Nos diste un chingaso , cabrón. Mira esta cara rota, these baton-cracked ribs, this black and blue street dizzy con gente: blades, kiki, larry, snow, enrique, connie, 
elton, king, david, kelly, jeff, ratón, chaz , los de aquí, los de abajo. This roll call won’t be silenced, not by glock, not by chokehold. This is our temple of runes, our tomb — its glyphic curve and flow, calligraphic code writ acrylic. This, our relic, our scroll unrolled in catacombs, our flecks of subtext still buzzing después de que vayamos con La Pelona. ¡ qué lucha, loco ! Ven, baile con nosotros to the aerosol’s maraca y hiss, al punk en español’s furious sweat. Hang your head out the window y dale un grito tan lleno de duende that it cracks the pavement, summons our dead to dinner. Turn the tonal kaleidoscope. Then pause, catch your breath, so you don’t miss the illegible moment where all the mystery lives. There, de-cypher that!”

Untitled, from the Silueta series, 1980, by Ana Mendieta 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

She is proud of her papá because he comes to their little grey school, converted from army barracks, to teach español to Mrs. Brenda’s fifth grade. And that means they don’t have to listen to that awful Señora Beister on TV with her screech owl version of “Las mañanitas” and her annoying forefinger to the ear, Escuchen and then to the lips, y repitan. He teaches them to order Coca-Cola en el restaurán– Señor, quisiera una Coca, por favor– and the names of all the utensils– cuchara, cuchillo, tenedor. The children look at him funny when he picks up the knife. Next week he will demonstrate the bullfights he watched in Mexico when he was muy chiquitito. He will choose a boy to snort, stomp, charge the red cloth that Papá will snap at his side as he dodges the sharp-horned strike, stabs invisible swords into the boy’s hide and makes the children laugh.

She says my hair smells like corn tortillas. I raise an eyebrow. After all those honeysuckle and papaya shampoos, I can’t believe my scalp hasn’t soaked up the scent of blossom or the perfume of rainfall. No, she’s my mother, and she insists that even as a little girl, my whole bedroom breathed corn tortillas. Pressing nose to pillowcase, I search for masa, reach back before molcajete and plow to a dusky meadow, its bed of soil flecked with teosinte, ancestor grasses. Up through the dark follicles of my skull covered in sun-cracked husks, push the black-brown silk strands, cocooning thirsty kernels. Maíz sprouts into fields of thought bearing hybrid rows of words that fall like teeth from the mouths of the dead.

(after the painting Á rbol de Blues by Roberto Valadez) The hands of this telling tree pull him from the cobalt bowl sky, bring Jimmy back to the ruins of Maxwell Street hunched in dusk. He stood where strings intersected frets like tracks meeting ties on the Illinois Central’s passage from the Mississippi Delta, then followed the bread crumbs of troubadours to this steel city. Twelve-hour shifts beckoned mexicanos north on the Union Pacific from Piedras Negras to Pilsen, Back of the Yards. How many grandparents, mothers and fathers, pounded stake into soil, snuck or were shoved into boxcars, leapt onto the train’s iron rungs as it shuddered along the rails to foundries where they poured molten metal, faced hot licks of the blast furnace’s growl and hiss? How many lugged themselves north to slaughterhouses that drooled rank puddles at their feet? This, so sons and daughters might step off into another era, choose instruments of wood and metal, axes of their own timbre. This so Jimmy might mix his own palette— tune each turquoise pitch and purple tone into an electric blues old as corridos, but new to the mexicanos who came each Sunday to the market at Maxwell. New to the ears of Roberto, a boy, who would keep his ranchera rhythms close as a pair of old jeans but grow into the blues as he listened to the heirs of Papa Jackson— Johnny Young, Howlin’ Wolf, Nighthawk and Maxwell Jimmy. Now Roberto sits in overalls at an easel, splits the hairs of his brush over how to compose this ofrenda, this homage. How to take Jimmy back in time to the market whose merchants once hustled with tricks for trade ancient as Africa, as Toltec Mexico, Maxwell, whose live blues bands and car radios belting norteño mixes made every Sunday a session. How to take Jimmy back to Maxwell’s gathering spot where he guzzles from an aluminum garden blooming atop his amp, swings his ax— fingers climbing its trunk, plucking twigs— while our feet tap the roots of this wailing tree. Notes skip through alleys of his voice like gravel pinging off windshields, lift a pitch high enough to singe the autumn sky— cousin to the red and green gritos of the barrio only blocks away. Twelve bars spin like metal rims, stack like hubcaps, chords crackling in the tin barrels of his laughter. When the people gather, he sputters, What did the one-eyed woman say? and waits for them to peer into the devil’s draw of his eyes before he roars, Where is my one-eyed man? But we barely get to the punch line, to the end of a set, before the mayor swings his ax, a claw that rips this árbol de blues up by its roots; before Chicago swings its wrecking ball to level homes, stores, restaurants, bars; before troops graffiti-blast, scrub and cinch-sack it all, but one empty wall where someone has scrawled Jimmy’s name among the others in this hall of fame: Willie, Hound Dog, Honey Boy, Sal, the many legends who’ve shared the marrow of their music, of Santana’s hearty soup with the bones still in it steaming with sabor and sometimes weeping.