Brenda Cárdenas

ice down Tina’s neck, breasts on the hottest

day of the year. The cube releases her

mind from the body’s prison, her tongue

from its humid cave. Then the melt

of his kiss coaxes her back into corporeal

chemistry—its cascade and rapture.

Ice swishing beneath blades composes

its own sharp symphony, percussive sluice

for ear and foot gracing the skater’s ballet—

slice, sweep, scratch, swoosh, the raspiest

winter whispers. Have you really listened

to the snap—to the earth cracking itself

in two—when you drop a cube fresh

from the freezer into a glass of fizz. You might

hear everything that will save you in that tiny

explosion. So how can we ever absolve

the theft of our awe when crystals paint

fractals on our windowpanes, the pilfering

of a word that now grates our tongue’s

skin as if it were an orange rind beneath

metal teeth. This callous ice that opens

the lake no matter how gingerly we step,

that swallows us, then seals itself

over our heads. This fanged ice snarling

and barking like the fire hydrants and dogs

of another era. This fiend ice that splinters

communities into shards, dystopian fracture

forever unforgivable.

that can toss your own first world’s hellscape

into the slop sink like a dirty rag—you shut

all the doors inside your mind to keep what you’ve left

alive—its terracotta lining the cracked callouses

in the soles of your feet, its afternoon rains

soaked into your scalp, a pinch of its raw cacao

on your tongue. You will try to pry the empire

you carry in your heavy steps from your feet,

from your skin like a gemstone from a king’s ring.

You will dream of leaning against a cornflower

blue wall in your yellow dress. No gray, white,

or beige houses like those lining every street in the land

of greed as if color were a sin greater than its bloody

stripes, dagger stars you have turned upside down.

You lock windows, so the memory of a woman in a passion

fruit skirt dancing alone at night on the cobblestone

street, guitar strums guiding her ritmo de puro gozo,

will never leave you. Forever, you will watch her feet tap

like roosters pecking, lift like chicks first learning to fly,

skip backwards like you did as a child who had nothing

to lose, your whole body so light, the wind, if it swept

around the corner in a sudden gust, could carry you

home or away.