POEM
Report from the Temple of Confessions in Old Chicano English
(after an installation by Gillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes)
Se cruzan canyons en el templo de confessions.
Languages lies across the barbed lines,
piles of its limbs pierced y pinchados.
Risky recordings reveal what we think
of the Other offering his objectified body
to the river rats who ride his wetback,
the coro de coyote who crave his flesh,
the whey-faced who whisper their sin in his ear,
the translators who trap and trade his tongue,
la raza who receive him, la raza who repel him.
In this chamber the chill of chicken flesh—
pollito mojado picoso y picado,
the black body bag of the repatriated.
Here the distorted words of debutants y do-gooders,
of know-no-betters y neo-Nazis,
of Beowulfs and other born-again beats,
of sandaled sombreros sleeping under cacti,
of Machiavellian mentes y mouths
of anthropological autoethnography,
of pretend pachucas peeling their layers,
of preachers and poets with puckered lips
of the misused multi- cultural machinery,
of the Hispanic hodgepodge hiding their Indio,
of the Quetzalcoatls concealing their conqueror
de la migra meando marking its turf.
Here, the hemistiched hemispheres blend,
a vacuum of voices absorbed in the velvet
paintings of slick y sexy santos,
of the Aztec icon at the altar of Aztlán
tripping and turning transvestite warrior,
of the cyber-cholo stripping down—Simón!
The vato loco’s liquid eye lures us
over borders, their blurred tumbling barriers,
calling us to come stare into the cage—
jaula de joda aquí juntándonos—
the table turned and tacked to the wall,
lit with votives licking our luscious
breakfast bowl of cucarachas on their backs
squirming to free their feet and fly.
"Report from the Temple of Confessions in Old Chicano English" by Brenda Cárdenas from Boomerang, forthcoming in 2008 from Bilingual Press, Arizona State University. Used by permission of Bilingual Press.
Source: The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (The University of Arizona Press, 2007)
A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two poetry collections, . . . MORE »
