A un Desconocido

By Lorna Dee Cervantes b. 1954

I was looking for your hair,

black as old lava on an island

of white coral. I dreamed it

deserted you and came for me,

wrapped me in its funeral ribbons

and tied me a bow of salt.

Here’s where I put my demise:

desiring fire in a web of tide,

marrying the smell of wet ashes

to the sweet desert of your slate.

My intelligent mammal, male

of my species, twin sun to a world

not of my making, you reduce me

to the syrup of the moon, you boil

my bones in the absence of hands.

Where is your skin, parting me?

Where is the cowlick under your kiss

teasing into purple valleys? Where

are your wings, the imaginary tail

and its exercise? Where would I breed

you? In the neck of my secret heart

where you’ll go to the warmth of me

biting into that bread where crumbs crack

and scatter and feed us our souls;

if only you were a stone I could

throw, if only I could have you.

“A un Desconocido” by Lorna Dee Cervantes was first published in Drive: The First Quartet (San Antonio: Wings Press, 2006).

Source: Drive: The First Quartet (Wing Press, 2006)

Biography

One of the major voices in Chicana literature, poet Lorna Dee Cervantes’s writing evokes and explores cultural difference—between Mexican, Anglo, Native American, and African American lives—as well as the divides of gender and economics. Born in San Francisco in 1954 to Mexican and Native American ancestry, Cervantes was discouraged from speaking Spanish at home in an attempt to protect her from the racism prevalent at that . . .

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