May 2023

Is there a more surreal month than May, with its neon green leaves; its confetti bursts of apple blossoms; its warm, lilac-perfumed breezes; its oriole flute solo high in the canopy of a catalpa tree? “Art can make us airborne, sometimes,” observes this month’s featured poet, Mario Cardenas. Oh, friends, this month as you amble or cycle or simply sit within the dreamscape that is May in New England, breathe in this singular, cyclical beauty and let yourself soar.

Terry House, Poetry Editor

Borne Again

by Mario Cardenas

I found myself on the roof of the Casa Milá in Barcelona

Among the tan walls of Gaudi’s decorative turrets and chimneys

Following someone I knew, I entered a descending stairway

Which became a wriggling passage

Through something like a rolled up brisket of beef

(Glad, in retrospect, that a marinade of oil, lime, garlic

And Serrano pepper did not coat the sides)

After some difficulty I emerged into a vast empty room

On a grid of white tiles with black grout for a floor

It does not take a professional to analyze this dream:

Being birthed to the blank slate of life

I thought of this while riding uphill on my bike

Through the tube made by foliage from overhanging trees

In the shade from this enclosure

And my labored breathing

From the four kilometer climb back into town

One journey was coming to a beginning

While this one was simulating

The final gulps at life’s end

My kinship with these hypoxic moments is greater

Than the writhing, into uncertain surroundings, of birth

This journey through the canopy of trees

Seasoned in effort and sweat

Brings me no closer to any epiphany, or conclusion

Beyond gratitude from having another breath to take

Mario Cardenas lives in Harvard. A sound recordist for motion pictures, his creative interests extend to art, literature, music, and photography. “I started writing poems driven by the need to give expression to thoughts and feelings, to solve—even momentarily—the challenge of living through words,” he writes.