Yanaguana volume 1, issue 1 fall/winter 2025-2026 a literary journal from San Antonio, Texas
Cloud Delfina Cardona
“i would like to be post-label
but fitting in is so seductively human”
“I need to come out and say it: change feels like a flaming knife in my throat”
Portrait as a Cloud Delfina Cardona Poem
God turns down
the day’s dimmer switch.
chicharras buzz right
outside the kitchen window.
inside, women sit
at the round wooden table,
bodies pressed up against
the chairs’ knobby spindles.
like a scene from a Jodorowsky movie,
they offer up chisme like sacrifices
to a hedonistic god. the sugar bowl listens
to them without judgment.
do you ever feel like
you’re writing the same poem over again?
telenovela on the tv,
petrichor rising up through the backyard
women and their sadness
relatives and their judgements
gender origin story on the westside
Labels
over burnt coffee,
my father asks:
why can’t I just be a poet?
why always a Chicano poet?
in 1950s Alice, Texas,
he was an outsider to the outsiders
with a love for words like gelato
the problem is the pressure
of the Chicano poet label
he said, can’t i write about flowers
& still be considered a Chicano poet?
or does it only count if i’m writing
about being Mexican?
it is 2025 & i ask myself
the same question
i think of Annar & our
conversations about film
how she said, yeah i’m watching Godard
but i’m watching it through the lens of a Latina!
& how i loved her for saying that.
i try hard not to fall into
the not-like-other-girl-isms
i have spent so much time
scavenging for language
test-tasting different labels
until i find mr. right
i would like to be post-label
but fitting in is so seductively human
woman, hispanic, latina,
latinx, latine, tejana, non-binary,
they/them, pansexual, bisexual, she/her
queer, chicana, demisexual, genderfluid—
i have tried them all
it is funny spending so much time
figuring out who you are
more than anything
this questioning of labels
comes from loneliness
i think labels should be entry points
my younger sibling says
i thank God i have friends
that make me feel sane
we love to ask ourselves these questions
& come up with new ways to be,
we create stupid and brilliant realities
we are all outsiders to the outsiders
and all i want is to cleanse our bones from
the eyes of the world—
April 18
the heat hugs my body
on a day in April
that feels like a fuzzy guitar
i feel bad for ever thinking
i didn’t deserve life
//
isolation kills people
& heterosexual lifestyles are stealing
my friends away
i feel like a teenager & i am
just going to have to accept
that this part of me will never go away
when you have lived for other people,
how do you figure out who you are?
the neighbor’s trees flop high above me
& the infinite droll of the air conditioning
reminds me of the ac window units
that kept me company summers ago
why can’t life always feel like this?
don’t tell me, i already know
I whisper when no one’s around
feeling like a nuisance to myself
shut up, cállete,
let’s go get some sleep
Untitled
i wish i could seduce the rain.
instead i listen to rain sounds
from your bluetooth speaker
i need to come out and say it:
change feels like a flaming knife
in my throat. i can’t stop
replaying the past while wishing
i could be present or maybe, optimistic
about the future. i have always
thought about my parents dying
since i learned about death.
i wanted to spraypaint my father’s
hair black. i tried to pull out my mom’s
white hairs. Change, a ghost
in the mouth. Every day i get closer
to death which means so do my parents.
i am 31. My father is 83. Grief is the fawn
struggling to walk, miles behind me.
she licks my ear while i sit in the flesh
of the present.
All My Loves Come Back To Me
when talking about dreams
Clint said, you have all of your friends’
personalities in your soul.
outside of the Menil gallery in Houston,
Chan said, all my loves always come back to me.
i believe them both.
all my loves come back to me
and their personalities live in my soul.
they come to me in heavenly visions
eating gummies in the secret corners of buildings
smoking weed in the parking lot before dinner
fighting at lunch like Real Housewives
dancing to LCD soundsystem at Barb’s
shit talking identity politics on the patio
watching movies on the projector
burning papers by the water, noticing how the ash falls,
retelling dreams about rusty nails in our flesh
my therapist asks me to list
the types of self-talk i do all day
after a litany of lines
of negative thoughts
i put down the gratitude i have
for my group chat titled
“women against gay guys”
titled by my gay best friend
how Clint sends me YouTube links
to songs i’ve never heard,
like how he did
in high school via
Messenger
Cloud Delfina Cardona (she/they) is an artist, writer, and book cover designer from San Antonio, Texas. She is the author of What Remains, winner of the Host Publications Chapbook Prize. In 2013 Cardona co-founded, with Laura Valdez, Chifladazine, a zine that highlights creative work by Latinas and Latinxs. Cardona is also co-founder, with Juania Suenos, of Infrarrealista Review, a literary journal that publishes Texan voices, and where they are Co-Editor in Chief, graphic designer, event coordinator, and social media manager. Cardona’s poetry can be found in The Offing, Prairie Schooner, The Boiler, the Los Angeles Review, and more. They currently work as an associate for Letras Latinas and moonlight as DJ Mexistentialism. She believes in a free Palestine.