the past is a jean jacket, winner of the 2024 BIPOC Poetry Prize, selected by Ashley C. Jones
Featuring compelling visual collages and inventive imagery throughout, these poems are firmly rooted in Southern Texas. Cardona brings readers to a jukebox on S. LBJ Drive, underneath a Catholic girls high school, and to “San Marcos sunsets above the H-E-B parking lot” with weighted and poignant reflection. Each careful line produces a soundtrack to a passionate coming-of-age and implores us all to be gentle, yet honest, with our younger selves.
Evocative and blunt, the past is a jean jacket asks the essential existential questions: “where did all the wishes of my ancestors go? / what memory of me will play in someone’s head before i die for the final time?”
“In the past is a jean jacket, Cloud Delfina Cardona brings to vivid life the loneliness of teenhood and the estranging effect of performing to expectations, confronting with great skill and heart the harmful effects of pop culture’s ‘white propaganda’ on a young sense of self. Against a backdrop of 90s media, with winsome humor and profound ache, Cardona plumbs deep relational questions and dynamics, running lines along the untangleable threads of desire and culture. This beautiful, compassionate, fresh collection offers no false solace but rather the grounding, emboldening invitation to break the silences of shame, to bring violently denied selves back to life, to reach for abundance.” —Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat
what remains, winner of the 2020 host publications chapbook prize
What Remains is a collection of poems propelled by impulse, desire and an ancestral sense of longing. These poems are experiential; they exist within the dark and splendid catacombs of the body, in dusty moonlit Texas nights, and invite us into their own glittery mythos of what it means to be a young woman falling in and out of love in San Antonio.
What Remains begins with a portrait of a Brown girl growing up in San Antonio: a girl whose “tongue [is] burnt from gas station coffee,” and who wears “a name dipped in gold.” She invites us to “lay [our] head / on [her] chest and listen,” to stir “your margarita / with a chamoy-coated straw”, and to play “a guessing game of gunshot / or firework.” We settle into the rich and storied landscape of San Antonio just in time to be lunged into a dimension of lust, loving, and longing, “toward someplace too dark for us to see—”, only to return to what remains.
selected published poems
Yanuaguana – “Labels” (forthcoming)
2025
Praisesong for the People, edited by Amanda Johnston, Host Publications – “In praise of Westside Women”
2024
The Offing – “Tia-Shaped”
Sybil Journal – “Filth-Shaped”
The Boiler, Issue 37 – “GENDER SHAPE”
2023
Prairie Schooner, Issue 12 – “I FEEL LIKE AN ANTONIONI MOVIE”
The Los Angeles Review – “SELF PORTRAIT AS AN ANNA KARINA GIF AT 17”
2022
the winnow – “the past is a jean jacket”
Occulum – “central texas seance”
Voices de la Luna – poems
2021
wildness – “I am always busy wanting other lives”
Cloud Delfina Cardona 