by Ruby Rodriguez
 |
| The climate crisis is killing migrants trying to cross the US border, study finds. Many undocumented migrants trying to cross the Sonoran desert into the US from Mexico are dying of dehydration and organ failure. Photo: A group of migrants cross the US-Mexico border in Otay Mesa, California. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images via The Guardian, December 16, 2021 |
a catarina sits like a cardinal
in a black and white movie
on my window
in front of a city of concrete
and metal and one giant
intersection, this city
is nothing but grey cars and roads.
barbed wire is also grey,
morally, physically,
metaphysically,
it exists only in the brown
of the Sonora desert dirt
and in the brown of our faces,
white faces have fences
brown faces have walls.
but the catarina is too red
the roses in tia’s garden are too
red
the jalapeños in my fridge are too
red
realize
all faces bleed catarina red.
Ruby Rodriguez is a bilingual transgender Latina writer from San Antonio, Texas. Her work has been previously published in La Prensa Texas, at the America Library of Poetry, at the McNay Art Museum, and she is the winner of the Best Poem in Spanish in the second Aline B. Carter Poetry Contest (all under the name of Ricardo, however). She is the poetry and Spanish editor of the digital literary magazine, The Bunker Review.