Thursday, December 23, 2021

CATARINA

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 jalapeƱos 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.