About the Feature
The Red Flower
For Viviano Pérez Pérez
Photo by Giulia May
The smallest hummingbird will only survive
on another island. Two wings of the same bird.
I once found my most coveted bed on a rooftop
that overlooked a guava tree in the barrio of music.
My father’s first word was Spanish
when my grandmother strummed her guitar.
Beautiful, isn’t it, how one may die in the hills
above Mariana, a stalk of corn still in one’s hand,
the evil eye burnishing one’s hope,
and then, to be conjured into the body of your grandchild.
How daring to be renamed within the color of a red flower,
which reinvents itself each winter alongside survival,
but don’t trust me, I’m only a hummingbird who refuses
to be encaged in the kingdom of this world.
About the Author
Sarah María Medina’s writing is found in Poetry, Prelude, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Artists Up grant, a Jack Straw Writer fellowship, a Caldera AiR 2018, and the Black Warrior Review poetry prize.