Virgil Suárez | Betelon her tongue, carmine fire,
her teeth tainted, metal-tasting
blood spilled in her village,
she knows a thousand words
for flame, a bird consuming
her people in orange blooms,
she chews to remember, slow
like the falling of the rain,
the dousing of this eternal hell
in another country, this other
life. When she hears the bird
perched on a wire she
thinks of a red-combed rooster,
that sang to her, to her mother.
In its beak, pieces of her heart.
In its eyes, the mirror of her exile.
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