Hum

Slip of
bird
with fan
of furious
wings in
blossom’s
throat I hear
your wing
-beat sing.
To nectar
you need
no key,
mid-rib
of leaf or
sip from
little red
vials
constantly
defiled;
starvation
staved
for one
more day.
Butterfly
weed, too,
bids your
wing
-whistle
come:
sing me,
guard me,
lap me
with your
split
tongue.

First published in the Kenyon Review, Sept./Oct. 2017, and reprinted here with permission of the author. You can hear Cintia Santana in conversation about her poem here.

Cintia Santana’s work is or will be in Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, Narrative, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. The recipient of fellowships from CantoMundo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, she currently teaches literary translation as well as poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish at Stanford University. At times, she dresses as a human-sized gold nugget and performs anti-Trump poems in front of San Francisco City Hall. Author photo credit: Rewa Bush.