Columbine by Javier Zamora

Columbine

 

I’d never seen one like it: the flower

with its many orange cups. Dad drove me to Yosemite

the second month in this country.

He didn’t know the name of it. I didn’t know the name of it,

only that I loved the cups & that

they reminded me of the hibiscus

outside the glassless window I’d left months ago.

I hadn’t started school yet. There were many things I didn’t know,

English

the most important. Didn’t have friends.

Entire days spent inside the apartment

memorizing words, reading bilingual picture books,

comparing couch to the picture, to the couch

in my parents’ living room. In the news,

earlier, much earlier, before I arrived in June: headlines

I could not read. Could not understand. Parents

shared a fear I’d never known. Though

I’d seen guns on the way up here. Though

there had been war; I did not know the way to school yet.

The names of highways that would show me blooms.