Borderlands Corpus
Texas Poet Laureate 2020 Emmy Pérez presents six poems
The King's Salt Lake: Sal Del Rey, Edinburg, TX, 2013. Photo: Alex Garrido
EDITORIAL NOTE
HTI Open Plaza concludes National Poetry Month 2024 with six poems by 2020 Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Pérez, author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face and Solstice.
“Downriver Río Grande Ghazalion” (in Newfound Journal 5.3) has quotes from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, the traditional song “Las Mañanitas,” and Richard Wright’s Black Boy. “Halladay Street” is from Solstice (Swan Scythe Press, 2020) by Emmy Pérez. “[No strawberry moon]” was originally published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets, 14 October 2016. “Green Light Go,” “Not one more refugee death,” and "The River on Our Face" are from With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press, 2016) by Emmy Pérez and are reprinted by the Poetry Foundation by permission of University of Arizona Press.
Green Light Go
To be a disco ball dangling in a storefront window, in the sun, with a cage on it. To be two and three disco balls, downtown McAllen, spangles of sun and water that grew tangerine skins late February, pink bottlebrush nostrils, buff-bellied hummingbirds. To be mirrors and hexagonal combs, mexican honey wasps, larvae, paper, wax. To make geometry without vocabulary, to be live music—take off your jacket, girl, wear your tank top . . . it's ninety degrees! To be a green light go, downtown Corpus, after cars and trucks zooming on beach sand, before hot tubs. To be an orange sun driving from Anzaldúa's grave, to be a cactus bloom fuchsia, opuntia, Laguna Atascosa, Laguna Madre, to be a watering hole, a mud chimney air vent for crawdad water tunnels. To be a silver lizard run over by tires, a swatch of river on asphalt, to be a bolt loosened from the border wall, to be a peso falling out of the border crossing's revolving slot, to be a coke-bottle dove, a mexican coca-cola, a cooing quorum of lotería cards signing a resolution. To be a goose perched on top of an abandoned sink in a yard, in a town that fords the river, to be the woman stretched on her beloved's grave, returned after decades. To be a kid in juvie, to be her guardian, the judge, the p.o., to be the letters she writes, the words that matter more than food, almost as much as music and more than makeup, nearly suns seen through the mandatory skylight, imagined by the control room monitor. To be el chalán, the last hand-drawn ferry on the river, its ropes pulled by pilots, to be a passenger almost on the other side.
Part of the "artscape" within the South Texas Botanical Gardens and Nature Center, Corpus Christi, TX, 2014, Photo: Carol M. Highsmith | Source: Library of Congress
Downriver Río Grande Ghazalion
Drive into the Valley, past a field of old farm equipment.
Near the tip of Tejas: sal del rey, blatant farm equipment.
I never bent into onion fields or declined sweet strawberries.
The kid in everyone’s kitchen, escaping farm equipment.
When I think about seeing you, I want to jump on your back.
I confess—you’re sexy, luxury—let’s paint equipment
The color of parakeets congregating, squawking on 10th
Street McAllen power lines, strip mall trees, fading equipment.
99 cent meals. Surreal pickles like vine fetuses in jars.
Wrinkled wienies on a Stripes treadmill, saintly farm equipment.
Julia (te necesito) ¿dónde estás? ¿En el barrio
De nuestra nostalgia? ¿En el Río Grande de Loíza?
let’s
weld
jade
cave
excavate equipment
repatriate
shell and bone
shards and kernels
study hopi
dry farming
dare roman
empire
incan farm terraces
aztec chinampas
mississippi plantations
california strawberries
seedless watermelons, grapes
cherries still need their pits
suck and spit them like chew
Sometimes I defer to the blues, tejanas, two chachalacas
Rustling in ebanos, and ebanos in chachalacas
río
bravo ~grande
caracoles snails
both spiral
galaxies
Agha Shahid Ali prayed for each couplet’s own identity
Sin fronteras. Linked by rhyme, refrain, y su nombre de diosas
(& colonizers.)
Snake, bobcat, great horned owl, pauraque, bats, tlacuache
(medicine).
Burrowing vato owls protect their land, urban EPT.
Return? To rivers, loves, monte, el chalán? Erase citrus?
So-called fences? Faith in Boca Chica~Gulf of México, fresh salt-
(water confluences)?
Salt is old, older than cranium.
What’s older? Salt or water?
It’s time to move beyond binaries, old loves. Remember eyes.
Not love but eyes—eyes are love. Yes. Remember the smell of skin
(go swimming)
El día en que tú naciste, nacieron todas las flores.
The scent of water. A tolerance for ambiguity
In nepantla: between Hurricanes Dolly and Alex
(flooding)
Terremote, huracán
You lithium
The grass
Mineral, metal
Leaf cuts the ants clip and carry
Ant path
Goat
Sheep crossing
Rio Grande
Gorge
It takes hours to defang cactus. You nursed an orange all of
Christmas Day; at night, just before going to bed, you ate it.
A ~ marks your open text unions. Sign your ~name in email,
Feel your flirty ambiguity, friendly besito.
Ocotillo flower (Fouquieria splendens), Tonto National Monument, Roosevelt, Arizona, 2015.
Source: U.S. National Parks Service Gallery
Halladay Street
The men notice the slight swelling
of her chest. The street breathes:
a mirage of gasoline
flooding ghosts of orange groves.
To be a man is to detect
bodies as they soften.
She checks her reflection
in the chrome of his car. Holds still
while strangers scout a path
halfway to her sky. It is good
to have much cake on your behind.
They want to drop silverware; bring food to lips.
Mouths and hands join together; she ought to
say a prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Light candles for her bowed head.
Use cushions for knees. Kneel. Stained
glass keeps the sun out. A hymn flutters
through exhaust pipes. Outside, wildflowers
bloom through cracks of stone. Worms appear
in puddles of last night’s rain.
... She smiles for mother as bolillos bake into boats.
They will slit them, fill them with meat.
Plums ferment near the ocotillo fence.
Under skins, flesh hums—capillary, sweet.
[No strawberry moon]
No strawberry moon for me, tonight. No strawberry moon. This small house creaks when I walk and open it. I have to weigh it, to goddess or not tonight. Goddess or godless. God is in my sleeping children’s presence tonight. I use words like god when I haven’t seen the strawberry moon, less when I haven’t been so generous. It’s not about gender—ess or less—but heft of the weight. Inside me like a baby. When people procreate. Romance a dashing thing. The harvest upon us. Will we feast or collapse in exhaustion tonight which is every?
Photo: Mark Tegethoff
Not one more refugee death
A river killed a man I loved,
And I love that river still
—María Meléndez
1.
Thousands of fish killed after Pemex
spill in el Río Salado and everyone
runs out to buy more bottled water.
Here in El Valle, crossers drown in the Río
Grande and in the sun, like the singular
heat of Arizona and the ranchlands
around the Falfurrias checkpoint.
It's hard to imagine an endangered
river with that much water, especially
in summer and with the Falcon Reservoir
in drought, though it only takes inches
to drown. Sometimes, further
west, there's too little river
to paddle in Boquillas Canyon
where there are no steel-column walls
except the limestone canyon's drop
and where a puma might push-wade across,
or in El Paso, where double-fenced muros
sparkle and blind with bullfight ring lights,
the ring the concrete river mold, and above
a Juárez mountain urges
La Biblia es La Verdad—Léela.
2.
Today at the vigil, the native singer
said we are all connected
by water, la sangre de vida.
Today, our vigil signs proclaimed
McAllen is not Murrieta.
#iamborderless. Derechos
Inmigrantes=Derechos
Humanos. Bienvenidos niños.
We stand with refugee children.
We are all human. Bienvenidos
a los Estados Unidos.
And the songs we sang
the copal that burned
and the rose petals spread
en los cuatro puntos were
for the children and women
and men. Songs
for the Guatemalan
boy with an Elvis belt buckle
and Angry Birds jeans with zippers
on back pockets who was found
shirtless in La Joya, one mile
from the river. The worn jeans
that helped identify his body
in the news more times
than a photo of him while alive.
(I never knew why the birds
are angry. My mother said
someone stole their eggs.)
The Tejas sun took a boy
I do not know, a young man
who wanted to reach Chicago,
his brother's number etched in
his belt, his mother's pleas not
to leave in white rosary beads
he carried. The sun in Tejas
stopped a boy the river held.
Detention centers filled, churches
offer showers and fresh clothes.
Water and a covered porch may
have waited at a stranger's house
or in a patrol truck had his body
not collapsed. Half of our bodies
are made of water, and we can't
sponge rivers through skin
and release them again
like rain clouds. Today
at the vigil the native singer
sang we are all connected
by water, la sangre de vida.
World cloud (2010) of Julia de Burgos's poem “‘Río Grande de Loíza” (1935) over enhanced photograph (2008) of the Río Grande from 1,000 feet. Photo and image: David Sánchez
The River on Our Face
With el río grande~bravo
in our face
This river
at its mouth
at its source
With you at its source
its sources
With you at the snow
the evergreens
The million earth holes
of water emerging
emerald
Snakes, Gloria Anzaldúa's
grave
With this river
on our face
Neon green anole
swells its throat
pink-white
El río bravo~
grande on its face
Ocelots hunt
under six
foot shrub
canopies
With the drive
of the Continental Divide
with the pull
of tributaries
in their limbs
Chicharras
whining in the shade
river
in their timbals
Females laying eggs
in branches
The young border patrol officer
flashes sirens daily
lifts his gun
with the river
on his face
Upriver, Chihuahua
desert ancestors'
adobe bricks stand up
crumble down
With el río grande~bravo
on our face
You said you loved
the river
on my face
You said headwaters
the source
el río grande
rises from its source
saw the lines around
our mouths
saw adobe-brick lines
exposed
Monsoon season
granizo pelting
the facades
at its source
in my mouth
adobe mud
bricks in my mouth
the earth
holes, the sources
the snow
avalanches
granizo
Río Conchos de México
grandmothers'
Cueva de la Olla
at our face
Tarahumara
Rarámuri
Tidal confluences
in our face
Relatives
disappear
die detained
with tributaries
of many rivers on their face
In Ciudad Juárez, a mother hoped
her missing daughter
married a rich American
with the river far away
Constant helicopters finding heat
with the river as the source
To the west, crossers lift the tortilla
curtain
Walk deserts without water
on their face
Guanajuato ancestors crossed through Cali
with mirages
in their face
While
I shower daily
with el valle
river water on my face
Thank you and kiss you daily
Julia de Burgos
with el Río Grande de Loíza
Puerto Rico in your face
Julia
I can now speak of hurricanes
and being a dog at someone's feet
I remember El Paso's Inca doves
burrowing owls in the morning
barn owls in El Valle's cemeteries
great horned owl and mockingbirds
Harris hawks and pauraques
vecinos carrying signs
two communities
"¡No al muro!"
"¡Segundo Barrio no se vende!"
with the river on their face
A daughter and mother want their ashes
scattered
at Boca Chica
the river's mouth
the end, the start
another source
crabs collapsing
into bullets bursting out of holes
carrizo, bugambilia
seeds petals paper
rose
raspas
the mouth
the eddies
the tributaries
the flow
Río Conchos de México
the snow
granizo
the pelts
the sources
rising
The confluence
of people and god
tortugas
ribbon snakes in Roma
pigs and piglets jumping
from banks
with the river on their face
You can hear roosters
crowing across
the water in Miguel Alemán
Hurricanes
disturb unsettled graves
with the river in our face
You said you don't want archaic chains
lowering you loudly with obvious labor six feet in
You want to hear the cool chachalacas
with the river on their legs
flapping
from ébano to ébano
el chalán
the ropes
the pull
over green
water
under
blue sky
to Díaz Ordaz
I want to hear parrots
sabal palms
try again
With the river on our face
I want no medicine
no ambition
with the river in my face
I used to love you
with the river in my face
I still love you
when the river's on my face
I made a foot-deep grave
with the river on my face
I loved other rivers
with el río grande~bravo on my face
I want to oxbow lake
in this place where children still speak and lose
multiple tongues
in this place where we still lose and grow
forked tongues
this place where white herons hunt and drink in the resacas
this place with el río grande~bravo
in its pipes
in its lungs
in our face
“In divided times, Emmy Pérez’s voice speaks not only from America, but from the Americas, north and south. A wise, healing poetry.” —Sandra Cisneros
With the River on Our Face
By Emmy Pérez
University of Arizona Press, 2016
Solstice
By Emmy Pérez
Swan Scythe Press, 2020
