poem excerpts
By Emmy Pérez
And this skin one of our organs
the largest always sings this indigeneity
detribalized by no decision of our own
in the ranges of malachite
butterflies the same color as the river
where we stretch our legs between
strip malls & stripped earth:
Falfurrias checkpoint to our north
walls el río Reynosa bridge to our south
the east the river’s mouth & the Gulf.
West to Falcon Dam. Use wings
* * *
And even el paletero twines a cross of palm
leaves to his cart & youth devour
brilliant paletas de coco y fresa
as church bells ring I remember
my mother saying her father
handed her straw crosses
he wove as she spoke two small
children by her side
in her last visit to adobe homes before
he died. And I wonder how soon it was
when we started to get allergic
to pollen & dust & rejected
binarizing Tonantzines though it was all
between spelled out & implied I imagine
this tongue rests coiled like a caracol
alive in its shell ready to roll out
at first like a cartoon
carpet until everyone stepping
on my words with talones y tacones
flats Midwestern
cowboy boots with old gum
on the bottoms defending
the state that pays them
walks the fuck off Yes
I’m talking about you.
***
Time stamps mark our
seasons with protests When
they say no you say yes DACA yes
Clean DREAM Act Now Here to Stay
When they say yes you say no.
Keep your ICE-y
hands off El Valle’s
people and land.
Still, how can we compete at national
with overseas troll factories
cranking out memes that speak to Ted Cruz Texans
They say they didn’t get his Wall
but still new ones have been funded
properties will be condemned
communities destroyed A few builders
will laugh all the way to the piggy
get second honeymoons extra
cars And now they’re sending
the National Guard
like the Marines who hunted high school student
& part-time goatherd RIP Ezequiel Hernandez
***
But they already lost
the charge that Demetria’s poem
was evidence of smuggling that Lorna’s
Librotraficante speech in front of the Alamo
on YouTube might help a Chicanita
finish her homework that Celina’s poem on Neta
for DACAmented youth has exceeded the amount
of expected views for a Tejana from Edinburgo
***
The respite center here is filled with smiling & some crying
brown faces relieved because they made it
they made it they made it
Emmy Pérez is a Chicana poet and writer originally from Santa Ana, California. She has lived on the Texas-Mexico border, from El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley (where she currently lives), since the year 2000. A graduate of Columbia University (MFA) and the University of Southern California (BA), she is the author of the poetry collections With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press). Pérez is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. In previous years, she was a recipient of poetry fellowships from CantoMundo, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has also received the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award for her poetry and the James D. Phelan Award for her prose writing. Since 2008, she has been a member of the Macondo Writers' Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros for socially engaged writers. Pérez’s poetry has been published in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series and appears on the Poetry Foundation online. Her work has also been published in journals such as Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, PALABRA: A Magazine of Chicano & Latino Literary Art, and other publications, including the anthologies Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday), Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature & Art (University of Texas Press), New Border Voices: An Anthology(Texas A&M Press), and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press). She has work forthcoming in the anthology Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press). Over the years, she has served as a writing mentor and workshop facilitator at detention centers in New Mexico, El Paso, and the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. She has also taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and El Paso Community College. In 2004-2005, she was a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at UTEP, and served as visiting director of the West Texas Writing Project 2005. In 2006, she began a tenure-track position in creative writing at the University of Texas-Pan American, a legacy institution for present-day University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), where she currently is an associate professor in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs.
