poets tell important stories

April 6, 2018 in poetry

Emmy Pérez is the author of With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press, 2016) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press, 2003 and 2011). Originally from Santa Ana, California, she earned her BA from the University of Southern California and her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been published in journals such as North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Mandorla, and Newfound;and in anthologies including Happiness: The Delight Tree (2015), New Border Voices: An Anthology (2014), A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line (2011), The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007), and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (forthcoming 2018).

Pérez has held writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. A CantoMundo fellow from 2010 to 2012, she has been an active member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop founded by Sandra Cisneros for socially engaged writers since 2008. She has been the recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, the James D. Phelan Award, and she has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2012, she was the recipient of a UT Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.

Pérez has also taught writing at the University of Texas at El Paso and in adult and juvenile detention centers. Currently, she is an associate professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs. She has lived on the U.S-Mexico border since 2000.

Not one more refugee death

BY EMMY PÉREZ

A river killed a man I loved,
And I love that river still

—María Meléndez

Thousands of fish killed after Pemex

spill in el Río Salado and everyone

runs out to buy more bottled water.

Here, our river kills more crossers

than the sun, than the singular

heat of Arizona, than the ranchlands

near 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—Leela.

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.

About Patti Digh

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.