By Emmy Pérez

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.

• Social Commentaries

Poet Bio

Emmy Pérez is originally from Santa Ana, California; she earned her BA from the University of Southern California and her MFA from Columbia University. 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. In 2012, she was the recipient of a UT Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. Pérez has 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.   See More By This Poet

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