Emmy Pérez

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 rivers 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 Some crossed with nuns during la revolución el río bravo~grande on their 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 stil 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 oxbox lake in this place where children stil 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

Yellow pines    No ever    no green    except where stems brown needles green    I walk on the wooden train    The fall’s water you swam in one cold morning    What you braved    That ice path    A horse fence    Where fences are horses with long hair    I braid the tale of the fall of stables Four paws touch dirt    stirring a flirt of sky a bundle of rare    You bundle into stables    I open with sandy tongue taste the grain of barkwater I look at myself in a mirror of weather Rain trenzas    Dirt cups us    We drink & spin like tornillos    A swallow’s nest    like an adobe tornado    Shit & mud & feathers & forming pitchfork claws Eggshells gone    We rest in the ocean smalls the pink throat The back door is also the front    The only smoke hole    Feathers rise & we follow

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, 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. 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.

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.