On Green Light Go by Emmy Perez
By Tarfia Faizullah
Hi, I’m Tarfia Faizullah, here again for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m excited to share a poem with you by Emmy Perez, a poet I fiercely admire and look up to.
Emmy Pérez’s Paper america: New and Selected Poems was published in March 2026 (TCU Press, Texas Poet Laureate Series). She is also the author of Boxes with Zero Tolerance, With the River on Our Face, and Solstice. Her work also appears in important and essential anthologies such as Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage..., and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, a terrific anthology full of poets concerned about the environmental state of the world.
A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and co-founder of Poets Against Walls collective, she is a past recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the Academy of American Poets (poets laureate fellowship), the NEA, and CantoMundo. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Texas in Rio Grande Valley, where today’s poem partly takes place, though as you’ll soon see, this poem travels in ways that both defy and encompass time and space.
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. |
Used with permission
Whew. There is some indescribable quality in Emmy Perez’s poems that I find breathtakingly arresting, and this poem is no exception. Some poems are so unique and transcendent, so utterly themselves, that trying to find the words to describe the effects they create feels a bit redundant. I love this poem for the experience it creates…one that is post-language, despite being a poem that is of course composed of language. I think what I mean is that language at some point becomes pure image. This poem is like a painting in a museum that you find yourself standing before without completely understanding why or how it draws you in, just that it does, and you stand there gazing at and through what it conjures: some ancient and rich feeling.
This poem feels painterly, too, in its formal choice: the prose poem. The prose poem here serves as a formal frame visually in that it creates a boxy container for the poem’s contents, which are highly imagistic, which enhances that painterly feeling. I love the way this poem directs my gaze towards richly chaotic landscapes while also spotlighting individual images and objects in it. Spotlighting seems an appropriate word because this poem is filled with multiple kinds of light generated by multiple sources.
We begin with a disco ball dangling in a window in the sun–and if that isn’t enough multi-faceted light, the disco ball is in a cage. I like how this disco ball in a cage in a window in the sun could be anywhere, but in the next sentence, that original disco ball is joined by more disco balls, and all of them are in McAllen, Texas, which is in the Valley, as that region of Texas is called informally. I admire the specific naming of this Texas town. One other feature that is worth noting about the Valley is that it is culturally and linguistically bilingual. As a border community, inhabitants are typically fluent in both Spanish and English.
Let’s turn back to the light, this time in spangles, and then in tangerine skins that are the poet’s visual for the way sunlight reflects on water–wow, what an image!-- then we are outside, observing the same mirrors we saw in the disco ball in nature, in the hexagons of bee hives. And then we are in another downtown, this one in Corpus Christi, a coastal Texas town. I love the way this poem creates an unlikely hallway or portal from one downtown to another–I love the way these two Texas downtowns are joined so seamlessly within a matter of sentences. Then we are back in the Valley, with more light: an orange sun, this time at Gloria Anzaldua’s grave. Anzaldua, for those who may not know, was a beloved scholar of Chicana feminism and cultural theory, as well as the author of the essential book Borderlands/Frontera. The mention of Anzaldua, who was both from the Valley and buried there, feels crucial–-Perez has created a poem that is also a kind of temple, a place filled with light where a cherished ancestor can be venerated, there in the landscape in which she was born and in death, was returned.
I could go on, after my concern that I could not conjure any insights adequate enough for this beautiful poem, but I will close by saying that the rest of the poem is filled with objects that are deeply recognizable and familiar, perhaps even comforting, to those who know: Mexican coke bottles, loteria cards, an abandoned sink in a yard. In Perez’s hands, though, these commonplace objects are transformed into pure art, even more so because they are set against the backdrop of the border between Texas and Mexico. In this way, the poem transcends itself into becoming an artifact: a living and vivid archive of one witness’s careful and caring gaze.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). Her writing appears widely both in the United States and abroad and has been translated into several languages. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Arts & Letters, a US Artists Fellowship, and other honors. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.https://www.tfaizullah.com/tarfia/
FEATURED POET
EMMY PEREZ Emmy Pérez’s Paper america: New and Selected Poems was published in March 2026 (TCU Press, Texas Poet Laureate Series). She is also the author of Boxes with Zero Tolerance, With the River on Our Face, and Solstice. Her work also appears in anthologies such as Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage..., and Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. A member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and co-founder of Poets Against Walls collective, she is a past recipient of fellowships from United States Artists, the Academy of American Poets (poets laureate fellowship), the NEA, and CantoMundo.
