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[magic needed] EMMY PÉREZ Magic needed. A letter to Lorca. Outerspace aliens to help me translate. A letter I write and sign by Lorca to introduce my poems. Love poems to the beloved. Lorca or Gloria or Spicer needed in the absence of a beloved. Someone who understands María Sabina’s wisdom. A chachalaca as a pet. A glass of water for the dead, to help them in their journey crossing. The dead and the not-yet-dead. What could I offer except a glass or gallon of filtered riverwater in the deserts. Dark ruby tunas needed, easy to cut from the tops of cactus paddles. Life offers its appendages. I want to trim drooping tree limbs before hurricane season, before we mourn their violent losses. But white-winged doves have their nests in the branches. Nighthawks visit. Bats. Bats swoop through the neighborhood streets. Once, I was attacked by a snake and a bat—my beloved totems—in a dream. Real visceral pain in my thigh and neck woke me up. The border wall isn’t coming down. It woke me up. It keeps rising. It put me into a deep sleep, a sleep that wanted to open The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. And Sappho’s chickpeas grow on the riverbanks. * Sappho’s line “and gold chickpeas were growing on the banks” is in If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson (New York: Knopf, 2002). ♦ ♦ ♦ ...

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