Fernando Perez is a 27-year-old poet from Long Beach, Calif. He currently attends Arizona State University and is working towards an MFA in Creative Writing and completing a manuscript of poetry. He’s been writing poetry for 14 years and says it is something he feels compelled to do.

By FERNANDO PEREZ
Observer Contributor
OCT. 4, 2007

Kick-the-Can

On Josie Ave, our brick porch was jail,
If your hiding spot wasn’t good enough.
It gave you time to think about where to run if you were freed.
A couple feet from prison stood your emancipation,
A Folgers coffee can placed upside down.

The most important rule was that you had to stay within the culdesac,
You ended up hiding behind the magnolia trees most times,
Squatting next to mom’s dented dodge caravan,
Or standing out in broad daylight, if you had guts, and speed for that matter.
After dinner the neighborhood burst from stillness to a trumpeting, “Not it…Not it…You’re it.”

Summer, around the time when orange and yellow light filtered the air.
The count, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three…”
If found, your feet were your salvation,
Running around until you tired, onto neighbors lawns,
Over front yard fences, sometimes exposing other hiding spots,

You were tagged, always at least once,
Forced to drag your shoes, head down, all the way to our brick porch,
Sometimes serving a two-minute sentence,
While the rest of the neighborhood remained in hiding,
Two whole minutes thirsting to be free,
Hoping that someone was hiding in the garage, behind the garbage cans,
On the other side of the fence,
So that they, confronting their fear,
Would burst from refuge, run by, and kick the can.

What She Finds in Running

Air becomes a curtain, sepia through evening eyes.
A siren mosquitoes awaken to,
Those gum-sellers hustle a few more packs in the plaza,
The world is closing and walking,

Against the hard surface of cobble stone courtyard,
A canvas purse clinging to the side of square hips,
She plays fútbol,
She tries to forget morning,
Smiling as she runs
Holding on to sweat from foreign lands,
A foreign tongue in her mouth.

The ball’s bounce knocks on church doors,
She runs to meet it as it rolls down steps,
This motion, a curious dance between stone and skin,
Underneath palm trees, a gazebo,
People watch her music from the plaza,
A trumpet’s wind floats along the strum of an unfamiliar song,

The air becomes a gray quilt she wraps herself in,
In the lonely morning, she will rise with mosquito bites on her legs,
She will run.

East Los Angeles

You were just a child when the sun learned to paint
The afternoon asphalt.
Three dots tattooed your left hand,
You held broken keys,
Unlocking latches to your hollow home,
Running there to catch up to yourself,
To receive empty beatings trapped in fur coats,
Taken black and whites of this little girl,
Lost in pachuco ways,

Palm tree rows down Bradshaw sheltered
You from an absent parent,
There, my mother’s clothes hang drenched
On your mother’s line,
A borrowed burden spoken
In Spanglish, spoken in your language.

Your unwillingness to run,
Away from the inescapable has chiseled you,
A putty mold pressed into the soft of Athena’s hands.

The Impression Air Makes

It poured on Tuesday like Arizona summer
My thoughts mixing with monsoon
As I ran to rid myself of them,
To confuse myself with sweat and rain
Down paths that lead to unpromised relief
From paintings appearing on red rock,
Flashing images
Running with me to the mountain,
I stopping to breathe
Feeling the sword stabbed in my side,
The shortness of breath my lungs remember
Of times she wanted to smoke so I bought a pack.
Skin dehydrated from the lack of her
Touch and the imprint of her heart in mind,
Never mine