“Crossroad”

Boston Review, April 23, 2017

Click the link below to read the poem on the Boston Review website

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/meena-alexander-crossroad

Note
The opening stanzas are set at the crossroad outside the Graduate Center where I work — 34 th and Fifth in New York City. This was soon after the presidential election — stuck at the barricades I saw a procession of bikers, in leather and metal with American flags flying. As a brown woman, an immigrant, I felt so terribly marked. In my mind’s eye I saw the great Indian writer Mahasweta Devi, spectral now, coming to the crossroad to give me courage. The poem travels in inner space and crosses the disparate geographies that compose me. Its only in the shining space of the imagination that these worlds stitch together — something the poem allows me to do.I read out an earlier version of this poem on the steps of New York Public Library as part of the PEN America Writers Resist Rally, January 15, 2017.