Elizabeth Alexander Poems

Looking at the photograph is somehow not
unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low
on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray
...

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys
tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window,
open to ask directions. I was always asking directions
...

I am the last woman off of the plane
that has crashed in a cornfield near Philly,
...

tra
dition
wanes
I read
...

According to Mister Hedges, the custodian
who called upon their parents
after young Otwiner and young Julia
...

Now is the time of year when bees are wild
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants
...

Sylvia Plath is setting my hair
on rollers made from orange-juice cans.
The hairdo is shaped like a pyre.
...

I've been eating
like a sultan
since I was two days old.
...

My head so big
they had to pry
...

Fish-man comes with trout and fresh crabs:
"Live! They live crabs! They live crabs!"
Bars called "Watutsi." "Pony-Tail."
...