come from (New Poets of America, 56) - Tapa blanda

Acerca de los autores

janan alexandra is the daughter of a Lebanese mother and a Beirut-born American father. Her life has been nothing if not peripatetic, with roots scattered in Cyprus, Pakistan, Lebanon, and many corners of the U.S. Since 2015 she has taught creative writing in community-based literacy centers and schools, working with young folks in Los Angeles, Maine, Washington DC, and Southern Indiana. A 2021-2022 Creative Research Fulbright Scholar, janan has also received support from the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. You can read some of her work in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, Mizna, and elsewhere in print and online. Most recently, janan currently lives in Bloomington, IN.

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Come From

if we do not speak

in the night     in the kitchen

here leaning over the starrycounter

like two hunched sunflowers

if we do not stand     stooped

like this     picking at cold lasagna

which is neither the food

of your country     nor my own

how will we carry this tin pail

sloshing     with the question

can you imagine walking

into a softly lit room

in the world & feeling

hereiam, homewithallofyou?

to be known in the arithmetic

of belonging     we follow

an order     of operations

we do the math

    enough     & not enough.

what are you     really really?

    from from?

really we are     the field

in each other’s eyes

we hope     to die surrounded    

by our own languages—