Boston Year

by Elizabeth Alexander

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

and always driving: to an Armenian market

in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots,

dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste

with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate

stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror.

The floors of my apartment would never come clean.

Whenever I saw other colored people

in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp,

smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke.

What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take

me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone

in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond

cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar.

Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted

from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese

man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me

orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red

sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre.

Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head.

I learned the samba from a Brazilian man

so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain

that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg.

No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter

readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman,

no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.

Read, listen, share, create, and be on watch.