janan alexandra ’13
Alumnae Poet
janan alexandra is the author of COME FROM (BOA Editions, 2025). A recipient of the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, janan has also received support from the Vermont Studio Center, the Fulbright Program, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Her work appears widely online and in print, and she’s honored to have contributed poems to two gorgeous anthologies, We Call to the Eye & the Night and A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia. janan currently teaches at Indiana University, edits poetry for The Rumpus, and plays fiddle in a folk duo called Sweet May Dews.
Select Poems
I declare it a day of pleasure.
My flag says, Play. Sing a little song.
Says, Travel along.
I wave my flag made of dirt
and snow-dipped trees. It softens
in the rain, new letters forming
to say, Free. Can you see it?
I pledge allegiance. I’m keeping a ledger,
precious measure, seeking daylight
for the world-dark brain, hoping
this might be the break between
grief & rage. Landing softly all night.
What is pleasurable? When the body
can lie on uncratered ground. Touching my own
feet. My love’s warm hands like a spoon rest.
The roundness of the word spouse
and how it suggests sparrow and house,
all of which now have a home here.
What is sure to please? Havingahomehere.
Finding a bluish feather in the hushed
meadow. Gazing out the window.
To live each day without shrapnel
in the dictionary, in the air, with no
possibility of shrapnel in the calf, in the ear.
Call me naive, I won’t care.
War backwards is raw. I repeat:
What is pleasurable?
There’s no square but repair. No eye
no tooth. Hand on your heart. No nation
I declare but being together.
No bombing campaign. Try a songbird
campaign. Make way for the grass
-child and sea-child and child of rain.
This poem appears in AGNI (100th anniversary issue, fall 2024)