Alexis Ivy

Arrival Form

                                   erasure from Government Questionnaire, Ellis Island

            Manifest how 
                      you are.
                      Are you 
                                    at last    placed?

            Name      your country 
                                             as your    destination. 
                                                        Is your passage
                                                                      America n?

                                                          Are you 
                                                                        a yes     or no?

                                                                                     What     America 
                                                                                                    will you     form?

                                                                                                     All is yours. 
                                                                                                                  Color     your eyes.
                                                                                     Do you 
                                                                                                     Identify                     ?

 

Twenty Miles from Mexico

I am a flag 
        I stand for 
              water, I wave a faucet 
                            with one drop.

                            I am blue 
where nothing but sky is blue. 

              I wear the wind.  I tell people
                            come here, survive! 
  All I have is light, 
              holes of light, 

                            I am 
                            jumbled, un-symboled.
              The desert rips me apart
              I am eaten up by the desert.

A young woman drinks drinks      drinks.  
                                                     An American boy
                            shoots slurred, Stay the fuck out 
                            of my country

                            Where I fly 
doesn’t feel like anyone’s 
                                      country.

 

Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Saranac Review, Poet Lore, and Sugar House Review. She is an advocate for the homeless in her hometown, Boston.

 

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