The years before my grandmother’s ascent,
each week a trip, my father’s hand would steer.
Her small apartment wedged inside the steel
tenth-floor suburban tenement, intent
to be a box for those we loved to die.
I asked my father why, rebuked silence.
A plan to die, her brave gift, defiant.(More …)
Benjamin Alfaro
Benjamin Alfaro is a writer and educator from Michigan. He is a 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow and the co-author of Home Court (Red Beard, 2014). His work was anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and has appeared or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Duende, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He has also appeared on the HBO Original Series Brave New Voices, Yahoo!’s Cities Rising: Rebuilding America, and Michigan Public Radio. His chapbook, Fantasma, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.