Alexandra Watson
Winter 2022 Edition / Poetry
Keep Your Head Up
Alexandra Watson
Keep Your Head Up
Grandma says you have
only 1 skin it will scar
Keep your head up
as in look
on the bright side
and/or
Look out
Take your headphones out
Don’t walk through [X] alone
Keep your head up
on the bright side
in the park
on the 2 train
2pac said
things get
easier.
Branching paths
way to go wrong
back straight turn
to turn around again
right to know wrong
L o o p
O O
L o o p
Central Park
an ampersand
keeps losing me
back around
the loop again.
For a while
after
the murder
I walk alone
& defiant
through
the park
Get drunk
enough
to put
my bad bitch
stomp on
& play
the music
loud
accompany
myself
through
the dark
underpass.
If you know the grid
don’t ask
don’t look
don’t be
the 1 who
don’t belong
Fuck wearing a bra & avoiding
Morningside Park &
decency!!!
I can’t stand
to be respectable
in Astor Park
rail thin whitegirls
don bandanna shirts
& no one gawks.
My dress shows nipples.
One points up, one down.
I walk to my aunt’s
on 115th at dusk
in a summer hot
as blood. The boys
could be my nephews
could be my sons.
weird
to begin
the loop
loop to
begin the
weird
When I emerge
from underground
check signs
check angle of light
the grid.
North is up
West where the page begins.
Drunk in Marcus Garvey
where the men call
me out of my name.
Keep my head up
pluck my eyes out
don’t let them see
green pockets
shut clutch
don’t stumble.
A head a mighty
heavy thing to
keep up hold up
The H a bridge a waist
The H in Head rolls
off the body off
the tongue
and when
you’re down
the world has
got you
down
keep your head up
keep your
head up keep
your head up
keep your head
up keep your
Alexandra Watson is a co-founder and executive editor of Apogee Journal, a publication providing a platform for historically excluded artists and writers. She’s the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Nora Magid Prize for Literary Magazine editing. She is a Lecturer in the First-Year Writing program at Barnard College, where she has received a Provost's Innovative Teaching Grant. Her fiction, poetry, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, The Common, The Bennington Review, The Rumpus, Yes Poetry, Nat. Brut., Breadcrumbs, Redivider, PANK, Lit Hub, Apogee, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for community arts programming. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts.