miCRo: “Spring Semester” by Amy M. Alvarez

Associate Editor Lisa Low: Amy M. Alvarez’s “Spring Semester,” set at the beginning of a school day, opens with a sense of newness: the season, the day, and a teenager’s new red leather jacket. But just as “spring semester” is itself a simplified turn of phrase, referring to a period of time that usually includes winter too, the poem’s landscape and “the lanky brown boy” in front of the speaker are also much more than their first impressions. Throughout the poem, the landscape gives context to racial violence, and the tenderness in the speaker’s way of seeing becomes a necessary act. 

To hear Amy read the poem, click below:

Spring Semester

The lanky brown boy who walks ahead of me
wears a red leather jacket so new I can hear it creaking.
Hip hop rasps tinny through his oversize headphones.

His head bobs as the music comes to the place
where he thinks he knows the words and lets spill:
Shots fall, man down—it’s a homicide. He mumbles
as these lyrics fade, a brutal half-haiku.

These are the last words he will utter
before he slips through the blue doors
ahead, begins another day of high school.

Red buds push from maple branches. We
tread over ice and salt. Our path
is narrow—slick and steep.

Amy M. Alvarez is a Black Latinx poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has won fellowships from CantoMundo, VONA, Macondo, and VCCA. Originally from Queens, New York, Amy lives and teaches in Morgantown, West Virginia.

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