Friday means a poetry party at sepia this month. To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets all month long [catch up on past week’s poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Shailja Patel]. Today’s featured work is “Corona, Queens,” by Bushra Rehman, a bi-coastal, Pakistani-American poet whose words sing of place, family, religion, and identity with an honest, insightful, and poignant sensibility.

A few years ago, the Bowery Poetry Club and City Lore asked a bunch of NYC poets to write an epic poem about New York. Bushra was one of them, and of course, she wrote about Corona, Queens, the neighborhood where she lived as a child.

Corona, Queens

Fitzgerald called Corona the valley of ashes
when the Great Gatsby drove past it, but
we didn’t know about any valley of ashes
because by then it had been topped off by our houses,
the kind made from brick this tan color,
no self-respecting brick would be at all.

We knew Corona,
home of World’s Fair relics
where it felt as if some ancient tribe
of white people had lived there long ago.
It was our own Stonehenge,
our own Easter Island sculptures
made from a time when New York City
and all the country
was imagining the world’s future.

Back when the future still seemed exciting and glossy,
like some kind of old stainless steel science fiction movie, not now
when the future seems like the inside of a dark coat sleeve.

We knew Corona,
under the shadow of Shea Stadium
where brown men became famous
and moved to Long Island
where our brothers played baseball
in the tar school yards on the weekends.

Back then, our brothers’ futures
were so open and they were so close,
they all dreamed the same dream together.
That with the crack of a bat
and the pull of their skinny brown legs
they could run away from the smell of garbage,
the fear on the streets,
the boys beating them up
when they came out of the masjid in the evening.

They could hit with that bat
and it would land them
all the way into the safety of Shea Stadium
and then past that,
into the island that was long and rich
where all the baseball stars lived.

[A version of this poem appeared in the NY Times in April 1996.]

I’ve said this before: I like to pair literary and artistic selections the way people pair wine and cheese, so when I read this poem, it seemed to me a perfect accompaniment to Crossing the Blvd: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America, a critically acclaimed book and multimedia exhibit which is currently showing at Queens College through June 28 [details]

… When I think of Bushra’s poem, it speaks directly to Crossing the Blvd [check out the interactive website and submit your own ‘Crossings Story’ which focuses on Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. As the authors and artists Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer put it so well:

“Home of New York airports, Queens, ‘the modern day Ellis Island’ is no longer made up of neatly partitioned ethnic enclaves. Today, the choreography of Queens, a place where residents speak 138 different languages, is one of chaotic co-existence. This group portrait of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community [of new immigrants and refugees] is a magnifying glass for the future of America.”

“Corona, Queens” to me is a poem of place, but it’s also a poem of dreams – what are the dreams of immigrants? And, how does the physical place where we live assume those dreams? The images–of the Great Gatsby, the World Fair, Shea Stadium, the corner masjid, and the future that is the “inside of a dark coat sleeve” (a powerful metaphor for a post 9/11 America)–they all sit with me. Each tells its own story of the American Dream and perhaps even prompts us to think about the neighborhood where we grew up as immigrant kids, or as children of immigrants, or where we have arrived at as adults …

I’d love to hear some of those stories or memories that this poem might stir up.