Which also happens to be St. Patrick’s Day. I step into the bright buzz of Union Square. It’s only 2:30 in the afternoon, but I’m already nervous about the holiday activity that’s legendary in this city on March 17th. But most of my jitters fade away when I join the circle of fellow PUPers gathered at the Ghandi Statue. We head down into the station to hop on the Q train to Brooklyn. A dapper and highly decorated service man stands directly across from me. I tease the captain in a friendly banter about his ornaments, knowing that what was about to go down was probably going to be unlike anything he’d ever seen. I have a good feeling about this. There is already a sense of the unexpected in this car. The doors close. Anticipation on the part of the poets is palpable. Adam journeys us in deftly into the Q train’s flips and curves. Then comes the realization that we had entered...

The first to arrive, I wait at the base of the Gandhi statue and watch as this unexpected March warmth worked its magic through Union Square. We’re all a little more exposed today, offering stretches of previously shrouded skin to spring’s first bursts of sunshine. All too eager to expose enough of myself to don my first sundress of the season, I wasn’t feeling quite as easy about the way in which I was about to expose myself for the first time. There, in the midst of dodging the already drunk St. Patrick’s Day celebrators, I nervously sipped my iced coffee and tried to dodge my own fears. I was about to join the PUP team in breaking down the walls of the expected, breaking the accepted social contract between strangers on the train. One by one, the PUPs trickled into the park, and it was time to step into the subway and out of my comfort zone. I swallowed my last drop of coffee and...

Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me! On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose; And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. It all begins with Whitman.  Well, sort of. When we gathered around the Gandhi statue one April afternoon and offered the passengers of the Q train, poetry, we were met with some resistance. Then, the miraculous transformation followed, after Samantha offered her sweet reminisces of blackberries from the local grocery store in her island borne tongue, Adam danced as if all his cool depended on everything and Jon invited us to cleanest joint in...

  What is this difference between private and public verse? We were on a train—we were on many trains—and I remember the spell of Ngoma’s voice clearing away the clutter; it began the space; Samantha and Elana reciting Lucille Clifton in dual-voice began the space.I have been on NYC subways when the last thing I’ve wanted to do is acknowledge the humanity of the person next to me.Poetry is not for subways; it is better left in closed books:I have felt this way too many times, and yet, once in a while, I’ve crossed the field.Empathy is a poem on the Q Train.It’s the woman who takes off her headphones after Jon finishes and suggests a line.This is the strangest and most profound kind of revision:to give the poem as offering on a moving surface and then to receive—laughter, recognition, light. It was my second time as a PUP poet.I watched as Marcy snuck up from her seat and...