Poem of the Week, by Sabine Miller
Please help me be a good teacher today. Please help me bring kindness and clarity and joy. Please help me heal and never hurt. This is one version of an ongoing prayer that unreligious me invokes before I walk into the door of every classroom I teach. It is tough, tough going these days, for so many of us. We feel ourselves, our families, our friends to be under direct attack from our own elected employees. We fear the crumbling of a great, flawed, ugly and beautiful democracy. But hopelessness is not an option. When the terror and outrage threaten to paralyze me I think about the decades I have spent teaching. I think about how energy –my own energy, one single scrawny human being’s energy– can change the feel of an entire room. Exhausted, grieving, in despair, it doesn’t matter; stand outside that room and vow to be and to project energy and kindness and connection. The air in the room will change. You can literally feel it. Every moment of every day you can bring people down or you can lift them up –you, one small person– by the energy you project. We choose what we want our lives to mean, and what we want to leave behind. We have the power to write our own stories. Remember that.
Story, by Sabine Miller
Tell me the one
about the sick girl —
not terminally ill, just years in bed
with this mysterious fever —
who hires a man
to murder her — you know,
so the family is spared
the blight of a suicide —
and the man comes
in the night, a strong man,
and nothing is spoken
—he takes the pillow
to her face — tell me
how he is haunted the rest
of his life — did he
or didn’t he
do the right thing — tell me
how he is forgiven,
and marries, and has
2 daughters, and is happy —
no, tell me she doesn’t
die, but is cured and
gives her life to God,
and becomes a hand-holder for
men on death row —
tell me the one where the man
falls in love with the girl
and can’t do it, or
the girl falls in love
with a dog and calls
the man to tell him
not to come, or
how each sees their pain
mirrored in the other’s eyes —
tell me how everyone has already
forgiven every story
they ever told themselves
about living
or not living —
tell me, oh tell me
the one where love wins, again
and again and again.
Sabine Miller is a writer, visual artist, and qigong practitioner. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Haiku 2013, Lilliput Review, Modern Haiku, Solitary Plover, The Red Moon Anthology, Contemporary Haibun, and Mariposa.
Once I had a friend who shared my love of strong flavors. We would buy things like kimchee and Limburger cheese and pesto that was mostly garlic and sit at the small kitchen table in the 4th-floor walkup I shared with my sister eating it. You two and your stinky food!, my sister would say, and she was right. Intensity is a good thing when it comes to food. And gin, the kind where you can taste all the plants and flowers and life that’s been infused into it: bay and juniper and sage, dry sunshine air. “Whatever’s your most botanical,” is what I say to the bartender when they ask. I don’t care if there’s a heaven and I don’t believe anyone who tells me there are rules for getting into it, because why does it matter? This is the world we live in. This is our hell and our heaven, this world right here, the one with the Limburger and the pesto and the St. George terroir. Which is why I love this poem, by the great Kim Addonizio, a woman who has never been afraid of strong flavors.
This poem keeps drawing me to it, or it to me, and I don’t know why. The last two lines come back to me when I wake up at night, or sometimes when I’ve been walking or hiking for a long time. I don’t know where I found this poem, or where it found me. Sometimes when I read it, the hard times, I feel like a child who doesn’t know what she did wrong, why she’s being yelled at, a child who would do anything to be better and to make it better. Other times I feel a huge relief, a letting-go, as though the you in the poem, in the ending three lines, has finally found me and I don’t have to keep trying anymore. 
Alison McGhee 