Two spots open in our Freedom of Form workshop tomorrow, and five spots each in our two remaining one-day creative writing workshops next month – I’d love to see you there. Check them out here.

Me talking to me: Alison! For God’s sake, respond to all those piled-up emails. Clean up the kitchen. Teach yourself the WWI history you never learned. Scrub the tub, re-learn all those Chinese characters, get busy studying Spanish, go to bed at a reasonable hour, get up early and go straight to work. Alison! Do this do that do better!

But sometimes I don’t want to do better. Sometimes I just want to stay up late and make a martini and turn off all the lights and dance around my living room and dining room to loud music while the sly curvy lines of this poem spin round and round and round in my head.

Late Night Poem, by Hailey Leithauser

Better to risk, she says,
the whiskey’s wheeze
and the throttle’s urge
and a blonde
with curves
like tennis serves
than to wait as a sheep
for the chilling nap,
the buttoned breeze,
the pallid tap
of an autumn moth,
kept safe by glass
from the candle’s breath.

For more information about Hailey Leithauser, please check out her website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast