It makes life easier to love what you already have, my partner said the other night when we were talking about a friend who is never satisfied. Easier, but not always easy. Sometimes I look back in time and wonder what would have become of me if I’d stayed in Vermont. If I’d studied poetry … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by George Kalogeris
An old plastic solar-powered calculator is one of my most precious belongings. It adds and subtracts and divides and multiplies and I use it all the time. My calculator lives in my travel backpack when I’m on the road, along with its cousins the extra charger, the UBS converter, the external battery, the spare sunglasses, … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Marjorie Saiser
Garvin, I hear your Queens accent, your quick, quiet hoarseness, your nervous chuckle. Christine, I hear those tiny golden bells chiming in your words and laughter. Zdrazil, I hear your deep tenor, your booming laugh, your fierce and solemn words in that last conversation. My people, I call you back. One after another I conjure … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Lauren K. Alleyne
The morning after the 2016 election I picked up a friend to do errands. My friend, who is Black, took one look at me and said Alison, what happened? What’s the matter? I looked at his puzzlement and worry with disbelief: What do you mean, what’s the matter? After a minute his face cleared and … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by David Whyte
It is impossible to be a woman, it is impossible to be a woman: a mantra I chant to myself at some point almost every day. This mantra is usually comforting, in a weird way, because it reminds me I didn’t make this suffocating, cruel, abusive system we live in, nor am I alone in … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Ginny Lowe Connors
The other day I recaulked my bathtub. Razored out the repulsive old caulk, chipped and dug, alcoholed and bleached. Cut the tip off the tube of new caulk but the caulk gun didn’t work and I couldn’t squeeze it out of the tube. So I razored open the tube, spooned the caulk into a little … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon
Most of the time you don’t know, in the moment itself, the moments that will return to you for the rest of your life. The look on your daughter’s face that day, the way his hand felt when he held yours on the train. You don’t know when a moment will be the last time … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by James Laughlin
This poem awes me every time I read it. It floats me up above the earth and outside of time and noise and sensation while thousands of years of humans and our endless struggles against ourselves and the planet play themselves out below. We cut down our forests to make ships on the seas, the … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Joshua Poteat
It was surprisingly easy to get, someone who never should have been able to buy a gun once mused to me, a sentence that still turns my body to ice. Last week at a Moth live show I sat in the front row the way I always do and watched warily as one of the … Continue reading (early) Poem of the Week, by Grant Clauser
This quote is from my novel All Rivers Flow to the Sea. It pops up here and there around the world, on Instagram pages and Pinterest boards, translated into various languages. It’s taken on a life of its own, one I couldn’t have predicted. But I do remember writing these words, how the sentences spun … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Eileen Sheehan
a journal of growth, change & experimentation
Reflections from an Older Perspective
Goodies from my mailbox and camera
Telling all sides of the parenting story
Waking Up to Your Dreams
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Alison McGhee 