Poem of the Week, by Danez Smith
I’m thinking of the man in the white shirt and the black pants, the one holding a briefcase, who stepped in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and stood there. I’m thinking of the girl in the long dress, the one who slid a flower into the barrel of the gun the officer had trained on her. I’m thinking of the woman who began a conversation with and ended up becoming a second mother to the boy who murdered her own son. I’m thinking of this tiny beautiful prayer by Danez Smith. A new year to all. May ruin end here.
Little Prayer
– Danez Smith
let ruin end here
let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter
let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs
let this be the healing
& if not let it be
“It was a time like this. . . when all things fall apart.”
A house I used to live in was filled with a dark and ominous energy that I felt every time I approached the front door. When I dreamed, dark birds hovered silently in the air around me, landing on my shoulders and head. The dark birds wanted me — they wanted me dead. I lived in a state of permanent exhaustion, surrounded by the forces of darkness. 
Hey there, elected employees, thanks for an especially sickening week. Proud of yourselves and your ongoing attempts to destroy our democracy? 
This semester I taught a class about creative writers, identity and race. Forty students of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and race sat in a huge square in an underground room in a building next to the train tracks midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. We were strangers to each other. On the first day of class, I gave them a writing-from-life prompt. They wrote quickly and in silence, then some of them read their pieces aloud. The class is over now, and in their final paper, one student wrote of that first day, back in August, 
When my children were tiny they went to a neighborhood preschool two or three mornings a week. It was a gentle place, taught by lovely teachers who never got upset if a glass of milk was toppled or if someone broke a crayon. There was a dress-up corner, a story-time corner, a Lego corner. In nice weather the kids went outside and worked and played in a flower garden the school had created along a biking and walking path. 
When my son was a year and a half he came down with a stomach flu. After a couple of days the vomiting and diarrhea had calmed down, but he was quiet and listless. I wasn’t terribly worried but something told me to take him to the clinic, so I did. His doctor examined him in the little bright-lit room the same way I had grown used to, with calm and gentleness. I trusted this doctor completely and instinctively the minute I met him. He was older, small and lean, with wise eyes. 
After a reading from my new novel 
Alison McGhee 