Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Lydia Davis

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A few years ago my friend J sent me this poem, with the subject line Have you seen this? No, I wrote back, I have never in my life read this poem and how did I not know that Lydia Davis (who’s a genius of the short story) also wrote poetry? Later that night, J and I talked about the poem on the phone. We weren’t really talking about the poem, though, because what is there to say about it beyond This is life and this is life and this is life.

J and I have been friends for nearly our entire adult lives at this point, and we have seen each other through, with through standing in for those times when you don’t know how you will make it through. Once, many years ago now, during a time when I could barely make it off the couch, J and her husband showed up unbidden at my front door. Pack a bag, they said, you’re coming to stay with us for a while. And I packed a bag and went to stay with them for a while, and they fed me and watched over me and waited until I could function again. Sometimes my phone blinks with J’s name and a feeling comes over me: answer it. And in the silence between my hello and her first words is weight and pain.

We know how to help each other through, is what I’m trying to say. We all need someone to help us through. It doesn’t matter how long you live, heart is still and always will be so new. 

Head, Heart, by Lydia Davis

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love.  They will all go.  But
even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of
heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head.  Help heart.

For more information on Lydia Davis, please click here.

(Note: this post and poem originally appeared here in 2017.)
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kevin Hart

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It’s been wildly snowy here in Minneapolis in a way that brings me straight back to childhood in far upstate New York, where we lived so far out in the country that the only lights at night were the ones inside our house.

If you went outside and looked up on a clear night, the sky wasn’t dark. It was a field of diamonds, strewn so thick that sometimes stars blurred into each other. You could see the Milky Way and sometimes the northern lights. On winter nights, if it were snowing –and it was always snowing, there in the foothills of the Adirondacks–those stars spun their way down to earth in the form of snowflakes.

This past week in the city brought childhood back to me. Endless shoveling. Laughing with my neighbors about where can we possibly put all this snow. The mesmerizing beauty of tree limbs weighted with snow. The hush. The calm. The stillness.

Snow, by Kevin Hart

Some days
the snow has taken me in
to know the time of snow, to live
inside a world so quiet

its music
is all a shimmering. Some evenings
when quite alone
I turn off every light

and watch the snow
enjoy the dark, moving lushly
through spiky air,
finding more time

in time
than when I stretch myself
and am
my father’s father. Oh yes,

there is
a sparkling choir, there surely is,
and dark ice air
through which we fall.

Click here for more information about Kevin Hart.

alisonmcghee.com

My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Joy Harjo

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Five openings left in the Zoom room, January 7-13, in our first-ever, informal, kick off the new year with joy and freedom Write Together session! Seven days of morning and evening prompts, join in for any or all. Each session recorded in case you miss one. Click here for all the details.

A long time ago, acting on instinct, I took a little piece of scrap paper and wrote “People You Can Call” at the top of it. Whichever name came to me, I jotted down, even if it were somehow surprising, like a friend I hardly ever talked to, someone I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. My dog’s name came to me and I added that to the list too.

For better and for worse I don’t belong to many groups. My sense of solidarity and community is often invisible, made of words like these words, small lights strung along a meandering, imaginary path. Looking at my list was comforting. These names had shimmered up easily, and somehow this meant they could help me call my spirit back from its wandering, as if it were a beloved child.

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet (excerpt), by Joy Harjo

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark. ​

Click here for more information about U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Mary Oliver

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Nine openings left in the Zoom room, January 7-13, in our first-ever, informal, kick off the new year with joy and freedom Write Together session! Seven days of morning and evening prompts, join in for any or all. Each session recorded in case you miss one. Click here for all the details. 

If you ask a group of people to name a favorite poet, the name Mary Oliver will pop up within seconds. And with good reason. A few of her poems mean so much to me that I long ago memorized them, the better to weave myself an invisible, always-there blanket of comfort.

This poem goes out today to everyone living with loneliness through the holidays. Maybe your marriage ended this year, or you lost someone dear to you from death or estrangement. Maybe you don’t know how you’re going to pay your rent next month. Maybe you or someone you love got bad news from a doctor. Maybe you keep listening for the sound of your dog when you put your key in the front door. Maybe you’re surrounded with friends and family and still, somehow, you feel like crying.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, this poem–and every poem of the week–is my offering to you.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

​Click here for more information about ​Mary Oliver.
​
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by John Okrent

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’d love to see you in the Zoom room, January 7-13, in our first-ever, informal, kick off the new year with joy and freedom Write Together session! Seven days of morning and evening prompts, join in for any or all. Each session recorded in case you miss one. Click here for all the details.

Yesterday I went to my neighborhood post office for the first time since it was rebuilt. It’s been a long three years and I was so happy to see Fred back at his station. Fred is the greatest postal clerk in the history of the world: so funny, so endearing, so full of smiles and quips and zippy repartee.

I was afraid he’d retired but nope, there he was, making everyone’s day better, in the same way that Elizabeth, my favorite grocery story cashier, makes my life better. “How are YOU?” she will say when I haven’t been shopping in a while. “I see you’re baking again today, aren’t you?”

Fred, Elizabeth, the elderly man who walks his elderly dog past my house every day: these people and so many others at the edges of my daily life, weaving in color and caring and kindness. It is beautiful to be glad to see a person every time you see them.

May 5, 2020, by John Okrent

It is beautiful to be glad to see a person
every time you see them, as I was to see Juan,
the maintenance man, with whom it was always the same
brotherly greeting—each of us thumping a fist
over his heart and grinning, as though we shared a joke,
or bread. I barely knew him. Evenings in clinic,
me finishing my work, him beginning his—
fluorescence softening in the early dark. He wasn’t even fifty,
had four grandchildren, fixed what was broken, cleaned
for us, caught the virus, and died on his couch
last weekend. And what right have I to write this poem,
who will not see him in his uniform of ashes,
only remember him, in his Seahawks cap, and far from sick,
locking up after me, turning up his music.

Click here for more information on poet John Okrent.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio

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I’d love to see you in the Zoom room, January 7-13, in our first-ever, informal, kick off the new year with joy and freedom Write Together session! Seven days of morning and evening prompts, join in for any or all. Each session recorded in case you miss one. Click here for all the details. 

Sometimes don’t you just get so tired of being good?

Of being polite?

Of being patient and kind and clean?

Sometimes don’t you just want to be dirty?

Sometimes do you look back on those few secret memories you don’t talk about with anyone, memories of being bad, of how hard you laughed, how alive you felt, and think, yep, that’s in you too and don’t ever forget it.

Good Girl, by Kim Addonizio

 Look at you, sitting there being good.
After two years you’re still dying for a cigarette.
And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?
Don’t you want to run to the corner right now
for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice
and a nice lemon slice, wouldn’t the backyard
that you’re so sick of staring out into
look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends
day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,
the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs—
don’t you want to mess it all up, to roll around
like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren’t you a dog anyway,
always groveling for love and begging to be petted?
You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides
of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,
you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.
Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes
and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first
beautiful man you find? The words ruin me, haven’t they
been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn’t it time
you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets
to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?
Sure it’s time. You’ve rolled over long enough.
Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there’s one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they’re howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors’ dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won’t shut up.

Click here for more info about the brilliant Kim Addonizio.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Octavia Butler

Posted on by alisonmcghee

I’d love to see you in the Zoom room, January 7-13, in our first-ever, informal, kick off the new year with joy and freedom Write Together session! Seven days of morning and evening prompts, join in for any or all. Each session recorded in case you can’t make it. Click here for all the details. 

One of my children, then tiny, was scared of an upcoming small adventure. I remember the troubled but resolute look on their face as they recited advice from their father: “If you don’t try new things, you can’t have new fun.”

Much has changed in my life this year, some joyful, some painful, some nuanced and complicated, and all of it inevitable because change is inevitable. But the thought of our own small selves as capable changing everything we touch…what a sobering, powerful thought.

All That You Touch, by Octavia Butler

All that you touch
you change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
is Change.

God
is Change.

Click here for more about Octavia Butler.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Anni Liu

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Click here for all the details of my brand-new January Write Together week-long session. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room.

This past week I deleted a couple of no-longer-functional emails from my Poem of the Week subscriber list. As I was scrolling through the long list, addresses of passed-on friends flashed up – oh look, my darling Zdrazil, there you are. And Jay Hopler, the poet whose gorgeous poems I discovered just before he died. And Melissa Bank, beautiful human, beautiful writer.

Everyone on the list stays there unless an official bounceback flings itself my way, full of incomprehensible code that to my non-coding eye means only one thing: this person will never again open an email from you, Alison. Until that day comes, I send the poems out into the ether, because who am I to decide how and when and where a poem will find its way home?

Lake of the Isles, by Anni Liu

            January 2021

 After my grandfather died
I waited for him to arrive
in Minneapolis. Daily
I walked across the water
wearing my black armband
sewn from scraps, ears trained for his voice.
Migration teaches death, deprives us
of the language of the body,
prepares us for other kinds of crossings,
the endless innovations of grief.
Forty-nine days, forty-nine nights—
I carried his name and a stick
of incense to the island in the lake
and with fellow mourners watched
as it burned a hole in the ice.
He did not give a sign, but I imagined him
traveling against the grain
of the earth, declining time.
Spirit like wind, roughening
whatever of ourselves we leave bare.
When he was alive, he and I
rarely spoke. But his was a great
and courageous tenderness.
Now we are beyond the barriers
of embodied speech, of nationhood.
Someday, I will join him there in the country
of our collective future, knowing
that loneliness is just an ongoing
relationship with time.
It is such a strange thing, to be
continuous. In the weeks without snow,
what do the small creatures drink?

Click here for more information about Anni Liu.


alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ross Gay

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Click here for details and to register for this Thursday, November 17’s Memoir in Moments evening workshop and January’s Write Together week-long session – I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

Once, just out of college, I went to the movies with a friend. In the pocket of my jeans were nine dollars – a five and four ones. This was my cash for the week. I leaned back and draped my legs over the seat in front of me (terrible, I know) and watched the movie.

Walking home, I put my hands in my pockets, realized they were empty –my nine dollars must have fallen out to the floor of the theater–and panicked. My friend was weirded out. “Nine bucks?” he said. “Why are you so upset?”

He was a trainee investment banker. I was a trainee novelist.

Some of us – most of us? – are panicked by money worries at some point in our lives. For some, it’s a lifelong condition. I’ve never forgotten that night at the movies, the loss of that precious cash, how I tried to comfort myself by picturing some other penniless person, maybe a movie usher, maybe a late-night cleaner, and the wild happiness they must have felt when they found that $9 scattered beneath my seat.

The Truth, by Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ’til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

Click here for more information about the wonderful Ross Gay.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Robert Okaji

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Still room in tomorrow’s The Art of Writing Picture Books, Tuesday’s The Intuitive Leap and other workshops! Click here for all the details – I’d love to see you in the Zoom room.

A while ago I was out doing errands, heading to places I haven’t been in a while: Turtle Bread Bakery, Great Harvest, the coop, Sunnyside Gardens. When I was finished I headed home, except not, because next thing I knew I was pulling up to the curb in front of my children’s old elementary school.

Alison, what the hell are you doing? It’s been well over a decade since I picked a child up at elementary school.

I looked up at the old brick building, the playground that we fundraised new equipment for, the third floor that was the domain of the eighth graders, the first floor where every year we hosted the Carnival fundraiser that parents semi-dreaded and every child adored.

The routine of those years washed through me: drop off the older two, take the youngest and her friend to Turtle Bread for a muffin before school started, return to Turtle Bread and sit in a booth with coffee and my laptop, writing one book, then another, then another. Years and years. Hello, goodbye, hello, goodbye.

Driving without Radio, by Robert Okaji

One minute you’re sipping coffee at the stoplight,
and the next you find yourself six miles

down the road, wondering how you got there,
just two exits before the French bakery

and your favorite weekday breakfast taco stand.
Or while pondering the life of mud,

you almost stomp the brakes when a 40-year old
memory oozes in — two weeks before Thanksgiving,

the windshield icing over (inside), while most definitely
not watching the drive-in movie in Junction City, Kansas,

her warm sighs on your neck and ear, and the art
of opening cheap wine with a hairbrush. How many

construction barrels must one dodge to conjure these
delights, unsought and long misfiled? You turn right

on 29th Street and just for a moment think you’ve seen
an old friend, looking as he did before he died,

but better, and happier, and of course it’s just a trash bag
caught in a plum tree, waving hello, waving goodbye.



Click here for more information about Robert Okaji.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast