Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Seán Hewitt

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Yesterday we walked past four men in yellow safety vests standing silently in a south Minneapolis front yard, gazing up at the limbs of an enormous oak next to an old frame house. One limb drooped close to the roof. It was a brilliant fall day, maple and oak leaves twirling to the ground in red and yellow, and maybe because I’m in love with trees or maybe because I’m me I said to the Painter Those men look like they’re having a prayer meeting for the tree.

The Painter, who used to work for a tree pruning company, explained they were trying to figure out how high to climb, where to make the cuts, calculating which way the limbs would swing on their way down to the ground, how to both keep the tree alive and the house safe.

Which also feels like a kind of prayer.

Leaf, by Seán Hewitt

For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak
with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.
For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.
For how the silver water holds
the heavens in its eye.
For the axletree of heaven
and the sleeping coil of wind
and the moon keeping watch.
For how each leaf traps light as it falls.
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it. 

Click here for more information about poet and novelist Seán Hewitt. Today’s poem is from his collection Tongues of Fire, published in 2020 by Jonathan Cape Press.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Write Together 2026!

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Write Together 2026: January 12-17, 10-11 a.m. Central Time every day (note time zone)

Welcome to Write Together 2026! In our popular Write Together sessions, we convene each morning in our Zoom Room for a one-hour session. Each hour includes a brief reading and continues with a 30- to 45-minute guided prompt related to the theme of the day. Each day’s theme is different, each session features a different reading and a different prompt (usually two to choose from), and all are designed to wake up the magical writer who lives within us all.

The Write Together sessions were inspired by my regular January solo practice of a week devoted solely to generating new ideas, having fun, and playing around with cool new prompts. There’s something so comforting and freeing about knowing that a whole group are writing together at the same time, each of us in our little Zoom boxes, with no expectation of sharing or feedback. We do extend the last day’s meeting for an open mic session – anyone who wishes is welcome to read something generated during the week for applause and appreciation.

You won’t have to take time off work or your daily routine –unless of course you want to–but in the mini-session you will have six hour-long opportunities to write in a focused, intensive, exhilarating way in a room full of others doing exactly the same thing. Come have fun and see what you come up with!

Registration and payment for the January 2026 session: $100. To register, email me at alisonmcghee@gmail.com or simply send payment and note you’re registering for Write Together 2026. Registration is tentative until payment is received. You may send payment via Venmo to @Alison-McGhee-1, Zelle to alisonmcghee@gmail.com, or by personal check. Please email me with any questions. Note: I offer two half-price scholarships ($50 each) for this workshop – if you need one, let me know and it’s yours, no questions asked.

Poem of the Week, by W.S. Merwin

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I still see the look in my mother’s dark eyes, decades ago, when I told her a decision I had made, one that would cause the people I most love to suffer. She reached for my hands. It will be okay, she said. Everything will be okay. And that gave me strength. Many years later she told me she hadn’t known at all that it would be okay, but I knew I had to tell you that.

Last week it was my turn to tell my mother, my lifelong love, that it would be okay. That in her absence we would take care of each other, that we would go on and be happy. I did not tell her my heart was broken, because she would have worried. It would have distracted her from the profound work of dying. She needed to be free.

Before she entirely lost her words, she leaned her head on my arm in the middle of the night and kissed it. Do you feel like you’re my mother now? she murmured. I do, I answered. Well, you’re a very nice mother, she said, and she smiled like a little girl.

Good Night, by W.S. Merwin

Sleep softly my old love
my beauty in the dark
night is a dream we have
as you know as you know

night is a dream you know
an old love in the dark
around you as you go
without end as you know

in the night where you go
sleep softly my old love
without end in the dark
in the love that you know

Click here for more information about W.S. Merwin. Today’s poem is from his collection The Shadow of Sirius and was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2008. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Czeslaw Milosz

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Here’s the fourth-floor walkup you called home. Here’s the tiny room overlooking Joy Street where your sister used to roll her waitressing change into paper tubes for the rent. Here’s your room, with the big saggy bed left by a previous tenant. Here’s the bathroom where you didn’t pee at night because darkness was the domain of the cockroaches. Here’s the plant in the sunny window that you wound around itself because it was out of control.

Here’s the curbside rocking chair that your friend lugged up for you. Here’s the curbside rug on the living room floor where you used to host Chinese dinner parties. Here’s the couch you were lying on that spring Thursday when the phone call came. This is the place you fled a few weeks later. The place where you were a girl and then not. The place that comes back to you in dreams, just the way this poem does. 

Encounter, by Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

For more information on Czeslaw Milosz, please click here. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter 

Poem of the Week, by Dick Westheimer

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The time one of my babies fell off the changing table. The time I, crazed with sleeplessness, slapped one of my little ones on the top of their head in the middle of the night. The time I didn’t know what to do or say in response to one of my teenagers and I regret what I did and said. The time, the time, the time. They laugh when I apologize for these things and say they don’t even remember. But I do.

Quantum Falling, by Dick Westheimer

When I dropped the hammer
from the top rung—
twelve feet below,
on my ten year old’s head—
he looks up right before
the fall. His,
mine. I am no longer the dad
who knows all.
The boy’s now an NP and says
I did right—kept him
awake, from fading,
from falling away.
He still dreams
of the ladder, the wall,
the house,
the blooming black flower
he’d become
when the hammer hit,
recalls my face
blank, falling away
into the wide-open mouth
of the sky. I still see him
when I look in the mirror
at night—alive and dead—
knowing
the truth
about
me.​ 

​Click here for more information about Dick Westheimer. Today’s poem was published in the August 2025 edition of Rattle, from their Ekphrastic Challenge series. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Alice N. Persons

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When walking in crowds I sometimes think that man could be a rapist or that man could be a serial killer or I wonder if that’s a loaded gun in that bulgy pocket. There’s no fear in these thoughts, just a kind of distant, idle curiosity.

I’m switching things up now, though. Maybe that woman runs a senior dog rescue; maybe that man sings show tunes in a nursing home every Thursday; maybe she’s a pediatric oncologist; maybe he roams the neighborhood every day with a plastic bag; picking up trash.

Maybe that woman with the dark hair and sparkly eyeglasses once saw a young man standing by the edge of a tall building, and she sensed he was gathering his strength to jump, and she approached gently and told him how she had once felt the same way, and she was there to listen if he wanted to talk, and he did, and she listened, and now a decade later they send each other a tiny daily text, just to say Hi, thinking about you. Sending love.

the man in front of you, by Alice N. Persons 

is just tall enough
has soft black hair
and golden skin
wide shoulders
and smells good

you stand behind him
in the movie line
or buying flowers on boylston street
or see him on the subway
not far down the car
his clean brown hands
on the overhead rail

the man in front of you
could have just killed someone
or might have a bitter face
may love no one
or always sleep alone

the man in front of you
hurries out of the station
or rushes around the corner
and vanishes into a cab
you never see his face
but in dreams he comes to you
and does not slip away

Click here for more information about Alice N. Persons. Today’s poem appears in Never Say Never, published in 2004 by Moon Pie Press.  
alisonmcghee.com​ 
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limón

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A few months ago I was tromping around the Zurich airport train station, backpack heavy on my shoulders, following signs, twisting and turning down this hallway and that. Now to figure out the ticket kiosk. Now to find the right platform. Now to double check the time. Tired. Hungry. Thirsty. Worried worried worried and so sad about my country.

Ticket in hand, I turned a corner and locked eyes with a small brown dog who looked at me calmly, as if she’d been waiting for me. I dropped to my knees next to her and held out the back of my hand and she lay her head on it. The animal part of me wanted to live with this dog forever, and I looked up at her human, who smiled in understanding. The world was calm for a moment.

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart, by Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Click here for more information about Ada Limón. Today’s poem is from The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas. 

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Charlotte Parsons

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The elementary school bus I grew up riding, nearly an hour each way to and from school, was an ongoing nightmare. Fights, bullying, cruelty, all egged on by our horrible bus driver. That school bus has appeared and reappeared in many of my novels, always as a place of fear and torment. (There’s a reason I’m a fiction writer.)

We can replicate that kind of cruelty or we can push back against it. It’s beyond exhausting and beyond terrifying to see our current vicious administration rise up against our fellow humans. We are all in this together. We will all come to an end one day. Those who called from the planes and towers on 9/11 were calling with messages of love.

Nine-Eleven, by Charlotte Parsons

You passed me on the street
I rode the subway with you
You lived down the hall from me
I admired your dog in the park one morning
We waited in line for a concert
I ate with you in the cafes
You stood next to me at the bar
We huddled under an awning during a downpour
We dashed across the street to beat the light
I bumped into you coming round the corner
You stepped on my foot
I held the door for you
You helped me up when I slipped on the ice
I grabbed the last Sunday Times
You stole my cab
We waited forever at the bus stop
We sweated in steamy August
We hunched our shoulders against the sleet
We laughed at the movies
We groaned after the election
We sang in church
Tonight I lit a candle for you
All of you

Although today’s poem has been featured on hundreds of websites I’m unable to find out any information about poet Charlotte Parsons other than that this poem first appeared on The Writer’s Almanac on September 11, 2017. This leads me to suspect that Charlotte Parsons is a pseudonym for someone else. If anyone’s in the know, please clue me in. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Rob Ingraham

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In elementary school we had to write a lot of book reports, and this felt unbearable to me. How can a book possibly be boiled down to a few lines of plot and description of style? It would have crushed my soul, so I had to come up with an alternative, which was to make up imaginary books and then write book reports about them.

Most of my imaginary books were about winter pioneers, trying their best to survive in a one-room unchinked cabin, huddled around meager fires, facing the endless snows of winter. (Yes, I’m a northerner, and yes, I spent a lot of time reading the Little House books.)

To this day I can’t read book jackets, and it’s almost impossible for me to write jacket copy for one of my own books. I feel the same way about resumés. How can a bland listing of degrees and jobs possibly convey the truth of a human being?

Resumé, by Rob Ingraham

In French, it simply means a summary,
which limits what it can and can’t convey
despite my padding and hyperbole.
No room to cite the winter night I lay
inside an ambulance (my friend was dead),
they strapped me down, the flares lit up the snow.
No place to say how luckily I wed,
or itemize what took me years to know.
The format’s not designed to mention awe;
transcendence can’t be summarized at all.
And nowhere on the page to say I saw
a plane explode, I saw a building fall.
But these are skills not easily assessed;
all references provided on request.

I’ve been unable to find out more personal information about Rob Ingraham, but you can click here for another of his poems. Today’s poem was first published in Rattle #22 in the winter of 2004. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Hafiz

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Excerpt from a small blue diary I kept when I was in fifth grade: It’s weird but when you walk into a room of people you can feel the air. The air is a color and a texture that you can see and feel and it’s how people are feeling. But what’s really weird is you can change how they feel if you concentrate really hard.

I believed this at ten, and I still believe it. In our early twenties my sister and I used to go to parties and some of the parties were flat and dull. We would look at each other and murmur social overdrive, social overdrive, and then throw ourselves into the scene and try to put everyone at ease and make everyone feel connected and happy.

Social overdrive social overdrive is a mantra for me in these vicious times. How to lift up another human being, or a roomful of them, or a nation. How to change the energy in the room, how to channel not anger and bitterness but love and kindness and acceptance. Something that Hafiz, who lived and died 700 years ago, knew well.

With That Moon Language, by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;
otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?​

Click here for more information about this poem, attributed to the Persian poet Hafiz/Hafez. Please note also that reputable sources say that most of the beloved poems attributed to Hafiz were actually written by his purported translator Daniel Ladinsky.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter