Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Ursula K. Le Guin

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My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

When we were little we weren’t supposed to swim for an hour after we ate, because if we did, cramps will seize you and you’ll sink to the bottom and drown. Or something like that. And when we got drunk or high we were killing off brain cells that would never be replaced, because you were born with all the brain cells you’ll ever have. Or something like that.

Both false, along with a lot of other things. Sometimes I wonder about the things I believed, and maybe still do, like the idea of a soul that’s unchanging and the essence of who we are.

But what if there is no soul? What if the person you are in the moment is just that, the person you are in the moment, not who came before and who will come after? What if everything you forgot isn’t buried inside you somewhere, it’s just. . . gone? These were the questions floating through my mind on a thousand-mile drive last month. The little girl I used to be rose up in my mind, her serious eyes and wondering heart, calling to me from long ago and faraway.

Leaves, by Ursula K. Le Guin

Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves. 

For more information on Ursula K. Le Guin, click here.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by David Ray

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

“No regrets” is a phrase and a feeling I don’t understand. Regrets, I have plenty. “But every decision and every choice brought you to where you are right now,” a friend argues, in the latest iteration of a conversation we keep having. “How can you possibly have any regrets, Alison?”

How? Because of the look in my son’s eyes that one summer day. Because of the sound of my daughter’s voice on the phone that one winter evening. Because of the words someone once said to me one dark night, and how I let them lodge inside me and didn’t fight back. How can I possibly not have regrets? I tell my friend.

No, I wouldn’t change my life, and yes, I would change my life.


Thanks, Robert Frost, by David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

For more information about David Ray, please check out his blog.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Omar Khayyam

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

On the way back from a long jog yesterday I glimpsed this book in a little free library. The sight of it brought me straight back to childhood. The poet’s name used to mesmerize me, and so did the poem below, which I copied out as a little girl, knowing its power even then.

Re-reading this poem yesterday was hard. Hard because true or false, willfully ignorant or intentionally misleading, what’s said and done in these troubling times matters. Nothing can be canceled out.

Quatrain 74

The Moving Figure writes, and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.


It’s not known for sure whether Persian poet and astronomer Omar Khayyam actually wrote all the poems in the Rubaiyat. Click here for more information.

My website: alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Andrea Gibson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems + reflections podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

A friend in college loved the word bittersweet for the way it made him feel, full of a kind of happiness mixed with sorrow. As if he were missing something while it was still happening.

The last time I saw this friend, years ago at a reunion, he used the word again, telling me that even though I was sitting next to him, part of him was already in the future, missing me, and how bittersweet it was.

That’s how I think of fall. There is nothing more beautiful to me than leaves turned flame, than air turned crisp, but it’s an aching kind of beauty.

Autumn, by Andrea Gibson

is the hardest season.
The leaves are all falling
and they’re falling
like they’re falling
in love with the ground.

For more information about Andrea Gibson, please check out their website: https://andreagibson.org/

My website: alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Wallace Stevens

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Late night. Eight inches of heavy wet flakes. Sound of shovels up and down the block. The specific silence of air that comes only with snow.

Lifelong northerner that I am, snow is part of my earliest memories. Snow so deep my sisters and I could walk right up onto the roof of the garage and slide down the other side.

When I go to California in January, the way I do now, I think about snow. Dream of it. Miss the way, when you breathe in that cold, cold air, your whole body feels clear. Winter is something I’ve both loved and dreaded (S.A.D.) my whole life. But these days, on this melting planet, winter feels like a treasure always mine in such measure that I was heedless with it.

The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
to regard the frost and the boughs
of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
and have been cold a long time
to behold the junipers shagged with ice,
the spruces rough in the distant glitter
of the January sun; and not to think
of any misery in the sound of the wind,
in the sound of a few leaves,
which is the sound of the land
full of the same wind
that is blowing in the same bare place
for the listener, who listens in the snow,
and, nothing himself, beholds
nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.    


For more information about Wallace Stevens, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

A few days ago we hiked a remote trail north of Yellowstone, a passage between two high ridges that had burned maybe twenty years ago. Carry bear spray and know how to use it. Avoid places where ravens have gathered. Dress your kill and remove the meat immediately. Because I’m scared (understatement) of bears, I constantly scanned the ridges and the rushing creek between them.

Half an hour in, the sound of high-pitched screaming rose from behind the ridge line. We stopped and stared at each other. Bears? The wailing was carried on the wind, and we realized it was the wind itself, rising above and between the ridges and slopes littered with charred trunks. An unearthly companion, marking the twists and turns of the trail, the waterfalls, the huge burnt trunks and the little new pines growing in their wake. A reminder –a relief?–of how small my humanness is, how inconsequential in the great scheme of the wilderness.

So Much of the World, by Gregory Djanikian

So much of the world exists
without us

the mountain in its own steepness

the deer sliding
into the trees becoming
a darkness
in the woods’ darkness.

So much of an open field
lies somewhere between the grass
and the dragonfly’s drive and thrum

the seed and seedling,
the earth within.

But so much of it lies in someone
standing alone at the edge of a field
with a life apart

feeling for a moment
the plover’s cry
on the tongue

the curve and plumb
of the apple bough
in limb and bone.

So much of it between
one thing and another,

days of invitation,
then of release and return.



For more information on Gregory Djanikian, please check out his website.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Tania Runyan

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

In the university class I’m teaching this fall we gather online, small heads nodding from frames, mics unmuting, videos flicking on and off to show children climbing on laps, housemates in the background, dogs and cats, the sound of traffic. Thank you for doing such a good job in difficult times, I tell them, and I mean it.

The thought of us all trying so hard makes my heart ache the same way it aches at the memory of my young son, shuffling out of his first locker room with his first pair of flip-flops threaded through the wrong toes, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what, insisting he was okay —I’m okay, I’m okay.

I read this poem and wish I could go back in time and put my arms around my little boy. And my students. All of us trying so hard.

Villanelle for My Son, by Tania Runyan

You cried because you dropped a butter knife.
Everything I do is stupid and wrong!
I want to reach into your nine-year-old life,

but my mind, too, is murky and rife
with the morning’s thoughts like ricocheting frogs
that made you drop the butter knife.

You collapse on the couch, your naked strife
abrading your throat like a funeral song.
I want to reach into your nine-year-old life

and gather the joys that scattered like wildlife
the first time you stared at a question too long
and felt your spirit dissolve like butter on knife.

I’ve lurched and careened my way to midlife,
and child, I will not lie to you: even the strong
reach from the middle of their nine-year-old lives

for rescue from the wreckage, the jackknifed
pileups from adulthood’s rushing throng.
You cried because you dropped a butter knife.
I’m desperate to save your nine-year-old life.




For more information on Tania Runyan, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Emma Hine

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Last weekend I showed my daughters around the barn my sisters and I used to play in. The old red barn, where I used to fling the feed in the general direction of my chickens so I could get the hell out of there before Big Red, the rooster, attacked me. We used to build hayforts in here. See that beam? That’s where the rope swing used to be. When you jumped, you had to be careful not to fall through the hay chute.

Now I look at the barn and try to figure out how old those supporting beams are – two hundred fifty years, maybe? Standing there with my daughters, telling them family stories, I could feel the shadow presence of my sisters, the selves we used to be, wandering the woods of our childhood.

Young Relics, by Emma Hine

They broke into houses,
my sisters. The empty ones,
just built, where nobody had yet
tried to sleep. Little mounds
of sawdust still in the corners,
no floorboards loose.
I imagine them being the way
I’ve seen them be with horses,
hands gentle on the walls—after all,
a house must learn to hold a family
with all its quivering systems
of energy and grief. I once saw Sierra
with a colt that wasn’t ready
to be ridden. She stood in the stall
and talked until his heart rate slowed.
All through our neighborhood
new houses were dark and panicking.
Enter sisters.
Bringing comfort where it wasn’t
supposed to be, no key for entry,
no light allowed, just a ritual gift
for the rooms alone to remember:
hands on their painted flanks.
Voices in the eaves.

For more information on Emma Hine, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Diane Wakoski

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Me to the elementary or high school students I sometimes visit in person or via Zoom: Sometimes does it feel like your feelings are too big to hold inside? Like you might explode because life feels so overwhelming?

Heads nod. Hands go up.

Maybe you do something when you feel that way. Maybe some of you run and run, maybe some of you put your music on loud and dance and dance, maybe some of you . . . write?

Everyone always turns quiet. They nod. Maybe we all need a way out, a way to channel and calm and transform the giantness of what it is to be alive in a body in the world. I feel this poem in my very bones.

Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons (excerpt), by Diane Wakoski

The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond
as big as a shoe;

as if
you had just built a wooden table
and the smell of sawdust was in the air,
your hands dry and woody;

as if
you had eluded
the man in the dark hat who had been following you
all week;

the relief
of putting your fingers on the keyboard 





For more information about Diane Wakoski, please click here.   

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Kari Gunter-Seymour

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Yesterday my parents sent photos of the dairy farm on McGhee Hill Road, in downstate New York, where my father grew up and where my sisters and I spent a lot of time as children. I drove by it last year, after visiting my grandparents in Irondale Cemetery, pulled into the long driveway, and started to cry. So many memories all wrapped up in that old farmhouse, that barn. The still-there, although barely noticeable, remnants of my grandmother’s giant flower garden. Their dog Jody, who ate the same dinner we did every night, warmed up in his very own frying pan with a rich brown gravy. The upstairs bedroom with the yellow curtains where I slept and woke to the smell of scrambled eggs made only the way my grandmother made them. The bookcases filled with the heavy anthologies she taught at her second job as a high school English teacher. At age ten, when they sold the place, I cried and cried.

I Come From A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, by Kari Gunter-Seymour
       

White oaks thrash, moonlight drifts
the ceiling, as if I’m under water.
Propane coils, warms my bones.

Gone are the magics and songs,
all the things our grandmothers buried—
piles of feathers and angel bones,

inscribed by all who came before.
When I was twelve, my cousins
called me ugly, enough to make it last.

Tonight a celebrity on Oprah
imagines a future where features
can be removed and replaced

on a whim. A moth presses wings
thin as paper against my window,
more beautiful than I could ever be.

Ryegrass raise seedy heads
beyond the bull thistle and preen.
Everything alive aches for more.

For more information on Kari Gunter Seymour, please check out her website: https://www.karigunterseymourpoet.com/bio