Poem of the Week, by Pauletta Hansel
This shard of pottery is from a storage container used by an unknown someone who lived on a hill in Lisbon almost three thousand years ago. I imagine her filling the original container with soup or stew or pickles or water, then scouring it out, day after day.
Sometimes I picture the potter who made it, how they shaped its curves, worked the clay, painted those stripes with care and attention so that the pot would be beautiful. Doesn’t matter where we are or who we are or how poor or how worried or stressed or tired our lives, we make things beautiful because we want to, because we can. Because it’s a gift we can give ourselves.
The Road, by Pauletta Hansel
Where I’m from, everybody had a flower garden,
and I’m not talking about landscaping—
those variegated grasses poking up between
the yellow daylilies that bloom more than once.
Even the rusted-out trailer down in the green bottoms
had snowball bushes that outlived the floods.
Even the bootlegger’s wife grew roses up the porch pillar
still flecked with a little paint, and in the spring
her purple irises rickracked the rutted gravel drive.
Even the grannies changed out of their housedresses
to thin the sprouts of zinnias so come summer
they’d bloom into muumuus of scarlet and coral
down by the road.
Now driving that road that used to take me home,
I think how maybe it’s still true.
Everybody says down here it’s nothing
but burnt-out shake and bakes and skinny girls
looking for a vein, but everywhere I look
there’s mallows and glads, begonias in rubber tire
planters painted to match, cannies red
as the powder my mother would pat high
on her cheekbones when she wanted to be noticed
for more than her cobblers and beans.
Everywhere there’s some sort of beautiful
somebody worked hard at, no matter
how many times they were told
nobody from here even tries.
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Before taking the city bus for the first time, I was scared. How much does it cost and what if you don’t have exact change and what are those green cards everyone else seems to be holding and oh crap what about that scanner thingie? Etcetera.
A few years ago, from my front porch, I watched an enormous, dark turtle labor its way across Emerson Avenue. It was winter. Snow and ice and slush. A giant turtle? 
On the surface there’s little in common between Lucille Clifton and me besides the fact that we both grew up in far upstate New York (which, as all upstaters know, is in fact a deep and powerful bond). But ever since I read The Lost Baby Poem in my early twenties, a poem that filled me with so much sorrow and pain and understanding that it felt as if I were somehow embedded in it, she has been a kindred spirit. 
Would your life be worse then than it is right now? is a question to ask yourself when you wake up every day in fear and dread of something that hasn’t happened but might happen. Something you fight and fight and work and work to prevent happening, to you or to someone you love. Foreclosure. Suicide. Recurrence of cancer. Loss of a job, a friend, a romance.
This past week: the friends in a group discussion admitting they can barely ask what the honorarium is because it feels so selfish. The friend who wonders can I back out of this event in NYC because I just noticed there’s no travel reimbursement and I literally can’t afford it but I can’t stand to let anyone down. The friends who say they know it’s their own fault for feeling ashamed of their bodies and why can’t they just ignore all the ads for liposuction, juvaderm, lip filler, neck filler, breast augmentation, tummy tucks, and vaginal rejuvenation.
This was back in the days of dial-up modems with their squealy screechy sounds. The first line of the first review of my first novel came shimmering up on that clunky old computer screen: “First time novelist tries but fails to move or matter.” 
Everything physical, everything specific: the sharp scent of the woods that night in the Adirondacks when the rain drummed down on the canvas tent. The cold clear water that dazzled your body when you plummeted from the rope swing. The softness of the loam under your boots that cold dawn hike in Vermont.
Alison McGhee 