Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Nayyirah Waheed

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On Tuesday this week, more than thirty heavily armed officers wearing FBI, ICE, ATF, and Minneapolis police badges descended on a Mexican restaurant on east Lake Street, supposedly for a “federal law enforcement operation” regarding a “criminal search warrant for drugs and money laundering.” Many of the officers wore masks covering their faces up to their eyes. The more than 100 protesters were dispersed using “chemical irritants.” *

No one was arrested.

Every statement regarding this raid has been vague and confusing. What is not vague or confusing is the fact that across this country, fully masked people carrying massive guns are pulling non-white residents off the streets, arresting them, detaining them, and sending them to prisons in other countries against the direct orders of U.S. courts. That’s how you create a police state.

poem, from Salt
– Nayyirah Waheed

you broke the ocean in
half to be here
only to find nothing that wants you

​Click here for more information on Nayyirah Waheed.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

*photo by Nicole Neri, Minnesota Reformer

Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher

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Last fall I thinned and divided some of the daisies and phlox and coneflowers and lilies and peonies in my gigantic flower garden. I tried to do such a careful job, but this spring the daisies and some of the coneflowers didn’t come back, and neither did the lavender, which I left undisturbed. I’ve planted delphiniums and coneflowers in their place, but I’m in mourning, as if by disrupting their natural growth I set something unintended in motion.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,   
an unseen nest
where a mountain   
would be. 

                              ​(for Drago Štambuk​)

​Click here for more information about poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. Today’s poem appears in her collection Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Natalie Diaz

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Book party! I rarely do book events, and I’d love to see you at the book party for my brand-new novel, Weird Sad and Silent, at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul this Tuesday, May 27, at 6 pm. I’ll read a little, tell you some secrets behind the writing of the book, answer questions, and there might even be some tiny gifts for you. It’s a school night so fear not, we’ll get you home nice and early, too. Click here for all the details. 

The zinnia seedlings biding their time in the 40-degree drop in temperature from last week. The man and his dog who always stop for a poem from my poetry hut, careful to relatch the door afterwards. The hurt squirrel writhing on the lawn that I called 311 about. The man with the long box braids unloading the giant moving van who stopped to wipe the sweat from his face. So much feels fragile and precious in these days of siege from lies, cruelty, and greed. Don’t we all need refuge?

If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert, by Natalie Diaz

I will swing my lasso of headlights
across your front porch,

let it drop like a rope of knotted light
at your feet.

While I put the car in park,
you will tie and tighten the loop

of light around your waist —
and I will be there with the other end

wrapped three times
around my hips horned with loneliness.

Reel me in across the glow-throbbing sea
of greenthread, bluestem prickly poppy,

the white inflorescence of yucca bells,
up the dust-lit stairs into your arms.

If you say to me, This is not your new house
but I am your new home,

I will enter the door of your throat,
hang my last lariat in the hallway,

build my altar of best books on your bedside table,
turn the lamp on and off, on and off, on and off.

I will lie down in you.
Eat my meals at the red table of your heart.

Each steaming bowl will be, Just right.
I will eat it all up,

break all your chairs to pieces.
If I try running off into the deep-purpling scrub brush,

you will remind me,
There is nowhere to go if you are already here,

and pat your hand on your lap lighted
by the topazion lux of the moon through the window,

say, Here, Love, sit here — when I do,
I will say, And here I still am.

Until then, Where are you? What is your address?
I am hurting. I am riding the night

on a full tank of gas and my headlights
are reaching out for something.​ 

​Click here for more information about Natalie Diaz, and click here to hear Diaz reading today’s poem. If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert first appeared in Postcolonial Love Poem, published in 2020 by Graywolf Press. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jeanne Wagner

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Book party! I rarely do book events and I would love to see you at the book party for my brand-new novel, Weird Sad and Silent. Please come to the launch party at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, at 6 pm. I’ll read a little​ and tell you some secrets behind the writing of the book. We’ll talk, we’ll celebrate, and there might even be some tiny gifts for you.​ It’s a school night so we’ll get you home nice and early, too. Click here for all the details. 

My dog makes an almost inaudible tiny hoot when he wants me to get up in the morning. A low revving sound when he wants me to bring his food out to where I’m working (he doesn’t believe in eating alone). A short, sharp yip that means he needs to go out. He makes no sound at all when I pack my roller bag for a trip; he just sits in the middle of the rug with his head down.

A few months ago when he was frantically barking at something in the ceiling –a mouse? bugs? bat?–I searched for a Dogs and Wolves playlist. He froze, tilting his head this way and that, silent. When wolves began howling he looked at me, pointed his muzzle to the ceiling and began howling softly, howling and howling. It was one of the most mournful sounds I’ve ever heard. It made me want to howl too. As if on some deep level we know there are wild lives out there, wild lives we want, wild lives that are waiting for us.

​Dogs That Look Like Wolves, by Jeanne Wagner

When my dog hears the neighbor’s baby cry, he begins
to howl, his head thrown back. He’s all heartbreak and
hollow throat, tenderness rising in each ululation. He’s
a saxophone of sadness, a shepherd calling for his stray.
I’ve read that baying is both a sign of territory and
a reaching out for whatever lies beyond: home and loss,
how can they be understood without each other?
Once I had an outdoor dog who sang every day at noon
when the Angelus belled from the corner church.
She was a plain dog but I could prove, contrary to all
the theologians, that at least once a day she had a soul.
I’ve always loved dogs that look like wolves, loved
stories of wolves: the alphas, the bullies, the bachelors.
We have to forgive them when they break into our
fenced-off pastures, lured by the lull of a grazing herd,
or a complacent flock, heads bent down. Prey, it’s called.
At night wolves chorus into the trackless air, the range
of their song riding far from their bodies till they think
the stars will hear it and be moved, almost to breaking,
while my poor dog stands alone on the deck, howling
into the canyon’s breadth, as if he’s like me, looking
for a place where his song will carry. Dogs know,
if there is solace to be had, their voice will find it.
This air is made for lamentation.

​Click here for more information about Jeanne Wagner. This poem is from Everything Turns Into Something Else, published by Grayson Books in 2021. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Winter Jones

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Minnesotans! Book party! I rarely do book events and I would love to see you at the book party for my brand-new novel, Weird Sad and Silent, in the world as of next Tuesday. Please come to the launch party at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, at 6 pm. I’ll read a little, we’ll talk, we’ll celebrate, and there might even be some tiny gifts for you. Click here for all the details. 

When I read this poem I thought about how bringing a child into the world, knowing everything we know about what life may throw at them, is an act of…what, defiance in the face of it all? Selfishness, because you yourself want to feel that kind of giant love for someone else forever and ever? Hope, that they will love their lives? Faith, that you can make the world better for them and they can make the world better by being in it?

Molecules from everyone who ever lived circulate inside us. Gandhi. Hitler. Your great-great-great-great-great grandmother. That former friend who no longer speaks to you. The beloved dog who died at fifteen. The poets who wrote the poems you memorize and recite to yourself. Everyone you love, and everyone you don’t. The past, the present, the unknown future: breathe in. Breathe out.

Concessions, by Winter Jones
(There is a 98.2% chance that at least one of the molecules in your lungs came from Caesar’s last breath. From Innumeracy, by John Allen Paulos)

If Caesar, then my great-uncle too.
He waited until the farm was sold,
went into the field and shot himself.
Was his last breath soft, a letting-go? Or was it 
sorrow? I lie awake imagining his final air, 
still alive in my body. 

Then my girl lights up my phone. Three time zones
away she tracks me by cell location, senses
I’m awake in the dark: love you mama
This is the child who couldn’t sleep without my touch,
without my own breaths timed to hers.
Back then she once told me she wouldn’t be sad if I died.
You wouldn’t?
Nope. Because I’d be dead too. I couldn’t live without you.

Her air also swirls inside me.
Before she was born I was young.
I didn’t know the weight of this kind of love,
how it would hurt. Would terrify.
Would turn me dangerous, like the time I hurtled between
her and the raving man in the grocery store.

Love you more, I text back.
Every breath’s a bargain struck between fear and trust, 
a concession we make to stay in the world.
The truth we carry within: for every
great-uncle who leaves this world
by lonely blast of bullet, a bright flame of child.

Click here for more information about John Allen Paulos. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Weird Sad and Silent: a novel

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Welcome to the world, Daisy Jackson! My new novel, Weird Sad and Silent, is available everywhere as of today, May 6. The idea for this novel came to me in a rush one day when a girl appeared in my mind and said, “To begin, my name is Daisy Jackson.” That became the first line of the novel. I sat down and began writing and then just kept on writing until Daisy had told me her whole story.

A couple things about Daisy: when stressed, she counts on her fingertips, under the table or behind her back, up to 111 and back down again, so lightly that no one will see. But one day, when she thinks she’s alone, she starts counting out loud, and the bullies notice and start calling her Weird Sad and Silent. After that awful day, Daisy learns how to invisibilize herself.

She’s seen and loved by a few people, though: her neighbor Lulu, who stays with her while her mama Flora works the overnight shift at Glorious Cleaning. The school librarian Marimba, whose library is always a place of refuge. Captain the custodian, who calls everyone by their first and last names and who’s always there to open the door for Daisy so she can slip into school early. Not to mention Rumble Paws, the feral cat who lurks around her apartment building. He’s scrawny and wary, most of one ear is missing, and he too knows how to invisibilize himself.

But one day a new kid shows up at school, Austin Roseau. He notices Daisy right away, no matter how invisibilized she thinks she is. And everything starts to change. This book is for the weird sad silent kids everywhere who, like Daisy and Austin, are actually funny and lovable and full of curiosity. It’s also for all the other kids and no-longer-kids who grew up like most of us did, witnessing bullying and hating it, and who ever since have sought to make the world a kinder, funnier, loving place.

Starred review from Kirkus: “A beautiful story of unvarnished honesty and tender hope—this courageous protagonist will capture every heart.”

Click here to order your own copy.

Minnesotans! Come to my book party! 
I rarely do book events and I would love to see you at the book party for my brand-new novel, Weird Sad and Silent, in the world as of today. Please come to the launch party at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, at 6 pm. I’ll read a little, we’ll talk, we’ll celebrate, and there might even be some tiny gifts for you. Click here for all the details. 

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Book party! ​I rarely do book events and I would love to see you at the book party for my brand-new novel, Weird Sad and Silent, in the world as of next Tuesday. Please come to the launch party at Next Chapter Booksellers in St. Paul on Tuesday, May 27, at 6 pm. I’ll read a little, we’ll talk, we’ll celebrate, and there might even be some tiny gifts for you. Click here for all the details. 

A few days ago I was driving down Lake Street singing along to Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode at high volume. At a long red light I glanced over and saw a woman with earbuds dancing as she waited for the bus. She looked so happy and free. Her moves synced up exactly to the beat of Can’t Get Enough, one of those weird serendipitous things.

The other day a friend told me she felt guilty about feeling any moment of happiness amidst the nonstop horrors of this administration, and I heard myself tell her that if we can’t feel joy then they’ve won. Which is true. So I went straight out and bought myself some disco lights, and now you’re all invited to my house for a dance party.

To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
but the spark.
That’s crudely put, but. . . 

If we’re not supposed to dance,
why all this music?

For more information about Gregory Orr, please check out his website. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Philip Larkin

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Minnesotans! There’s ​plenty of room in my FREE workshop on Friday, May 2, 1-4 Central Time: The Echo That Remains. This workshop, held via Zoom, is for anyone who loved someone who died of suicide, substance abuse, or untreated mental or physical illness. Click here for more information and to register. ​Note that we do not share our writing with each other in this workshop, which you may find freeing. All are welcome, free of charge, no writing experience necessary.  

Last week I stood on a beautiful bridge, watching the current flow beneath, when an idling motorboat dislodged a duck nest from the pilings. The nest went floating down the river, the mother duck frantic, fluttering up from her seven eggs and down again, helpless to stop the drift. Finally she jumped off and paddled to shore, her nest soon out of sight.

It hurt beyond all reason to witness that duck and her nest, because even though it was unintentional, too many other losses aren’t, like this heinous administration’s wanton, daily, abject cruelty. The world throws so much at all of us, animal and human; we should be careful of each other, and kind.

The Mower, by Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
a hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. 
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
is always the same; we should be careful

of each other, we should be kind   
while there is still time.

Click here for more information about Philip Larkin. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Sarah Freligh

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A few of the thousands of memories I conjure when I need them: my grandmother, telling me of course I was doing the right thing. A night in summer when RJ and Doc and I slept on quilts on the beach, the sound of the waves and the smell of the ocean. How my father’s hug would lift me off the ground.

The day long ago when my phone chirped and I opened it to a tiny video from a daughter far away: a mother and child sea lion, sunning on the rough shore of a Galapagos sea. The mother sea lion stretched and flopped over. Then the camera flipped around and a girl with wide eyes and a tumble of dark curls was smiling at me. Love you, Mom, she whispered, and then the screen went blank. I still see her smile, hear that whisper.

Wondrous, by Sarah Freligh

I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,

travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte

has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief

multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during

which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make

him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.

For more information on Sarah Freligh, please visit her website.

Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Minnesotans! There’s still room in my FREE workshop on Friday, May 2, 1-4 Central Time: The Echo That Remains. This workshop, held via Zoom, is for anyone who loved someone who died of suicide, substance abuse, or untreated mental or physical illness. Click here for more information and to register. All are welcome, no writing experience necessary. 

How many times a day do you feel like a failure? I once asked the Painter. All day every day, he answered, to which I nodded.

Ten years ago, on a whim at the end of December, I sat down at my dining table and hand-wrote myself a letter. Dear Allie, it began, here are some things you did in 2015. The letter is a simple bulleted list, but each entry, such as tried to be a good teacher and stayed in good shape despite plantar fasciitis, holds within it an arc of emotion and effort and accomplishment. I hadn’t looked at that letter since I wrote it, nor the subsequent letters I’ve written to myself every year since, but everything I tried to do that year came rushing back over me, along with a deep sense of being just one of a long, long line of humans who are all just trying.

Which brings me to this beautiful farewell poem by Tony Hoagland. The ending, which I had to read twice to understand was not an admonition but a gentle acknowledgment to himself that he had been a good man who should have been kinder to himself, still chokes me up.

Distant Regard, by Tony Hoagland

If I knew I would be dead by this time next year
I believe I would spend the months from now till then
writing thank-you notes to strangers and acquaintances,
telling them, “You really were a great travel agent,”
or “I never got the taste of your kisses out of my mouth.”
or “Watching you walk across the room was part of my destination.”
It would be the equivalent, I think,
of leaving a chocolate wrapped in shiny foil
on the pillow of a guest in a hotel–
“Hotel of earth, where we resided for some years together,”
I start to say, before I realize it is a terrible cliche, and stop,
and then go on, forgiving myself in a mere split second
because now that I’m dying, I just go
forward like water, flowing around obstacles
and second thoughts, not getting snagged, just continuing
with my long list of thank-yous,
which seems to naturally expand to include sunlight and wind,
and the aspen trees which gleam and shimmer in the yard
as if grateful for being soaked last night
by the irrigation system invented by an individual
to whom I am quietly grateful.
Outside it is autumn, the philosophical season,
when cold air sharpens the intellect; 
the hills are red and copper in their shaggy majesty.
The clouds blow overhead like governments and years.
It took me a long time to understand the phrase “distant regard,”
but I am grateful for it now,
and I am grateful for my heart,
that turned out to be good, after all;
and grateful for my mind,
to which, in retrospect, I can see
I have never been sufficiently kind.

For more information about the one and only Tony Hoagland, please read his obituary.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter