Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Rebecca Bornstein

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A long time ago I needed to get some legal forms to an office a few miles away. It was winter, snowing, skiddy roads. My car slid right off the street into an ice-encrusted snow island between two lakes.

Car after car drove past. I was about to trudge home to get help when an ancient station wagon pulled off the road, hazards flashing. Five Spanish-speaking grinning men leaped out, ran behind my car and motioned me to put it in drive. They pushed me back onto the street, still laughing, waved, and jumped back in their beater.

When I think of the word “helper” it is those men who come shimmering up in my mind.

Love Poem to Taco Bell, by Rebecca Bornstein

Full-on, no bullshit, no irony, yes Taco Bell 
where I can almost always pull together the 
cash to get dinner, at my brokest 
scrounging up enough change  
for the pillowy warmth of a bean burrito,  
extra red sauce, meant to be eaten  
behind the steering wheel in a parking lot 
or while driving, the wrapper crumpled up  
and thrown on the passenger side floor, 
leftover napkins stashed in the glovebox.  
In high school we’d ditch seventh period  
and drive 10 miles down I-5 to the closest town  
big enough to have a Taco Bell,  
where we’d house as much food as we could 
pay for, lounging in the pinkpurplegreen vinyl  
or the metal swivel chairs we’d knock knees under,  
giving each other dares around fire sauce,  
hoarding packets of mild sauce to douse everything.  
And forever, my love to the Taco Bell employees,  
who took my order when I was drunk or high or crying,  
who listened and fed me without too much judgment  
through high school and college and my thirties,  
and a special love for the two who pushed my car  
through the drive-thru, once, when it broke down  
mid-order. I couldn’t afford a tow until payday.  
They let me leave it in the lot. 
This is how I know labor is entitled to all it creates,  
and that given a chance most of us are helpers, 
we want to help people and to be helped  
by people, amidst the absolute and delicious  
loveliness of ordinary things. 

Click here for more information on Rebecca Bornstein. Today’s poem was first published in April 2026 by the Academy of American Poets. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Bao Phi

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Many of my students at South High School were refugee kids from southeast Asia –Vietnam, Laos, Thailand–and I studied how to pronounce their names, because names are important. The surprised look on one girl’s face the first day of school during roll call: You said my name right!

Later, I taught at an under-the-radar state university where many students were also refugees. At one graduation, a faculty member mispronounced virtually all the names of the graduates as they walked across the stage for their diplomas. He seemed to think it was funny, as if he were somehow cute, mangling their names one after another.

I sat in the audience seething, thinking of the love and hope and care all parents bestow when they name their children. This poem feels like redemption.

Ego-Tripping as Self-defense Mechanism for Refugee Kids Who Got Their Names Clowned On, by Bao Phi

My given name, Thiên-bảo, translates to
treasure from heaven.
An immediate reason for my being indecipherable

the moment it stung
unfamiliar tongue
so soon after “hello.”
I would finally like to thank my parents for what I once thought of

as an unpronounceable curse
that I’d have loved to bleach—
because everyone who has ever addressed me from bullies to crushes to haters
has had no choice
but to call me
valuable. 


Click here for more information about the wondrous poet, picture book writer, and spoken word artist Bao Phi. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Stay steadfast, friends! Don’t let anyone rob you of hope and generosity and faith.

Happy Birthday, America, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

fearing the flag
no longer represents me
I start to fly the flag 

Click here for more information about the wondrous Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Today’s poem appeared this morning in her daily Wordwoman post.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter
Photo by Jinx Root

Poem of the Week, by Lucille Clifton

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Did you ever read the astonishing novel Feed, by M.T. Anderson? In it, humans walk through a world where constant ads present themselves wherever they go, shimmering in the air, instantly absorbed.

The news is like that these days for me. No need to read it; everything that’s happening is already in me, by osmosis. To stay sane I hit delete over and over, but still, ask me anything about world events and I already know it all.

But then! I watched the new Presidential Library dedication the other night: The Obamas, John Legend, Springsteen, all the performers and speakers, and everything in me suddenly hit pause. Hit rewind. Hit play, and play, and play again.

HOPE. Hope is a verb, a choice, action. Hope is joy. Hope is the thing with feathers, the long view in the midst of all the daily assaults. Wow did I need reminding of that. Afterward I sat scrolling the artists who feed my soul. Thank you, Jacob Collier, thank you Jon Batiste, thank you musicians, visionaries, poets. Thank you Lucille Clifton.

Won’t You Celebrate with Me, by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed. 


Click here for more information about the one and only Lucille Clifton.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by C.L. O’Dell

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When I was little the state fair concessionaire stands sold pink puffs of spun sugar in paper cones, mesh bags of tiny buttered salt potatoes, paper containers filled with fried fat-bellied clams glistening with oil. Paper cups filled with lemonade made from a squeezed lemon stirred with sugar and cold water.

A single afternoon at the New York State Fair always shimmers up in my mind, me and my father, that man I was so often so afraid of but not on that day, not on that one day when I sat on a red stool beside him, under a red awning there at the fair, drinking lemonade and eating those salty buttered baby red potatoes and fried clams he treated me to.  

I was seven and he was thirty-one and he was happy, and I was happy too.

Decades later I stand in my kitchen making lemonade in just that way: A single lemon, big spoonful of sugar, water cold from the tap. Stir and stir and stir.

Forsythias, by C.L. O’Dell

I think about time.
The forsythias
and the man singing
in the car ahead of me.

When I enter the space
the same shape
he made a moment
before me,

where is the music,
the taste of honey
in his mouth and now
mine, the thought

of kissing his wife good-bye
and the words of a song
lifting off my tongue
as if from memory, but his?

What is mine stays with me,
my heart in the glitter
of his heart. My dreams
have no bones. Love

is never saved in layers
of rock. So much of me
will never be found
on this earth.

For more information about C.L. O’Dell, please visit his website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Lucille Clifton

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Ten years ago at a book conference overseas, the women writers at my table told me they felt sorry for American women like me, that I not only had to work so hard at my writing career but also at home, cleaning and cooking and doing laundry and taking care of my children, while they had cooks and drivers and housekeepers and nannies.

I think every day about the systems of racism and sexism and vast wealth disparity so many of us struggle within. I think about famous people, past and present, and all the people behind them in the shadows, overlooked, overworked, underpaid. Every time I read the last line of this poem the entirety of this country’s history comes over me.

study the masters, by Lucille Clifton

like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.

For more information about Lucille Clifton, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Craig Santos Perez

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Last night two writer friends and I were plotting how to join another writer friend’s new and fascinating workshop without her knowing. How, though?

Maybe we should all register under anagrams of our names! I said. She’d just see three unusual names and figure she had some cool new people in her workshop and then our smiling faces will pop up!

I immediately began trying to anagram my name: Chemise Along. Cholimia Gens. Egma Cholines. Mein Galoches. Chameleon Gis. Ciel Hogmanes.

Then I remembered this poem, which I hadn’t thought of in a long time, but wow, do I need it right about now. Maybe you do too. Let’s make canoes out of whatever we can –wood, words, our own determination not to give up–and keep paddling our way through this neverending nightmare.

Ars Pasifika, by Craig Santos Perez

when the tide

of silence

rises

say “ocean”

then with the paddle

of your tongue

rearrange

the letters to form

“canoe”

For more information about Craig Santos Perez, please click here. Today’s poem was originally published by the Academy of American Poets on May 22, 2020.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by V. Penelope Pelizzon

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A few weeks ago I found a folder labeled Student writing I love and opened it to find copies of stories and poems and memoirs collected over years.

A story titled Eight Days brought me back to a woman who entered the classroom silently, eyes down, and slipped into a seat. She never raised her hand, she never read aloud, she emanated shyness and something else, something that told me someone awful had made her feel she didn’t matter. Pay attention to her, I thought.

A memoir passage about a child who hid on a high shelf in a closet because her mother couldn’t reach her there brought me back to the eighteen-year-old who walked through the door of my memoir-writing classroom, her motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm. Pay attention to her, I thought.

I remember standing outside classrooms when I was going through times that felt impossible, thinking I had nothing left, no way could I walk through that door and teach. But a single line or look from a student can restore me to myself. The art of writing is sacred, and so is the art of teaching.

To Certain Students, by V. Penelope Pelizzon

On all the days I shut my door to light,
all the nights I turned my mind from sleep

while snow fell, filling the space between the trees
till dawn ran its iron needle through the east,

in order to read the scribblings of your compeers,
illiterate to what Martian sense they made

and mourning my marginalia’s failure to move them,
you were what drew me from stupor at the new day’s bell.

You with your pink hair and broken heart.
You with your knived smile. You who tried to quit

pre-law for poetry (“my parents will kill me”).
You the philosopher king. You who saw Orpheus

alone at the bar and got him to follow you home. You
green things, whose songs could move the oldest tree to tears.

For more information on V. Penelope Pelizzon, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Molly Brodak

Posted on by alisonmcghee

In our pottery class we were warned that pots might fling themselves off the wheel, but it was still shocking when one of mine suddenly leapt into the air and smashed itself on the floor. I mushed it back together as best I could and returned it to the wheel.

Everything was going well (as well as anything can go when you are the beginningest of beginning potters) when suddenly POOF, the pot flung itself off the wheel again and this time landed on the window ledge.

Maybe the pot didn’t want to live? I wanted her to live, though, so I nicknamed her The Child and kept going. Maybe she could be a lopsided gravy boat, maybe a lopsided vase, maybe just a lopside. The Child made it through her first firing. I painted her and glazed her and dipped the rim again and everyone in the class blessed her and off she went for her final firing.

I’m a perfectionist in one way only and for that I’m grateful, because otherwise The Child wouldn’t be sitting in my kitchen now, making me smile every time I look at her.

How to Not Be a Perfectionist, by Molly Brodak

People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long—


Click here for more information about poet and memoirist Molly Brodak. Today’s poem was first published in New York Tyrant on November 25, 2017, as part of a grouping called “Three Poems by Molly Brodak.”


alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Bob Hicok

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My garden is giant, the kind now referred to as a pollinator garden, with tons of bees and butterflies and worms and bugs, and I’m constantly trying and failing to keep even a few of the weeds in check.

My fingernails are permanently blackened and broken (gloves are not for me), my back hurts, I hack crazily from the Russian sage which I must be allergic to, my legs cramp. And that’s after a few hours, which is nothing.

This one goes out to everyone who keeps the world humming while the billionaires lord it over them: servers and mechanics and plumbers and caterers and farmers and housecleaners and personal care attendants and orderlies and shift workers and convenience store clerks and landscapers and farmworkers and everyone else doing the actual, unsung work of this world. 

By Their Works, by Bob Hicok

Who cleaned up the Last Supper? 
These would be my people. 
Maybe hung over, wanting 
desperately a better job,
standing with rags
in hand as the window
beckons with hills
of yellow grass. In Da Vinci,
the blue robed apostle
gesturing at Christ
is saying, give Him the check.
What a mess they’ve made
of their faith. My God
would put a busboy
on earth to roam
among the waiters
and remind them to share
their tips. The woman
who finished one
half eaten olive
and scooped the rest
into her pockets,
walked her tiny pride home
to children who looked
at her smile and saw
the salvation of a meal.
All that week
at work she ignored
customers who talked
of Rome and silk
and crucifixions,
though she couldn’t stop
thinking of this man
who said thank you
each time she filled
His glass.

Click here for more information about Bob Hicok. Today’s poem was first published in 5AM, after which Verse Daily featured it on December 24, 2002. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter