Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Catherine Pierce

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This summer, July 17-19, I’m offering a mini-session of our popular Write Together sessions, in which we gather on Zoom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and write quietly together from a guided prompt. $100, with one half-price no-questions-asked scholarship remaining. Please click here for all the details. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room.

A few days ago my friend Julie and I spent half an hour in the anechoic chamber at Orfield Labs, which is the official “quietest place on earth.” It was entirely dark and entirely silent but for the sounds of our breathing and my (always gurgly) stomach.

Minutes went by. My wild, tumbling mind began to still. A feeling of peace replaced thought. Usually I think of my arms and legs and head and chest as separate, but there in the chamber my body felt whole, and I was so grateful to it. When the guide opened the door and turned the lights on and asked how we felt, all I could think was I want to live here.

Abecedarian for the Power Outage, by Catherine Pierce
Absolute, the sudden silence—the fan stops
buzzing, the refrigerator hushes. No,
child, the night-light can’t turn on. The nervous
dog curls herself like a comma against any soft thing.
Everything non-house—crickets, wind rustle,
full white moon—is amplified. Everything else: vanished.
Goodbye, breaking and broken news; farewell, accomplishing. Dear
husband, shall we fool around? Dear moon, you reckless marvel.
In this floating black sphere, there are no edges,
just transformations. The microwave looks
kindly in the candle’s amber
light. The curtains are full of possibilities.
Miraculous, this gift: how
nothing can reach you here. Not what you haven’t done, not tomorrow’s
OB-GYN appointment, not all the wildfires and floods and hurricanes
piling up like megaphoned
questions you can’t answer. The night
roils around you, only it’s not the night, it’s
something bigger, something that holds you, something
that tells you, gently but firmly, this can’t last,
under no circumstances will this last.
Vellum moon, solicitous microwave—nothing
will stay. You’ve drawn
Xs through your obligations,
you’re pleading for more time, but the power blares back,
zealous in its quest to return what you dropped. Here: Every stone. Every needle.

Click here for more information about poet Catherine Pierce. This poem first appeared in the The Southern Review. 

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Brittany Rogers

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This summer, July 17-19, I’m offering a mini-session of our popular Write Together sessions, in which we gather on Zoom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and write quietly together from a guided prompt. Cost: $100, with one half-price no questions asked scholarship remaining. Please click here for all the details. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room.

Years ago, changes to zoning laws in my beloved Minneapolis neighborhood began a shift from small, cool, local businesses and artisans to new luxury apartments and big box retail. Then came the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and some hard reckonings. Currently there are lots of vacant storefronts, petty and not-petty crime, and ongoing road construction that messes things up even more. But! The big, vacant CB2 store is being turned into a roller skating rink! Disco roller skating, birthday parties, karaoke skating, toddler skating. The day I found out this great news is the same day I read this fabulous poem.

Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink, by Brittany Rogers

I ignore the kids’ slinky arms. The dishes. They daddy. Tonight
I rush to the rink with my best friend, her fingers locked into mine.
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath. I forget to take pictures, but trust. We fine.
Out after dark, awestruck at our own grown. Downtown
ain’t looked like ours since they landed on Woodward and mined,
hollowed the center to erect a highrise. Joke’s on them.
Everybody here Black and in love and my,
don’t we know how to reclaim what’s ours. We on beat with it.
Look how our thighs obey: backwards, glide, turn, slow whine.
The DJ cuts to Cupid Shuffle, and even on skates, we hustle. Our necks,
tilted bottles, laughter splashing and messy. Oh, how I mined
for this belonging, scythe swinging, searching for my name. So busy
hiding from selfish, I had dropped damn near everything that was mine.

Click here for more information about Brittany Rogers. This poem was first published in Prairie Schooner. 

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My ​poetry podcast: Words by Winter 

Poem of the Week, by Danez Smith

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The man in the white shirt, black pants, and briefcase, the one who stepped in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square and just stood there. The girl in the long dress who slid a flower into the barrel of the gun the officer had trained on her. The woman who ended up becoming a second mother to the boy who murdered her own son. In the face of justifiable horror at Israeli and Palestinian deaths and unjustifiable antisemitism, these are the people I’m thinking about these days.

Little Prayer, by Danez Smith

let ruin end here

let him find honey
where there was once a slaughter

let him enter the lion’s cage
& find a field of lilacs

let this be the healing
& if not    let it be

For more information about the wondrous Danez Smith, please check out their website. Note that a version of this post first appeared in 2017.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my poetry podcast

Poem of the Week, by Leo Dangel

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This summer I’m offering a mini-session of our popular Write Together sessions, July 17-19, in which we gather on Zoom for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening and write quietly together from a guided prompt. $100, with two half-price scholarships available, no questions asked. Please click here for all the details. I’d love to see you in the Zoom room.

Some friends and I were talking last week about certain memories that sustain us, that we keep somewhere way down in our hearts and don’t talk about with anyone, ever, but that we remember when we need strength, when we need to be reminded of who we are way down deep. A certain person, maybe, or a certain conversation, or a certain evening. These memories are a kind of invisible, silent fuel.

His Elderly Father as a Young Man, by Leo Dangel

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away –
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed,
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.

Please click here for more details about poet Leo Dangel.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Thomas Fenton

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Click here to read a thoughtful Publisher Weekly’s interview with me about my new novel, Telephone of the Tree. 

Today I sat in my favorite bakery working on a new book. This is a bakery I go to once or twice a week, where most of the staff are young and beautiful the way young people are always beautiful. It was late afternoon, a slow time of day, and behind the counter two of them were talking. Their voices rose and receded, paused and then tumbled along, full of laughter, then murmurs, then laughter again, and I thought of this poem. Maybe they’ve been friends for a long time. Maybe something is changing. Maybe they left the bakery and went to their separate homes and are thinking about each other now and smiling.

Serious, by James Fenton

Awake, alert,
suddenly serious in love,
you’re a surprise.
I’ve known you long enough —
now I can hardly meet your eyes.

It’s not that I’m
embarrassed or ashamed.
You’ve changed the rules

the way I’d hoped they’d change before I thought: hopes are for fools.

Let me walk with you.
I’ve got the newspapers to fetch.
I think you know
I think you have the edge
but I feel cheerful even so.

That’s why I laughed.
That’s why I went and kicked that stone.
I’m serious!
That’s why I cartwheeled home.
This should mean something. Yes, it does.

Click here for more information about James Fenton. Today’s poem, “Serious,” is from his collection Yellow Tulips, published in 2012 by Faber and Faber. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Tim Seibles

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Click here to see the beautiful cover, read an excerpt, and find out more about my new novel Telephone of the Tree, officially in the world on May 7. 

These days I keep looking at a photo of a friend’s baby lying on a blanket as his father reads Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to him. The baby is tiny, and the expression on his face is pure wonder. Astonishment. Happiness. As if the book and his father and the words and the blanket and the world, the whole entire world, this same world that most of us later learn to walk through with our guard up, are just one big delight.

Naïve, by Tim Seibles

               I love you but I don’t know you (Mennonite Woman)

When I was seven, I walked home
with Dereck DeLarge, my arm 

slung over his skinny shoulders,
after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.

So easy, that gesture, so light— 
the kind of love that lands like a leaf.

It was 1963.  
We were two black boys

whose snaggle-toothed grins 
held a thousand giggles.

Remember? Remember
wanting to play

every minute, as if that
was why we were born?

Those hands that bring us
shouting into this life

must open like a fanfare 
of big band horns.

Though this world is nothing

like where we’d been, 
we come anyway, astonished

as if to Mardi Gras in full swing.
There must be a time

when a child’s heart builds 
a chocolate sunflower

while katydids burnish the day
with their busy wings.

This itching fury that 
holds me now—this knowing

the early welcome
that once lived inside me

was somehow sent away:
how I talk myself back

into all the regular disguises
but still walk these streets

believing in the weather
of the unruined heart.

My friends, with crow’s feet
edging their eyes,

keep looking for a kinder
city, though they don’t

want to seem naïve.
When was the last time

you wrapped your arm
around someone’s shoulder

and walked him home?

Click here for more information about Tim Seibles. “Naive” was first published on the American Academy of Poet’s Poem-a-Day site in 2024.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Robin Rosen Chang

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Friends, I’m teaching a year-long FICTION writing class on Zoom, beginning in June, via the Loft Literary Center. The workshop, which will take place Tuesday evenings from 6-9 Central time, is open to anyone anywhere in the world who wants to write fiction. Click here for many more details. 

Cindy was my childhood best friend. We spent inordinate amounts of time together playing our own word game, building hay forts, playing tag in the sweet corn, and camping by the creek across the field, through the woods, and down the hill where the coyotes lived (we were fearless little kids). Cindy went through cancer treatment when we were in fifth grade (she recovered) and I used to go with her to the radiation lab and sit next to her on the couch afterward. She moved to Florida when we were eleven. Only decades later do I understand just how lonely I was without her.

Indian Creek with Neighbor Boy, by Robin Rosen Chang

When we were kids, we explored
the creek, meandered with it
through our yards and beyond
as if we had discovered it
ourselves. We wandered along its bed,
navigating its contours
until we learned where the water
moved fastest, where it trickled,
where its stones jutted out
forming steps for us to cross
from one side to the other.
When we knew the creek perfectly,
we rolled our pants,
tossed our dirty socks and damp sneakers
and waded through it,
lifting rocks to catch crayfish
and scooping up salamanders
shrouded in the cool mud.

In winters, we stomped along
its gray frozen surface like giants,
cracking the ice with our heavy steps,
or slid clumsily on the thicker patches
behind the McCabes’ house.
Once, you shattered it
and fell in. When you got up,
dripping wet, tears
streaming down your chubby child cheeks,
you turned to me,
claimed it was my fault—
a true friend wouldn’t just stand there.
To ease your pain,
I lay in the frigid creek,
in the exact spot where you had fallen.

Click here for more information about poet Robin Rosen Chang. Today’s poem is from her collection The Curator’s Notes, published by Terrapin Press.

alisonmcghee.com​ 
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Niels Hav

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Friends, I’ll be teaching a year-long FICTION writing class on Zoom, via the Loft Literary Center. The workshop, which will take place Tuesday evenings from 6-9 Central time, begins in June and is open to anyone anywhere in the world with an interest in writing any kind of fiction. Click here for many more details. 

The first time I walked into my house it felt happy and full of life and I made an offer then and there. It’s well over a hundred years old, still young by Alison-house standards. It began life as a single-family house, turned into a boarding house in World War II (some of the bedroom doors are numbered, and when we knocked out a wall it was insulated with newspapers from 1945), and now it’s triplex-ish.

Sometimes I wonder about the people who lived here before me. Hints live on in bits of wallpaper at the back of an ancient closet – who chose that pattern? Who was the person who planted the rhododendron that bloomed solo before I turned the place into a riot of flowers? How many babies learned to walk in this house? How many fell in love, fell out of love, grew into people who maybe drive by now and think, Who lives here now, in the rooms I knew so well?


The Battered Inside, by Niels Hav, translated by PK Brask & Patrick Friesen

The battered inside of the cupboard under the kitchen sink
makes me happy.  Here are two honest nails
hammered into the original boards that have been there
since the apartment block was built. It’s like revisiting
forgotten members of our closest family.
At some point the boards were blue; there is some leftover red
and a green pastel. The kitchen sink is new
and the counter has been raised ten centimeters. Probably
it’s been renovated several times through the years.
The kitchen has remained current; there are new lamps,
electric stove, fridge and coffee maker.
But here under the sink a time warp has been allowed
its hidden existence. Here is the wash tub with the floor cloth,
the plunger and a forgotten bit of caustic soda.
Here the spider moves about undisturbed.
Maybe there’s been kissing and dancing in this kitchen

Probably there’s been crying.
Happy people newly in love have prepared fragrant meals
and later cooked porridge while making sandwiches for lunch boxes.
Hungry children have stolen cookies. Laughter has resounded
in the stairwell and ropes have been skipped in the yard
while new cars were being parked outside. People moved in and out,
old ones died and were carried downstairs, newborn babies
were carried upstairs. Everything according to order—
my nameplate will also disappear from the door one day.
I get down on my knees in front of the kitchen sink
and respectfully greet the plunger, the spider
and the two honest nails.

Click here for more information about Danish poet Niels Hav. Today’s poem is from his poetry collection Moments of Happiness, published by Anvil Press, Vancouver. 

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Poem of the Week, by Marion Strobel

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Click here to see the beautiful cover, read an excerpt, and find out more about my new novel Telephone of the Tree, out next month. 

When I first read this poem I felt quiet and still, as if I were with a baby in a garden and we were gently touching each flower and vegetable in turn and saying their names. When I read it again I thought of love, old love, and wondered if it too is fragile, the way new love can be fragile.

Then I wondered if all love is fragile, and if all love needs to be tended, and learned how to be held, over and over, so that it can grow old.

Little Things, by Marion Strobel

Little things I’ll give to you–
till your fingers learn to press
gently
on a loveliness;
little things and new–till your fingers learn to hold
love that’s fragile,
love that’s old.

A fiction writer, critic, and poet, Marion Strobel was an associate editor of Poetry from 1920 to 1925. Today’s poem, Little Things, is in the public domain.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Julia Hartwig

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Our dog Paco never tires of affection. His appetite for pets, belly rubs, neck scratching, or improvised songs sung into his ears knows no bounds. During the day he will sit at my feet and tell me, in low grunts and grrrs, eyes fixed on mine, that it’s time to take a break so he can leap onto my lap and be stroked.

What Paco wants, he asks for. And we give it to him. Our lives are all better for it. I have one human friend who reminds me of Paco: fearless, funny, and forthright in stating their needs. I’ve never been like my dog or my friend, but I aspire to be.

Demand It Courageously, by Julia Hartwig (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter) 

    Make some room for yourself, human animal.
     Even a dog jostles about on his master’s lap to
improve his position. And when he needs space he
runs forward, without paying attention to commands
or calls.
     If you didn’t manage to receive freedom as a gift,
demand it as courageously as bread and meat.
     Make some room for yourself, human pride and dignity.
     The Czech writer Habal said:
     I have as much freedom as I take.

Click here for more information about Polish poet Julia Hartwig. Today’s poem first appeared in her collection In Praise of the Unfinished, published by Knopf in 2008.

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My podcast: Words by Winter