Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Annie Kantar

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Our summer and fall four-hour workshops are coming right up. I’d love to see you in one! Click here and scroll down for all the details.

Last week my daughter and I were naming dreams that won’t happen because of time, because of choices, because we can only live one life at a time. Like my dream of living in Vermont, I said, and my other dream of living on an island off the coast of Maine, and my other other dream of being a forest ranger in the Adirondacks.

Sometimes other selves rattle around inside me, wanting out, wanting to live those other lives. But decades and decades into this one life, here I am, still trying to write something beautiful, still trying to learn how to live with all my imperfections.

First Thing’s, by Annie Kantar

—to make the person

            who’ll write the poems,

the poet said—and, answering

            a question I

must have asked

            but can’t recall: You learn

to live with your imperfect

            self—then went

back to her dinner,

            as if that were all.

Click here for more information on poet and translator Annie Kantar.

alisonmcghee.com.
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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My new book Dear Brother is in the world as of Tuesday! Click here for more info and/or to register for its launch party. 

Maybe you, like me, talk to the people you love who aren’t on the planet anymore. Maybe you look up and oh, there she is, coming toward you at the end of the block, waving…but wait, no, it’s just someone who looks like her. Maybe you see a cardinal, or an eagle, or a small red fox, and that’s the sign you and your loved one agreed upon, so you know they’re still with you.

And maybe you’re also like me in that sometimes a sign isn’t enough. Sometimes you just want them right back there in the room with you, nodding off in the big chair, or telling you a story, because you need their presence, their courage, their steady-as-a-rock-ness.


The Courage That My Mother Had, by Edna St. Vincent Millay

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.


Click here for more information about Edna St. Vincent Millay.

alisonmcghee.com

My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Faith Shearin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Click here to peruse our summer and fall one-day online writing workshops. I’d love to see you in the zoom room.

There is a town in North Ontario
Dream comfort memory to spare
And in my mind I still need a place to go
All my changes were there

College is the place I go in my heart when I need a place to go: Maple leaves ironed between wax paper. Mountains turned to flame in the fall. My mailbox for four years: 2947. My i.d. #: 84337. Blue sky winter afternoons. A narrow bed with a blue wool blanket. A library carrel. The language lab, headphones over my ears. Dancing at the Alibi. Chinese characters written over and over and over. The boy who wore the army jacket and set up a shrine to John Prine in his dorm room. The girl who laced her hiking boots with red laces.

For me it was college, but it doesn’t have to be. A person, a place, an experience, a single moment: and suddenly the roof of your life lifts off and blows away.

Directions to Your College Dorm, by Faith Shearin

All hallways still lead to that room
with its ceiling so high it might have been

a sky, and your metal bed by the window,
and your crate of books. First,

you must walk across the deep
winter campus to find your friend

throwing snowballs that float
for years. Then, open our letters:

shelves of words. You will find
our coats, our awkwardness, the tickets

from the trains that witnessed
our confusion. Love was the place

where we became as naked
as morning; it was dangerous and

dappled and we visited its shores
with suitcases and maps from childhood.

I remember our shadows growing
on your wall while a candle

swallowed itself. You kept a single
glass of water on a desk and it trembled

whenever we danced.


Click here for more information about Faith Shearin.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter (my poetry podcast)

Poem of the Week, by Danusha Laméris

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Twin Citians, please come to my Dear Brother book party at the Red Balloon on Tuesday, August 8 at 6:30 pm. I’d love to see you there!

The other day a wave of missing my friend John Zdrazil, who died two years ago, flooded through me and I just wanted to hear his voice and that big laugh. Feel the sun of his presence shining on me. So I picked up my phone and scrolled through a few of our many years of texts. My God, he was hilarious. And soulful. And smart. And he just loved me so much, exactly as I am, which is so rare in life.

I miss you, Z’driz, I texted him, and listened to the swoosh as it sent itself to wherever he is now.

Late that night I picked up my phone again to read more of our messages to each other, but everything was gone, erased, deleted, except those four words: I miss you, Z’driz. All our conversations, all our laughter, all the books we loved and everything we said about them, invisible now. Floating somewhere in the scrim between worlds.

How Often One Death, by Danusha Laméris

How often one death carries another. Like when
my painting teacher, Eduardo, died, and the cat

he’d had for years succumbed the same month
to the same rare ailment. Or how when they buried

my friend’s grandfather in Japan, the pond-full of koi
he’d tended all his life, sickened, turned belly-up.

Who or what is in our keeping? A house, unoccupied,
quickly turns itself, sinks earthward.

Long-married couples are known to give up
the ghost within hours of each other.

Think of the hum that holds the walls together,
the roof high, keeps the rot at bay a little longer.

As surely as we, too, are pinned here by others,
whose presence urges our cells to replicate, our lives

more single than we imagine. Even the woman
I can’t see, who lives in a studio on the other side

of the wall. She washes a dish and the water runs through
the pipes between us, like blood through the arteries

of a single heart. 

Click here for more information about the wondrous Danusha Laméris.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Cecilia Woloch

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Click here for a list of our summer and fall half-day workshops. I’d love to see you in the zoom room.

When I first moved to Minneapolis, I taught Mandarin at a big city high school where many of my students were recent immigrants from South Asia. I was especially close to a boy from Laos, a boy full of laughter and jokes, intensely smart and talented, who longed for his home country. He used to tell me stories about its beauty, the colors and fruits and simplicity of his life there despite a near-total lack of money. Once he told me that when he was sick, his mother would feed him a precious egg to help him get better.

A single egg.

All these years since, I’ve thought of my student and that story. As I sit here in my kitchen, where I cook myself two eggs nearly every day, I’m thinking of him again.

Ghost Hunger, by Cecilia Woloch

Sometimes when I wipe the bowl with my bread
when I scramble one egg, two eggs, with milk
when I stir the kasha until it’s thick
when I sit at the table and bow my head
I think of how my father ate
how he bowed his head—though he didn’t pray
at least not in the usual way of grace
but always that posture over his plate
of supplication, gratitude—
the hungry shoulders of the boy
who’d stuffed his mouth with pulled grass once
who never got over that there was enough
Sometimes I wipe the bowl with my bread
Sometimes I feed his ghost this prayer

Click here for more information about Cecilia Woloch.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Jacqueline Allen Trimble

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But this was not that day, says the poet.

Today’s my birthday, and this poem goes out as a gift to all you beautiful poetry people out there, in hopes it fills you with the same happiness I feel every time I read it. Out loud, because this poem demands out loud-ness.

The Language of Joy, by Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Black woman joy is like this:
Mama said one day long before I was born
she was walking down the street,
foxes around her neck, their little heads
smiling up at her and out at the world
and she was wearing this suit she had saved up
a month’s paycheck for after it called to her so seductively
from the window of this boutique. And that suit
was wearing her, keeping all its promise
in all the right places. Indigo. Matching gloves.
Suede shoes dippity-do-dahed in blue.
With tassels! Honey gold. And, Lord, a hat
with plume de peacock, a conductor’s baton that bounced
to hip rhythm. She looked so fine she thought
Louis Armstrong might pop up out of those movies
she saw as a child, wipe his forehead and sing
ba da be bop oh do de doe de doe doe.
And he did. Mama did not sing but she was skiddly-doing that day,
and the foxes grinned, and she grinned
and she was the star of her own Hollywood musical
here with Satchmo who had called Ella over and now they were all
singing and dancing like a free people up Dexter Avenue,
and don’t think they didn’t know they were walking in the footsteps
of slaves and over auction sites and past where old Wallace
had held onto segregation like a life raft, but this
was not that day. This day was for foxes and hip rhythm
and musical perfection and folks on the street joining in the celebration
of breath and holiness. And they did too. In color-coordinated ensembles,
they kicked and turned and grinned and shouted like church
or football game, whatever their religious preference. The air
vibrated with music, arms, legs, and years of unrequited
sunshine. Somebody did a flip up Dexter Avenue.
It must have been a Nicholas Brother in a featured performance,
and Mama was Miss-Lena-Horne-Dorothy-Dandridge
high-stepping up the real estate, ready for her close-up.
That’s when Mama felt this little tickle. She thought
it might be pent-up joy, until a mouse squirmed out
from underneath that fine collar, over that fabulous fur,
jumped off her shoulder and ran down the street.
Left my mama standing there on Dexter Avenue in her blue
suit and dead foxes. And what did Mama do?
Everybody looking at her, robbed by embarrassment.
She said, “It be like that sometimes,” then she and Satchmo,
Ella, and the whole crew jammed their way home.

Click here for more information about Jacqueline Allen Trimble.


alisonmcghee.com

My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Karen Bjork Kubin

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Last week my daughter asked why there was duct tape wrapped around my foot. “To dissolve a callous,” I said, which is something I read duct tape can do (among its zillion other uses). She shook her head in a sad but familiar way, and I laughed and thought of the foot doctor who once lectured me on how I should stop wearing high heels.

Dude. You clearly do not know me at all, I thought.

These feet of mine have tromped up and down a thousand mountains and through a thousand woods and they show it. Occasionally I pick things up with my extra-long toes rather than bend down and use my fingers, and no, I’m not kidding. I always felt so sorry for Cinderella.

The Lost Shoe, by Karen Bjork Kubin

Doodle, doodle, doo,
The Princess lost her shoe:
Her highness hopped,
The fiddler stopped,
Not knowing what to do.

It had never before occurred to me
to kick it off.
And you know princesses 
don’t just lose things, right?

I have not found the courage yet
to chuck the other.
For now, the chill and bite of floor
against skin is almost more

than I can bear. Let me feast on it.
Give me earth. Give me
time, and I will bare the other,
will bare the rest,

and I do not need your music anymore.
I have my own, 
and steps to learn,
a dance to keep, and turn,
and turn.

Click here for more information about poet and violinist Karen Bjork Kubin.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Czeslaw Milosz

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Long ago someone I loved bought a set of small salt and pepper shakers for a friend. He showed them to me and I admired the ingenious way the shakers curved into each other. They slipped in my friend’s hand and he carefully fit them together again so they were tucked safely in his palm.

This moment has come back to me over and over and over, through all the years between then and now. Why, I don’t know. But every time I picture those shakers, my friend’s hand, the intent look on his face as he kept them safe, the image goes straight to my heart.

Encounter, by Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.


Click here for more information on Czeslaw Milosz.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kathleen Wedl

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Long ago one of my small children asked if I wanted to play a board game. It was evening and I was tired, so tired, beyond tired.

I’m sorry, honey. But I think I’m just too tired.

Would you like to read a book together instead?

How many more times would my child want the simple pleasure of my company? Even then, in the moment, I knew saying no would be something I’d regret forever. Now I look back through the tunnel of years at my child’s quiet nod, their small back disappearing down the hallway.

Wished Away, by Kathleen Wedl

I wish for the days I wished
my teen granddaughters wouldn’t sprawl
across my silken bed in street clothes
their pollen infested ripped shorts
and indoor/outdoor socks
defiling my anti-allergy refuge
reveling in their secrets and embarrassments
trying their bravado on each other
like leather bustiers. Where was the sage
warning me to be careful
what I wished for, those long afternoons
all breathable air saturated with happy
chittering and chortling. They’re gone.
My satin comforter smooth, fresh
as the first chill of September.

Today I’ll gather apples as the air
becomes crisp, something to put up for winter.
Think how the jewels will glisten under glass.

Click here for more information about poet Kathleen Wedl’s new collection, Ordinary Time.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Fasano

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Dear chatbot, please write a 1000-word essay about Alison McGhee’s novel What I Leave Behind, including the themes of the novel and the themes of her work in general. Note voice, style, tone, and anything that makes this novel unique. This was the assignment I gave to a chatbot a few months ago (and yes, I did say “Dear chatbot” and “please.” Because I’m polite.). The essay was finished in seconds. It was good, for the most part, articulate and careful and full of tender references to the narrator Will’s love and care for his little brother.

But no little brother exists in my novel. A crucial fact which no one who hadn’t read it would ever know.

We speed along, faster and faster and faster and faster, saving and saving and saving time. So much time saved. And so much lost along the way.

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now.
I know your days are precious
on this earth.
But what are you trying
to be free of?
The living? The miraculous
task of it?
Love is for the ones who love the work.

Click here for more information about Joseph Fasano.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter