Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Cecilia Woloch

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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

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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

Poem of the Week, by Judith Waller Carroll

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Write Together, our week of no-pressure, twice-daily guided writing prompts via Zoom, begins next Saturday, June 10. Spots are still available, so if you’d like to join in, just let me know.  Click here for details. I’d love to see you in the zoom room​!​

Right after college I moved to Boston and began my life as a self-employed penniless writer. Sometimes I took a creative writing workshop through Harvard Extension. In one of them, I wrote a short story about a young woman who was married to a nice man, a good man, a man who bored her. She dreamed of passion, of adventure, of wild sweeps of emotion. One of the male writers in the room, speaking of the story, said “But what’s wrong with nice?” and I inwardly rolled my eyes and scoffed at what I perceived as his own boringness.

That story is probably at the bottom of a file cabinet somewhere in my house, but I don’t want to find it. I don’t want to think about the girl I used to be, how she silently equated “nice” with “boring,” and how wrong she was.
​

The Wrong Man, by Judith Waller Carroll

A few years after I married you,
when our love had settled down
to that steady simmer
that’s sometimes mistaken for boredom,
something triggered a memory—a whiff
of Brut cologne, iced instant coffee—
and suddenly I craved the misery
that marked my brief time with him:
the lurching stomach, the sweet
prickle at the back of my neck.
I even started to dial the number
I still knew by heart, but there you were
walking through the doorway,
arms full of something ordinary—
groceries or shirts from the cleaners—
wearing that half-smile
that could always start a fire inside me,
a flame much deeper
than the remembered pain. 

​Click here for more information about Judith Waller Carroll.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Homero Aridjis

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Eight spots remaining in our June 10-16 Write Together week of twice-daily no-pressure writing together on Zoom! Click here for details. I’d love to write with you next month.

Last weekend I watched a friend dance alone as a band played directly in front of them. The world isn’t easy to navigate for this friend, but as the hours passed and they danced on and on, you could see them shed their layers of confusion and bewilderment until they were nothing but their own body fused with music, fully at ease.

I think I needed that, was all they said at the end of the night, drenched in sweat, relaxed and happy.

Who am I without the names and categories the world slots me into? Who would I be if everything fell away, if my shadow was cast far behind me because I had no need of a shadow? The first time I read this poem I nearly cried. I keep reading it to myself, out loud, wondering who I am.

The Desire to Be Oneself, by Homero Aridjis (after Kafka)
– translated from the Spanish by George McWhirter

If you could be a horseman riding
bareback through the winds and rains
on a transparent horse
constantly buffeted
by the velocity of your mount
if you could ride hard
until your clothes were cast off far behind you
because there is no need of clothes
until reins were done with
because there is no need of reins
until your shadow was cast far behind you
because there’s no need of a shadow
and then you might see countryside not as countryside
but a fistful of air
if only you could cast the horse far behind you
and ride on, on yourself


Click here for more information about Homero Aridjis.

Click here for more information about poet and translator George McWhirter.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Rosanna Young Oh

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Are you interested in a week of twice-daily no-pressure writing together on Zoom? Click here for details on our June 10-16 session of Write Together. I’d love to see you there!

Breakfast at a Kowloon hotel: waiters in black pants, white shirts, red vests. Platters of fruit and dumplings and smoked fish, bowls of congee, you tiao. It was all so beautiful. Then I saw a cockroach crawling around one of the fruit platters. I touched a waiter’s arm and silently nodded at the roach. His eyes widened and he bore the platter away through a door that swung open onto a different world: fiery woks, steam, cooks and busboys racing around shouting.

Did the waiter flick the cockroach off and bring the fruit platter back out? Maybe. Everyone’s trying to survive. There are other worlds within ours, just behind a swinging door, and if you look for them you see them everywhere.

Picking Blueberries, by Rosanna Young Oh

It was a risk my father had taken in midwinter:
ordering 240 pint boxes of blueberries
in less than desirable condition at a discount
so they could be repicked, repacked, and resold.

We stand together before crates of blueberries—
the color of river pebbles in water, some flecked with mold.
I am twenty-nine years old, and yet my father instructs
me as though I were a child again, hiding
between the aisles of lettuces and squash in the store.

“Daughter, look,” he says. He squeezes a blueberry
between his thumb and finger until the skin tears.
I see now: rotten ones bruise to the touch.

We pick in silence. By the second hour,
our fingers stiffen, their nail beds
purple from juice.

Suddenly, my father’s voice emerges as though from a distance:
“You were not meant to live this kind of life.”

But nor was he—a man with a mind made wide by books,
who as a child rose with the sun to read by its light.

We’re left with fewer boxes than we had thought.
How, how to price them? $3.99 per pint.

Click here for more information about Rosanna Young Oh.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Alison McGhee

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Are you interested in a week of twice-daily no-pressure writing together on Zoom? Click here for details on our June 10-16 session of Write Together. I’d love to see you there!

More than seventeen years have passed for the woman who wrote this poem. She re-upped her bargain with the planets when Venus and Jupiter and Mercury again conjoined in the southwestern sky, and if she’s lucky she’ll keep re-upping it as long as she’s alive. This poem goes out to everyone –not just mothers, but everyone–who would trade their own life if it meant someone they loved could keep living.


Bargain, by Alison McGhee

The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight
Venus and Jupiter will conjoin
in the southwestern sky,
a fist and a half above the horizon.
They won’t come together again for seventeen years.
What the article does not say is that Mercury, the
dark planet, will also be on hand.
He’ll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.
I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.

Seventeen years from now, where
will I be?
Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,
let me propose a trade:
Auburn hair, muscles that don’t ache, and a seven-minute mile.
Here’s what I’ll give you in return:
My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for
French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and
the memory of having once kissed Sam W.

Then I see my girl across the room.
She stands on a stool at the sink,
washing her toy dishes and
swaying to a whispered song,
her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.
The planets are coming together now.
Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.
Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red
plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.

Mercury, here’s another offer, a real one this time:
Let her be.
You can have it all in return,
the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell
and the softness of Sam’s mouth on mine.
And my life. That too.
All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence
she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes
I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.


alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter