Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

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Please check out my half-day and Writing Together offerings – I’d love to see you in the Zoom room!

A few days ago I was on the phone with my sister, telling her a true-life tale from a few months ago. She started laughing so hard she had a coughing fit (always my goal). Then she turned quiet.

“I bet it wasn’t funny when it happened, was it, Allie?” Nope. But making unfunny things funny is a way to transcend what really happened. That child with a book in her treehouse, in her hay fort, in her room with a flashlight: she was me. She’s still me, making up people who take everything that’s too hard about being alive and somehow make it manageable. The older brother I always wanted, the high school boyfriend I never had, the woman who’s the me I want to be, they rise up from my keyboard every morning, saving my life like always.

Moon in the Window, by Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Click here for more information about wondrous poet Dorianne Laux.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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Most great celebrations, like my daughter’s wedding last month, begin long before the celebration itself. Yards of cotton chosen years ago, to be turned into a quilt. Endless bottles of vodka turned into homemade gin, enough for 180 miniature party favors. Evenings with my daughter and a letterpress kit, hand-stamping each letter of each name of each place card.

Early mornings, late nights: hand-stitching, hand-stamping, hand-steeping juniper and cardamom. Moment after moment in which I thought about how much I love both my girl and her now-husband. Nothing was hurried. Everything took time, time, time, and every moment of it was a reminder that, among our endless rushing, time itself is an act of love.

The Word, by Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli,” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,

but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.


Click here for more information about the beloved Tony Hoagland.
alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ron Koertge

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As a little kid I had a baby doll I loved and played with, but no Barbies – I hated them. They scared me. Maybe because they were so grownup-looking. Those big boobs, the feet permanently stuck in a pointing-down position. I didn’t want big boobs, high heels, fancy clothes.

Ken creeped me out too – that coiffed hair, that shoulders-back confidence, that gleaming I’ll be the decision-maker here, little lady look in his eye. It all gave me the willies. It still does.

Cinderella’s Diary, by Ron Koertge

I miss my stepmother. What a thing to say,
but it’s true. The prince is so boring: four
hours to dress and then the cheering throngs.
Again. The page who holds the door is cute
enough to eat. Where is he once Mr. Charming
kisses my forehead goodnight?

Every morning I gaze out a casement window
at the hunters, dark men with blood on their
boots who joke and mount, their black trousers
straining, rough beards, calloused hands, selfish,
abrupt…Oh, dear diary—I am lost in ever after:
those insufferable birds, someone in every
room with a lute, the queen calling me to look
at another painting of her son, this time
holding the transparent slipper I wish
I’d never seen.

Click here for more information about Ron Koertge.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Gerald Stern

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A long time ago, one of the men from my writing class at the Minnesota AIDS Project, a beautiful writer whose memoirs I still keep in a “Favorites” file, invited us all over to his house for a potluck dinner. I remember he was lying on the couch when we arrived. He hadn’t felt well for years. He’d had to leave his job at the theater. He moved slowly.

But at one point in the evening, talking about one of his favorite performances, he suddenly drew back, hands extended, and transfixed me with a few lines from the play. I remember how his eyes blazed, how his voice changed. I saw for a minute the wildness of his young man self, in love with theater, in love with life, before disease ravaged him.

The Dancing, by Gerald Stern

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop—in 1945—
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

Click here for more information about Gerald Stern.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Luci Shaw

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When Alison shuffles up on a playlist, or in a store, or on the radio, I take it as a sign: There’s my song. A sign of what, who knows, other than that it brings me back to high school, waitressing at Friendly Ice Cream, and the guy at the counter who said Elvis Costello wrote a song about you, you know.
Someone wrote a song about me? And he even spelled it with one l.

Something changed, in a tiny way, for the better that night, as it did the night someone told me, at a wedding where I’d avoided them all weekend, that they had, despite how it seemed, truly loved me all that time ago. The way it changed when, going through a giant bin of old letters, I found one signed We all adore you, from a troubled time. It takes so little, sometimes, to reshape the past.

Wrong Turn, by Luci Shaw

I took a wrong turn the other day.
A mistake, but it led me to the shop where I found
the very thing I’d been searching for.

With my brother I opened a packet
of old letters from my mother and saw a side of her
that sweetened what had been deeply sour.

Later that day the radio sang a song from
a time when I was discovering love,
and folded me into itself again.

Click here for more information about Luci Shaw.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Paul Zimmer

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My grandmother McGhee lived her entire life in the Hudson River valley of downstate New York. She was a young mother in the Great Depression, a farm wife, a high school English teacher, a gardener, canner, cook, needle pointer and housekeeper extraordinaire, and the kind of grandmother who always shook her head sadly at my standard DQ order of a small vanilla cone. Oh Alison, she would say sorrowfully, that tiny little cone? Are you sure you don’t want a sundae instead?

She was a big woman, ashamed of her heavy legs, and she never danced, except alone, in her kitchen, to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I know this because of the times (unbeknownst to her) that I witnessed her, standing in place, swaying ever so slightly from side to side, one hand moving in the air to the music, which she loved. When she died, at ninety, I dropped to my knees and made a sound that my children –who were tiny at the time–still remember.

Bach and My Father, by Paul Zimmer

Six days a week my father sold shoes
to support our family through depression and war,
nursed his wife through years of Parkinson’s,
loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
never kissed me, but always shook my hand.

Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
was on the stereo. He listened with care—
brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
moving his right hand in time. He would have
risen to dance if he had known how.

“Beautiful,” he said when it was done,
my father, who’d never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
just in time he said, “That’s beautiful.”

Click here for more information about Paul Zimmer.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Joyce Sutphen

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I was a girl, walking along the Charles River in Boston on a sunny day, no one else within earshot, when suddenly a young couple got out of a car next to me, the girl in a tight sundress and heels, big smile, radiating friendliness. Her male partner silent, a half-smile on his face.

The girl was full of questions for me. She invited me to join them for coffee, tea, lunch. It’ll be fun, she said. That big smile. But something in me was wary. Something in me knew to smile, excuse myself, and back away.

I’ve never forgotten this five-minute encounter. It’s haunted me for decades, but why? Because they were going to do something terrible to you, I woke up thinking a few weeks ago. They were going to do something indescribably awful, and somehow you knew it.

Last week some friends and I were talking about all the narrow escapes in our lives, all the twists and turns of fate that somehow we’d eluded. Do you think life is just a never-ending series of lucky misses? one of them asked.

My Luck, by Joyce Sutphen

When I was five, my father,
who loved me, ran me over
with a medium-sized farm tractor.

I was lucky though; I tripped
and slipped into a small depression,
which caused the wheels to tread

lightly on my leg, which had already
been broken (when I was three)
by a big dog, who liked to play rough,

and when I was nine, I fell
from the second-floor balcony
onto the cement by the back steps,

and as I went down I saw my life go by
and thought: “This is exactly how
Wiley Coyote feels, every time!”

Luckily, I mostly landed on my feet,
and only had to go on crutches
for a few months in the fifth grade—

and shortly after that, my father,
against his better judgment,
bought the horse I’d wanted for so long.

All the rest of my luck has to do
with highways and ice—things that
could have happened, but didn’t.

Click here for more information about the wondrous Joyce Sutphen.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by John Daniel

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So last week I was talking with this guy at a party, both of us horrified by this country’s lack of affordable housing, the grinding pain of life on the streets or in a tent city. How to make things better? Tiny house communities, with onsite health care and social services? Onsite laundry, a door you can lock, access to food, community, nature? Each of us had done a bunch of research. We didn’t agree on everything.

Guess what, I’m Republican, he said at one point, as if it were a bad word that would come as a shock to me (apparently I give off a certain political vibe).

Oh, I could tell, I said, and he laughed. Big deal.

Enough with the endless fixation on dividing ourselves into camps. Enough, enough, enough. Our problems are too big. We’re all dependent on each other.

Dependence Day, by John Daniel

It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks

or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag,

a day of staying home instead of crowding away,

a day we celebrate nothing gained in war

but what we’re given—how the sun’s warmth

is democratic, touching everyone,

and the rain is democratic too,

how the strongest branches in the wind

give themselves as they resist, resist

and give themselves, how birds could have no freedom

without the planet’s weight to wing against,

how Earth itself could come to be

only when a whirling cloud of dust

pledged allegiance as a world

circling dependently around a star, and the star

blossomed into fire from the ash of other stars,

and once, at the dark zero of our time,

a blaze of revolutionary light

exploded out of nowhere, out of nothing,

because nothing needed the light,

as the brilliance of the light itself needs nothing.

Click here for more information about John Daniel.


alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Hutchison

Posted on by alisonmcghee

So here’s the way it’ll go down when I win the Powerball: a million each to my nearest and dearest and three million to me. With the gazillions left, we’ll set up a foundation to make the world better, with the caveat that every penny has to be spent within fifteen years. None of that endowment crap; that cash is going out the door in the here and now.

Priorities? Green energy. Women and children. The wilderness. Food insecurity. Dismantling things that hurt all of us, like racism and the patriarchy. And, and, and. . . Alison, focus. Don’t dilute the mission! Prioritize, Allie!

Check your ticket. Aw, crap. Well, there’s always next week.

Artichoke, by Joseph Hutchison 

O heart weighted down by so many wings


Click here for more information about Joseph Hutchison.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by George Kalogeris

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It makes life easier to love what you already have, my partner said the other night when we were talking about a friend who is never satisfied.

Easier, but not always easy. Sometimes I look back in time and wonder what would have become of me if I’d stayed in Vermont. If I’d studied poetry instead of Mandarin. If I’d moved to Thailand. If I’d said no, said yes, said Please let me think this through because something doesn’t feel right, said I need help, said No, I can’t. Or said nothing at all, but walked away, walked toward, walked around.

All the lives we might have lived. All the people we might have been. All the could’ves, reaching their small hands out to us through time and space.

The Evening Star, by George Kalogeris

I boarded the Blue Line at Aquarium station.
The only empty seat was the one by that young,

head back, eyes closed, exhausted-looking father
holding his sleeping child in his folded arms.

It was already suppertime, and the Evening Star,
as Sappho sings, was calling all of the creatures

home to their mother, through the rush-hour traffic.
The subway was coming out of the tunnel’s mouth

and I was sixty when I suddenly felt
a tiny hand start pulling at my sleeve.

In his sleep the child I never had was reaching
out for me, while the father I never became

kept his eyes shut. And all the way to my stop
at Orient Heights, nothing disturbed our dream

Click here for more information about George Kalogeris.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast