Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Marjorie Saiser

Posted on by alisonmcghee

An old plastic solar-powered calculator is one of my most precious belongings. It adds and subtracts and divides and multiplies and I use it all the time. My calculator lives in my travel backpack when I’m on the road, along with its cousins the extra charger, the UBS converter, the external battery, the spare sunglasses, and tiny packets of salt (judge not).

The calculator was a gift from my dad. Many years ago I watched him bent over the kitchen table adding up bills, and I admired its simplicity and lack of batteries and he pushed it across the table to me. “You can have it!” he said in his trademark bellow. “I’ve got another!”

The mother and narrator in this beautiful poem remind me of my father and me.

She Gives Me the Watch off Her Arm, by Marjorie Saiser

my mother wants me to
go to college

the closest she has ever been
is this
the dorm

her father had needed her
to dig the potatoes
and load them into burlap bags

but here she is
leaving her daughter

on the campus in the city
time to go
we are at the desk
the clerk is wide-

eyed when my mother
asks her if she will
take an out-of-town check

if the need arises
if something comes up
so my girl will have money

even I know
this isn’t going to happen
this check-cashing

a clerk helping me with money
but miracle of miracles
the clerk says nothing

and I say nothing
and my mother feels better
we go to the parking lot

old glasses thick graying hair
she is wearing a man’s shirt
has to get back to the job

we stand beside her Ford and it is
here she undoes the buckle of the watch
and holds it out to me

my father’s watch
keeping good time for him
and then for her

she says she knows I will
need a watch to get to class
we hug and she gets in

starts the car
eases into traffic
no wave

the metal of the back of the watch

is smooth to my thumb
and it keeps for a moment
a warmth from her skin.

Click here for more information about Marjorie Saiser.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Lauren K. Alleyne

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Garvin, I hear your Queens accent, your quick, quiet hoarseness, your nervous chuckle. Christine, I hear those tiny golden bells chiming in your words and laughter. Zdrazil, I hear your deep tenor, your booming laugh, your fierce and solemn words in that last conversation.

My people, I call you back.

One after another I conjure you: your voices, your love, your bright eyes. You once smiled, and sparkled, and shone your light upon me. I still hear your laughter. I still love you.

How could I have known I would need to remember your laughter, by Lauren K. Alleyne

the way it ricocheted—a boomerang flung 
from your throat, stilling the breathless air.

How you were luminous in it. Your smile. Your hair 
tossed back, flaming. Everyone around you aglow.

How I wanted to live in it those times it ignited us 
into giggles, doubling us over aching and unmoored

for precious minutes from our twin scars—
the thorned secrets our tongues learned too well

to carry. It is impossible to imagine you gone, 
dear one, your laugh lost to some silence I can’t breach,

 from which you will not return.


Click here for more information about Lauren K. Alleyne.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by David Whyte

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The morning after the 2016 election I picked up a friend to do errands. My friend, who is Black, took one look at me and said Alison, what happened? What’s the matter? I looked at his puzzlement and worry with disbelief: What do you mean, what’s the matter? After a minute his face cleared and he said, gently, Oh…you didn’t think he’d win.

The enormity of my own naivety swept over me at those words. My friend silently nodded, then said, in that same gentle voice, But you know that the work continues, right? No matter who’s in charge, the work itself never ends.

Fast forward to this past week, when we are living under minority rule and the decrees of people who think their religion trumps mine. My rage is so deep it’s almost paralyzing. Key word: Almost.

I flatly refuse to despair. Flatly refuse with me, will you? The world was made to be free in, and the work never ends.

Sweet Darkness, by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Click here for David Whyte’s website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ginny Lowe Connors

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It is impossible to be a woman, it is impossible to be a woman: a mantra I chant to myself at some point almost every day. This mantra is usually comforting, in a weird way, because it reminds me I didn’t make this suffocating, cruel, abusive system we live in, nor am I alone in it.

Not today, though. Not with an illegitimate supreme court. Not with sanctimonious zealots who believe my religion doesn’t count but theirs does. Not with minority rule that wants to force us into cages. Maybe they think if they just keep saying no, we’ll be dulled into submission.

We won’t.


Betty Parris Hears Only No, by Ginny Lowe Connors
(daughter ef the R.everend Parris)

No running    no dancing    no wasting of time

no power    no nonsense    opinions    or rage

all of our stitches must march a straight line

no running    no dancing    no wasting of time

stubbornness ugly    defiance a crime

I dream I’ve been captured    forced into a cage

no running    no dancing    no wasting of time

no power    no nonsense    opinions    or rage 

Please click here for Ginny Lowe Connors’ website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The other day I recaulked my bathtub. Razored out the repulsive old caulk, chipped and dug, alcoholed and bleached. Cut the tip off the tube of new caulk but the caulk gun didn’t work and I couldn’t squeeze it out of the tube. So I razored open the tube, spooned the caulk into a little plastic bag, snipped a corner of the bag and drew a bead around the tub as if I was frosting a cake. This worked, kind of anyway, and the tub looks pretty good.

Later that afternoon I read this poem by the inimitable Ada Limon and pictured that mountain lion in envy and admiration. Her six-foot fence, my baggie of caulk. . .

The Mountain Lion, by Ada Limon

I watched the video clip over and over,
night vision cameras flickering her eyes
an unholy green, the way she looked
the six-foot fence up and down
like it was nothing but a speed bump
then cleared the man-made border
in one impressive leap. A glance
over the shoulder, an annoyance,
as As if you could keep me out, or
keep me in. I don’t know what it
was that made me press replay and
replay. Not fear, though I’d be
terrified if I was face to face with
her, or heard her prowling in the night.
It was just that I don’t think I’ve
ever made anything look so easy.  Never
looked behind me and grinned or
grimaced because nothing could stop
me. I like the idea of it though, felt
like a dream you could will into being:
See a fence? Jump it.

For more information about Ada Limon, check out her website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by James Laughlin

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Most of the time you don’t know, in the moment itself, the moments that will return to you for the rest of your life. The look on your daughter’s face that day, the way his hand felt when he held yours on the train. You don’t know when a moment will be the last time you see her, the last time you hear his voice.

But sometimes, even as a moment is happening, you know that it will be with you forever. That you will always be held inside its laughter, its love, its pure happiness and comfort, and that you will wish you were still in that moment. Even as you experience it, you are letting it go and you are wishing it back. Those are the moments that shiver your heart.

O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again, by James Laughlin

How she let her long hair down over her shoulders, making a
love cave around her face. Return and return again.
How when the lamplight was lowered she pressed against
him, twining her fingers in his. Return and return again.
How their legs swam together like dolphins and their toes
played like little tunnies. Return and return again.
How she sat beside him cross-legged, telling him stories of
her childhood. Return and return again.
How she closed her eyes when his were open, how they
breathed together, breathing each other. Return and return again.
How they fell into slumber, their bodies curled together like
two spoons. Return and return again.
How they went together to Otherwhere, the fairest land they
had ever seen. Return and return again.
O best of all nights, return and return again.


Click here for more information about James Laughlin.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Joshua Poteat

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This poem awes me every time I read it. It floats me up above the earth and outside of time and noise and sensation while thousands of years of humans and our endless struggles against ourselves and the planet play themselves out below. We cut down our forests to make ships on the seas, the seas rise against us, the whole tide of history washes in and over and out.

Sixteen words! The wild power of poetry. And now I’m laughing, because look how much longer this little backstory is than the poem itself.


Tintype, by Joshua Poteat

Whole forests went to sea
                        disguised as ships.

         Whole seas went to forest
                        disguised as time.

For more information on Joshua Poteat, please click here.


alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

(early) Poem of the Week, by Grant Clauser

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It was surprisingly easy to get, someone who never should have been able to buy a gun once mused to me, a sentence that still turns my body to ice.

Last week at a Moth live show I sat in the front row the way I always do and watched warily as one of the storytellers brought a prop concealed in a plastic bag on stage. I turned to the stranger next to me and said I hope that’s not a gun in there, and then looked around to plot my exit routes. Should I crouch and scuttle or run in a zig zag?

We cover sockets with plastic caps, put car seats in cars, buckle our seatbelts, put locks on cabinets, stop signs at corners, add a rotten egg stink to odorless gas. We keep ourselves safer in common sense ways. We can do the same with guns. Mass violence is inevitable only if we shrug and say it is. Mass violence is acceptable only if we shrug and say it is. We are helpless only if we give up. So don’t give up. Take action. Here is one of my favorite organizations.

J35, by Grant Clauser
       
For two weeks
a killer whale
pushed its dead calf
around the ocean,
diving to the cold darkness
each time the desiccating baby
sank to the bottom.
She cradled her offspring
in her dangerous mouth,
raised the stillborn
back to the surface
to make sure its collapsed blowhole
could reach the air.

What if mythology
got it wrong about Sisyphus?
The rock not punishment
from the gods, but the weight
of regret falling
back on him,
grief rolling over
him each night
as he tried to quiet
the nightmares,
then woke again
to push it as far
up the mountain
as his shoulders could take.

Finally the whale-watchers
said it was over,
the body too decomposed
and eaten by fish
for the mother to keep
carrying, and the ocean
eventually separated them
by wave and storm,
the orca rejoined its pod
to follow the salmon,
something to focus on
while moving forward

Click here for more information about Grant Clauser.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Eileen Sheehan

Posted on by alisonmcghee

This quote is from my novel All Rivers Flow to the Sea. It pops up here and there around the world, on Instagram pages and Pinterest boards, translated into various languages. It’s taken on a life of its own, one I couldn’t have predicted. But I do remember writing these words, how the sentences spun themselves out as if they were trying to tell me something important. This poem feels the same way.

Holding the Note, by Eileen Sheehan

Singing class began with me being asked
to sing the scale. The class would laugh.

I never laughed because I already knew
I could not hold a tune, except inside my head.

For almost half a term I dreaded
Thursday mornings, until I told my mother

how I was used as an anti-tuning fork
to demonstrate how not to climb the scale.

My mother simplified it all with her advice,
Girl, on Thursday next, don’t sing.

So, next class I met her gaze dead on,
sealed my mouth tight shut. No matter

how many times she ordered me,
I allowed not one sound escape my throat.

Silence spread across the room
like a held note. I knew I had her then

for silence was my realm, not hers.
She rammed the tuning fork against

the wooden desk and instructed the
best singer in the room to lead

the group. My mother never asked a thing
when I got home but she sang, around the house,

a song that had my name in it:
and the girl inside the song could sing.

I carry every word and turn to The Spinning
Wheel: inside my head I sing it still.

For more information about Eileen Sheehan, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Muriel Rukeyser

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Yesterday I opened a can of tomatoes, squished them through my fingers to break them up, added them to the soup, and suddenly pictured the long line of people who made this possible. The invisible humans who planted the seeds, watched over the growing plants, harvested the tomatoes, hauled them to the processing plant, trucked them to the store, stocked the shelf I plucked them from. The people who made the can, cast the iron pot, strung together the gas lines that feed my stove.

I happily eat alone at restaurants and bars, go to movies alone, travel thousands of miles and across oceans alone, work alone, spend much of my time alone. But still, my life is entirely dependent on the decency of people I don’t know and will never know. Every time I read this poem I think about that.

Islands, Muriel Rukeyser

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are separate like them

For more information about Muriel Rukeyser, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast