Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by CAConrad

Posted on February 19, 2022 by alisonmcghee

Oh, this poem. When I first read it my long-ago friend Marty shimmered up in my mind, small thin Marty who came to the creative writing classes I taught at the Minnesota AIDS project when I first moved to Minneapolis. I used to bake muffins to pass around and Marty loved them, blueberry especially.

Once, when he and I were in the parking lot talking after class, he reached out and filched a third muffin from the basket. It wants to be free, he said, with that sly smile of his, I’m just liberating it. You’re long gone now, Marty, along with so, so many others from back in those pre-medicine days, but I promise I still see you, and every time I bake blueberry muffins I think of you.

72 Corona Transmutations (excerpt), by CAConrad

my friend

Rex told me

when he was

dying of AIDS

promise me every day of 1993

will be the best day with or without me

27 years later

the promise

still kept

For more information on CAConrad, please visit their website.

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Poem of the Week, by Lucille Clifton

Posted on February 12, 2022 by alisonmcghee

Once, at a book conference overseas, the women at my table told me they felt sorry for American women like me, that I not only had to work so hard at my writing career but also at home, cleaning and cooking and doing laundry and taking care of my children, while they had cooks and drivers and housekeepers and nannies. I’ve thought about that conversation ever since. Thought about what it says about the systems of racism and sexism most of us struggle within. Thought about famous people and all the people behind them in the shadows, overlooked, overworked, underpaid. Every time I read the last line of this poem the entirety of our country’s history comes over me.

study the masters, by Lucille Clifton

like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.

For more information about Lucille Clifton, please click here.

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Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by C.L. O’Dell

Posted on February 5, 2022 by alisonmcghee

Ever tried to imitate someone else’s handwriting? It’s hard and fascinating and full of speculation. What’s up with this big poofy T? Is this long straight line at the end supposed to stand in for the last five letters of their surname?

Trying to form letters the way someone else does makes me think how we breathe each other’s air but not quite, walk in each other’s footsteps but not quite, know our dearest ones so well, but…do we? I love this poem.

Forsythias, by C.L. O’Dell

I think about time.
The forsythias
and the man singing
in the car ahead of me.

When I enter the space
the same shape
he made a moment
before me,

where is the music,
the taste of honey
in his mouth and now
mine, the thought

of kissing his wife good-bye
and the words of a song
lifting off my tongue
as if from memory, but his?

What is mine stays with me,
my heart in the glitter
of his heart. My dreams
have no bones. Love

is never saved in layers
of rock. So much of me
will never be found
on this earth.

For more information about C.L. O’Dell, please visit his website.
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Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Garous Abdolmalekian

Posted on January 22, 2022 by alisonmcghee

Flags in general make me uneasy, especially now. Tromping around the streets of this little town, I see regular American flags, thin blue line flags, Q flags, skull flags, and other flags I can’t identify and don’t want to.

If I had to fly a flag I think I’d fly a potsticker flag. Hard to go wrong with potstickers.

Pattern, by Garous Abdolmalekian

Your dress waving in the wind.
This
is the only flag I love.

trans. Idra Novey and Ahmad Nadalizadeh (2020)

For more information about Garous Abdolmalekian, please click here.
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Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Jay Hopler

Posted on January 15, 2022 by alisonmcghee

A few days ago a friend was running in the canyons when he found a hiker lying on the trail, unmoving and unresponsive. He called 911 and gave him CPR until the medics arrived and took over, but the hiker died there, on a warm, sunny day filled with the scent of coastal sage, the sea glinting in the distance.

The ending of this gorgeous poem, which shocked but also thrilled me when I first read it, made me think I shouldn’t send it out, not in this ongoing pandemic. But I changed my mind. Love and the memory of it are what I hope for myself and for everyone in the world, in the end that will come for all of us.

love & the memory of it, by Jay Hopler

spook not at the shook world w/ all its viruses and murder hornets
instead that summer evening call to mind when you drove alone
over iowa
the light in the fields how long it was how in love you were w/ it
& the air & the world & that girl that atomic girl you would one
day marry
or call to mind a summer evening half a life from then & the park
by the river the way her laughter
echoed off the rocks
in sparks that sighed
into the water

it was she that lit the world just then
& not that ember of a sun
her light like a struck string fretting its zing against the pic-
nic tables

may that be the music you hear
when they unplug the ventilator

For more information about Jay Hopler, please click here.

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Words by Winter: my podcas

Poem of the Week, by Robert Okaji

Posted on January 8, 2022 by alisonmcghee

After our dog Petey died it felt like a betrayal to go for a walk without him, without the constant pauses so he could sniff, pee, investigate. I was finally used to hiking without a leash in my hand when we adopted our pup Paco. Now it feels strange when someone else takes him out and I have only myself to account for.

The ghosts of Petey remain: a few black curls clipped the day he died, his old blue collar, his tags, the bright halter and extendable leash that are too big for Paco. The memory of how Petey, after eight months of hard work on his part and mine, heeled at a single command while I’ve never bothered to train small Paco to heel at all – we just keep him on a 4′ lead.

Sometimes we unthinkingly call Paco by his predecessor’s name. Sometimes I wonder if Paco senses the dog who came before him.

While Walking My Dog’s Ghost, by Robert Okaji

I spot a baby rabbit
lying still in a clump of grass
no wider than my hand.

It quivers, but I pretend
not to have seen, for fear
that the dog, ghost or not,

will frighten and chase it
into the brush, beyond
its mother’s range,

perhaps to become lost
and thirsty, malnourished,
filthy, desperate, much

like the dog when we
found each other that hot,
dry evening so long ago.

For more information about Robert Okaji, please check out his website.

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Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Charles Ghigna

Posted on January 1, 2022 by alisonmcghee

Even though I conjured them up, the people in my books are real and alive in my mind and heart. They wonder about the meaning of life the same way I do, they look at the sun gleaming on the ice crusted snow and think how beautiful, the way I do, they look back on words said and unsaid, deeds done and not done, and like me they hope that somehow their shortcomings are balanced by their attempts at kindness.

My people live in a parallel world to this one, unless maybe it’s the same world. A few days ago a card arrived, a small Christmas wreath hand-painted on the front. My friend Zdrazil’s best friend sent it, and in it she wrote that he’d painted the card last year as he waited for his stem cell transplant to take. Holding it, I felt his presence the way I often do even though he’s passed on. He and others are the negative space to our living bodies, the light that becomes shadows. Love and comfort to you all in the new year.

Present Light, by Charles Ghigna

If I could
hold light
in my hand

I would
give it
to you

and watch it
become
your shadow.

For more information about Charles Ghigna, please check out his website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Gwendolyn Brooks

Posted on December 25, 2021 by alisonmcghee

The passerby who left the tiny painted peace rocks on my front steps with a sign saying for your beautiful garden that brings me so much summer happiness. The woman I watched pay for the groceries of the young man behind her in line. The man who saw the old man struggling at the stuck door, heavy bags in hand, and held it open with a smile. The two men walking down the street singing show tunes, their tiny dog wrapped in a pink boa and cradled in their arms. The young couple crying on the sidewalk after being robbed, and the neighbors who sprang into action to help them. The Spanish-speaking men who pulled their beater station wagon to the side of the highway after hundreds of cars had whizzed past me stuck in the snow, jumped out and pushed me back onto the road and waved me away, laughing and smiling. The girl I cash-apped money to after she told me her boyfriend had broken her leg, a story which may or may not be true but so what? We are each other’s harvest.

Excerpt from Paul Robeson, by Gwendolyn Brooks

We are each other’s
business;
we are each other’s
harvest;
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

For more information about Gwendolyn Brooks, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Stephen Dunn

Posted on December 18, 2021 by alisonmcghee

A long time ago, I was showing someone around the 150 acres of woods and fields where I grew up. We were closing in on what my sisters and I always called the pine tree house, a small outdoor room-like space enclosed by sheltering pines where I kept a tiny table and stool and paper and pens. I loved and trusted this person and wanted to show them the pine tree house as a kind of beautiful surprise –it was an important place to me–but at the last minute I veered away and didn’t mention it, either then or later.

When I first read this poem, by the wondrous Stephen Dunn, I ducked my head and shrank in my chair even though no one else was home. That long ago day came shimmering back into my mind, how something in me needed to keep the place and what it revealed about me secret, only for myself.

A Secret Life, by Stephen Dunn

Why you need to have one
is not much more mysterious than
why you don’t say what you think
at the birth of an ugly baby.
Or, you’ve just made love
and feel you’d rather have been
in a dark booth where your partner
was nodding, whispering yes, yes,
you’re brilliant. The secret life
begins early, is kept alive
by all that’s unpopular
in you, all that you know
a Baptist, say, or some other
accountant would object to.
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours.
When you write late at night
it’s like a small fire
in a clearing, it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
It’s why your silence is a kind of truth.
Even when you speak to your best friend,
the one who’ll never betray you,
you always leave out one thing;
a secret life is that important.

Click here for more information about Stephen Dunn.

alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on December 11, 2021 by alisonmcghee

In a recurring dream, I’m running, long effortless bounds that somehow cover much more ground than is possible in waking life. Each time my foot touches down I spring up higher and longer, until I’m actually floating.

The dream turns unsettling once I’m beyond the reach of gravity, but until then all is lightness and freedom. A silent floating peace, earth and all its heaviness and worry far below.

Over the Weather, by Naomi Shihab Nye

We forget about the spaciousness
above the clouds

but it’s up there.The sun’s up there too.

When words we hear don’t fit the day,
when we worry
what we did or didn’t do,
what if we close our eyes,
say any word we love
that makes us feel calm,
slip it into the atmosphere
and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.
Giant swoop of blue.

For more information on the wondrous Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast