Alison McGhee’s Poem of the Week

Poem of the Week, by Brian Trimboli

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

One of my dearest friends is brilliant, wild and fearless in body and mind. Whatever she does, she does with all her heart. If something entrances her she will follow it as far as she can: flamenco dancing, acupuncture, poetry, figure skating, music, rowing, the list is endless.

She doesn’t live by the rules most of us live by. I could fill the walls of my house with photos of her and those walls would come alive with her energy.

When I picture her in my mind she’s always laughing, bright eyes full of fun, but I have seen her in despair and exhaustion and pain. I don’t know exactly why this gorgeous poem, so full of pain and longing, brings her to mind, but it does. My friend was young once too. She’s never stopped dreamimg.

Things My Son Should Know After I’ve Died, by Brian Trimboli

I was young once. I dug holes
near a canal and almost drowned.
I filled notebooks with words
as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun.
I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction.
I spent a summer swallowing seeds
and nothing ever grew in my stomach.
Every woman I kissed,
I kissed as if I loved her.
My left and right hands were rival.
After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents’ house
at least twice a year. No matter when you receive this
there was music playing now.
Your grandfather isn’t
my father. I chose to do something with my life
that I knew I could fail at.
I spent my whole life walking
and hid such colorful wings.

For more information about Brian Trimboli, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Joe Mills

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

As a lone wolf when it comes to work and a non-team sports person, I don’t really know what being part of a team that wants to beat another team feels like. I think of myself as my own competitor: write better, do better, be better. When my kids played sports I used to sit on the bleachers and absentmindedly cheer if I saw a good goal, which doesn’t go over well if the other team made it.

Talking about competition is complicated, because if I claim I’m not competitive, others will often laugh and say “yes, you are.” So maybe I don’t really understand it. Maybe I don’t want to. Why do we agree to live in a system that emphasizes winning over others instead of mutual aid? Does the world have to be this way or do we make it this way? Isn’t everyone good at something others aren’t?

A couple of years ago on a family vacation I watched my children play a game called Pandemic, where all the players work together to beat a virus before it wipes them out. When I read this poem I thought of that game and its beautiful, imaginary, unfamiliar world.

Turning, by Joseph Mills
 

My friend’s kid runs the sideline, gets a pass,
turns, and scores with a kick to the near post.

It’s how the play should go, but at this age
rarely does. My son sprints to him, arms up.

They high five and celebrate a moment,
then turn to jog back to their positions.

Last year, they would have hopped around madly,
twirled, fallen backwards, and rolled in the grass.

This season, they are serious. No more
skipping. No more acting sweetly goofy.

Now, they turn towards one another rather
than towards us. No more checking that we’ve seen.

But we have. We know the score, and what’s lost
as they try to turn themselves into men.

For more information on Joe Mills, please check out his website.

alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Rebecca Elson

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

When I was pregnant I used to look at people passing by on the sidewalk, sitting in restaurants, laughing and talking and arguing, and think Every single one of them came out of a woman. This fact reassured me, because the thought of giving birth was terrifying. How could this giant thing in my belly possibly emerge without breaking me apart?

In the same way, it reassures me to look around at everyone –the old man walking his old pug, the child darting down the trail with her stuffed monkey, the woman smiling at me with her eyes above her Gromit mask early this morning–and think, it will happen to all of them, too. My faith is a searching one without definitive answers, but it comforts me to know others wonder the same big questions. Makes me feel like I’m part of a long line, something so much bigger than myself. I picture the poet-astronomer Rebecca Elson, who died young, lying under the stars and feeding herself with their light.

Antidotes to Fear of Death, by Rebecca Elson

Sometimes as an antidote
to fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
til they are all, all inside me,
pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
into a universe still young,
still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
the light of all the not yet stars
drifting like a bright mist,
and all of us, and everything
already there
but unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
to lie down here on earth
beside our long ancestral bones:

to walk across the cobble fields
of our discarded skulls,
each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
thinking: whatever left these husks
flew off on bright wings.

For more information on Rebecca Elson, please read her fascinating obituary.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Stephanie Niu

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

My dad once told me that his school music teacher told him not to sing. Mouth the words, pretend to sing, but don’t. Every time I think about this, it hurts. Last February I was visiting my parents when they called my brother to sing him Happy Birthday. I secretly took a video of my big dad, phone clutched to his mostly-deaf ear, leaning forward in the lamplight and straining out the words.

How many songs are locked up inside each of us? When I read this beautiful poem below I wished I could go back in time and tell that little boy to sing as loud as he wanted.

 

A Lao Jia Song Is a Song of Home, by Stephanie Niu

There were two times I heard my father sing.
Once from behind the camera, panning to my brother’s
birthday cake, his happy birthday a key off,
so bad it is valiant, my brother blushing before the table.

The second was at a feast—a mountain village
south of Kunming where, my father pointed out,
people readied for winter like animals,
mixing butter into their tea.

There was something there, his eyes watching
the long-haired buffalo graze the cold hills
as our little bus wound up and up. His favorite American books
were the Little House series, with their descriptions

of simple tasks, how they churned butter from cream.
At the dinner, roast lamb, dark pickled flowers,
a strong tea, and before long his song:
the haunting rise of an attempt at melody,

his voice breaking before it can carry.
Somehow they recognize it, the mountain family,
and they lean over and whisper “This is a lao jia song,”
because we have never heard it

in all these years, we are sitting with strangers
trying to imagine what he is mourning.

This poem was first published in Southeast Review. For more information about Stephanie Niu, please check out her website.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Stephen Cushman

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Paco! Our new little guy, elegant, lively and full of curiosity and affection. An athlete too — no matter how fast we run the leash never slackens, and every dash through the living room involves catlike leaps on and off the couch. Everything interests him, but when I’m working, he turns into a quiet little comma and burrows close to me and the laptop. He’s supposedly about a year old but seems younger to me, a funny little puppy who rarely barks and reminds me of the dog in the poem below, a poem I loved years ago at first reading, just like we loved Paco at first sight.

Smaller Dog, by Stephen Cushman

We can’t all be
brightest in the sky

or the biggest guy
in outer space.

But I don’t envy
anybody’s place

or need to feel
I have no worth

because I’m far
from Orion’s heel.

My yellow-white
double star

delivers its light
to nearby Earth

in eleven years flat,
which is pretty fast,

but my other boast
is Helen: she

loved me most
of all her hounds,

and you can’t beat that.
So I, unsurpassed

in her esteem,
made no sounds

when secretly
they left for Troy.

He was the dream
igniting the dark

scarcity of joy.
How could I bark?



For more information about Stephen Cushman, please check out his website.
alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Orr

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

I’m no dancer but I love to dance anyway. So many memories of dancing. A ballet studio on the second floor of a frame house: First position. Second position. Plie. Arabesque. Releve. The Alibi: a bar in Vermont, my best friend and I waiting in the entryway every weekend until the cover dropped to half price. The tiny dance floor where every song, in my memory, is by the Police.

A swing dance party in Maine: me a newbie unable to follow the tight rhythms until a dark-eyed man curled my fingers around the tips of his: Resist me. Follow me, and at the same time resist me. A friend’s wedding: rainy night under a big tent. Boards laid across mud. The band strikes up and a laughing man holds out his hand: Come on, Alison, let’s go. Mud-soaked red shoes: one heel broken by the end of the night.

It’s been a while since things didn’t feel so messed up, politics and the planet melting down and movements bad and good rising up simultaneously, a future in which so much feels so uncertain. Been a while since I danced things out late at night in the living room, or thought of this poem.

To Be Alive, by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass
but the spark.
That’s crudely put, but. . . 

If we’re not supposed to dance,
why all this music?

For more information about Gregory Orr, please check out his website. 
alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week (excerpt), by Amanda Gorman

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Four years ago my family and I flew to DC to protest cruelty, bigotry, and oppression. My memories of that day, the people I met, the signs I saw, the peaceful and profound determination I witnessed, have stayed with me through the years and the marches since.

None of us are responsible for the world we’re born into, but all of us are obligated to right the wrongs we see. I used to think I was a pretty enlightened person when it came to the baked-in racism and sexism and fundamental unfairness of life in this country, but I wasn’t. My eyes are fully open now. Amanda Gorman’s fierce grace and power as she delivered her poem last Wednesday transfixed me.

The Hill We Climb (excerpt), by Amanda Gorman

We will not march back to what was
but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country better
than the one we were left with

When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

For more information about Amanda Gorman, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Yalie Kamara

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

When someone in my family almost but doesn’t triumph at something, one of us might say But you didn’t, a phrase that goes back long ago to our friend Kareem, who almost but didn’t score an incredible soccer goal, and his mother who, after the fourth or fifth time he reminisced about the almost-ness of it, laughed and said “But you didn’t!”

It’s a code phrase known to all of us, the way Okay see youuuuu is what my younger daughter and I say instead of goodbye, the way the father in Kim’s Convenience, a show we both adore, says it to his customers when they leave his store. The secret codes between people who love each other, and how they can last a lifetime, are what I thought of when I read this beautiful poem by Yalie Kamara.

Besaydoo, by Yalie Kamara

While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boys
in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach
for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer,

their fingers shimmy as if they’re solving a Rubik’s cube just beyond our sight. Moments
later, their Schwinns head in opposite directions. My mother turns to me, revealing the
milky, John-Waters-mustache-thin foam on her upper lip, Wetin dem bin say?

Besaydoo? Nar English? she asks, tickled by this tangle of new language. Alright.
Be safe dude, I pull apart each syllable like string cheese for her. Oh yah, dem nar real padi,
she smiles, surprisingly broken by the tenderness expressed by what half my family might call

thugs. Besaydoo. Besaydoo. Besaydoo, we chirp in the car, then nightly into our phones
after I leave California. Besaydoo, she says as she softly muffles the rattling of my bones
in newfound sobriety. Besaydoo, I say years later, her response made raspy by an oxygen

treatment at the ER. Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like
some word from deep in a somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we
saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous, sun.

For more information about Yalie Kamara, please check out her website.

alisonmcghee.com

Poem of the Week, by Shilpa Kamat

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

Yesterday I listened to a news commentator tell me that in a few weeks things will have died down and we’d be “back to normal.” Really?

Normal used to mean the legal enslavement of Black people. Normal, in my grandmother’s day, meant she couldn’t vote. Normal, when my mother was pregnant with me, meant she had to hide her pregnancy to keep her job. Normal, when I was a kid, meant if you were gay you pretended you weren’t. Normal right now means, among many things, that most citizens live paycheck to paycheck while a few make a billion dollars a month.

Normal is a prism that shifts and changes over time, depending on your skin color, your sex, your gender, your age, your job, your money or lack thereof. I don’t want to go back to normal. Where I want to go is forward.


the demons were never, by Shilpa Kamat 

evil just regular
                                      people who prayed
                                      and were granted

thunderbolts
ethers
                                      before their hearts
                                      were grown
enough to keep
up

For more information about Shilpa Kamat, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast

Poem of the Week, by Elizabeth Coatsworth

Posted on by alisonmcghee

My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.

As a kid I used to wake up at dawn and walk down the road to a small concrete ledge over a watering hole. There were never any cars, and I used to sit on the ledge and watch the sun come up over the valley. Sometimes, far up the hill, through the mist, the sound of cowbells (the nearest farmers were Swiss) came drifting down.

Back then I used to take photos in my mind of things I wanted to remember forever. The lone tree that stood in the field halfway up the hill. The pink and yellow dawn sky. That herd of Holsteins chiming their soft way down the hill to the watering hole, the way they looked at me with their velvet eyes. When I found this old-timey poem in an old-timey book of poems and quotes and aphorisms I pulled off my bookshelf a few weeks ago, those mind-photos came back. Happy New Year, everyone.

Swift Things Are Beautiful, by Elizabeth Coatsworth

Swift things are beautiful:
swallows and deer,
and lightning that falls
bright-veined and clear,
rivers and meteors,
wind in the wheat,
the strong-withered horse,
the runners’ sure feet.

And slow things are beautiful:
the closing of day,
the pause of the wave
that curves downward to spray,
the ember that crumbles,
the opening flower,
and the ox that moves on
in the quiet of power.

For more information about Elizabeth Coatsworth, please click here.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my new podcast