Registration for our January 8-13, 2024, Write Together session is in full swing. I’d love to see you in this one hour, twice-daily workshop in which we all quietly write together from a guided prompt. It’s a beautiful way to usher in the new year. 

Last month, at a Moth Grand Slam, I watched the evening’s musician-composer silently practicing on stage as the audience filed in. Electric violin tucked under their cheek, eyes closed, they ran through music heard only in their head, fingers flying, grimacing in the beautiful way musicians grimace when lost in their music.

Sometimes what we most love and crave doing is obvious on the outside: the daily splotches of paint on my partner’s hands (and head), the rowing calluses on my friend’s hands, the beat-up laptop –extension of my hands and mind–that’s never more than a few feet away from me.

Samson et Dalila, Op. 47, by Jessica Tanck
       
I would wonder over it often: the welt
on my teacher’s throat. My hand cupped
round the neck of my cello, hollow

I hugged to me. So thin the music
stand, so thin what kept the din of strings
from the electric weather

of my blood. In profile my teacher’s
tucked hair, frown, perpetual bruise.
Horsehair on metal, purr torn from a gate

thrown open—and to what?
Only when she lifted her violin to play
would I understand the mark—

how close she held the carved thing
to tear its music out.

Click here for more information about Jessica Tanck. Thanks to the Cincinnati Review, where I first found her poetry.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter