Poem of the Week, by Joseph Fasano
-6 degrees, same as it’s been for weeks. Bundle up, put on your whistle, put phone in pocket. Walk as far as you can, scanning for ICE. Once home, call twenty senators: “I live in south Minneapolis, where we’re under invasion by our own government. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else anywhere else in this country but it can and it will unless you defund ICE.” Sign off. Feel energized because you took action, and action creates hope.
Drive to a distribution site while scanning for ICE. Help unload delivery truck, pack boxes for Minneapolitans who don’t have enough to eat, who don’t have basic supplies, who are terrified to leave their homes no matter their “status.” Think how wrong it is that so few in this country hoard most of the money. Envision, as you constantly do, a world in which we all took care of each other instead of competed against each other. Then think: hey, Minneapolitans are taking care of each other. Load up your car, distribute to the needy. Go home. Feel energized because you took action and action creates hope.
Watch a video someone sent you in which the lady in the pink coat talks about watching them cut the nurse’s clothes off, maybe to try CPR (why? he was gone) but no, no, oh God no, they’re counting the bullet holes. Like they’re hunters and he’s a deer. This undoes you. But no, you can’t be undone. You have to stay strong and resist. Check in with neighbors to say you’re here for them. They respond with “Same.” Their caring gives you energy and energy helps you act and action creates hope and hope is what will keep us going.
For Alex Pretti
Because his last words were for a woman;
because he asked,
are you okay, are you okay;
because he had learned to say it
by standing each night beside the dying;
because sometimes he held their hands;
because he had lived only long enough
as the scent of childhood in an album;
because he was a son;
because he sang once;
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
tell it, tell the story:
a breath has left;
a country is dying;
and a man laid his face
on the pavement today
as though he were listening
to a patient’s heart–
even then, even at the ending–
to do what he was there to do: heal.
Click here for more information about Joseph Fasano. Today’s poem first appeared on Instagram in January, 2026.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter
People look at me with confusion when I tell them I’m deeply wary of charismatic people, with charisma defined in the broad sense as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure (such as a political leader).” But wait, isn’t charisma charming, magnetic, powerful? Sometimes. And sometimes it’s a mask for manipulation, a bottomless need for adulation, attention, look at me look at me look at me, take care of me and do as I say because I am more important than you. Charismatic people so often go unchecked, no matter their behavior, because a) people are drawn to them by that magnetic personality and b) charismatic people often snap at anyone who calls them out on their behavior, in a vicious, malevolent and wildly cruel way. 
Remember the man in the photo to the right? He stood in front of those tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989, nothing but a briefcase in his hands. When the tanks tried to maneuver around him, he stepped in front of them again. I don’t know what became of him. 
Alison McGhee 