“Hi, this is Alison McGhee, patriotic citizen, calling from 55408.” Ever since the atrocity, which is my term for what went down last November, I make calls or send emails every day. I march if there’s a march. Taking action is the one thing that keeps me from sinking into a kind of paralyzed despair … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by David Hernandez
Mama passed, honey. That was the subject line of my friend S’s email to me last week. S had been by the side of the woman who, though not her mother, was close enough to be. S had helped Mama out of this world into whatever comes after. Before work, after work, on weekends, she … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Anna Marie Sewell
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. When the protest … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Assia Gutmann
I’m going through my entire house, cleaning and sorting and organizing and paring. Most things I can jettison, but the things I can’t ever seem to throw away are cards and notes and notebooks and little scraps of paper with lists jotted onto them. The other day I found one that I had written a … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Alden Nowlan
See that old photo to the right? I found it yesterday in a scrapbook filled with random high school mementoes. The girl with the beautiful smile playing the violin used to be one of my closest friends. She lived in a small bright green ranch house right across the street from the middle school, which … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Marie Howe
Please help me be a good teacher today. Please help me bring kindness and clarity and joy. Please help me heal and never hurt. This is one version of an ongoing prayer that unreligious me invokes before I walk into the door of every classroom I teach. It is tough, tough going these days, for so many … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Sabine Miller
When it came to homework, I was kind of a hands-off mother, a mother whose life –and whose children’s lives– became instantly better when I made the decision to quit checking the portal. (The portal. The portal. The portal of hell.) My children never asked me to look at or edit their papers, so I didn’t, and … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Richard Wilbur
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
drink from the well of your self and begin again. -Charles Bukowski
Your Source For The Good Things Black People Do, Give and Receive All Over The World
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
the literary asylum
Bipolar is my superpower
