Poem of the Week, by Kari Gunter-Seymour
This morning on the porch a bee was bumbling against one of the screened windows. Its little legs drifted below its huge, furry body as it tried over and over to get out. So I upended my fox mug over it, slid a letter from my mother between the screen and the buzzing mug, then held the whole mess tight and maneuvered outside. Whisked the letter off and watched the bee lumber into the air again.
That bee made me think of the ending of this haunting poem. We endure so much to get here. To be alive. To stay alive.
I Come From A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, by Kari Gunter-Seymour
White oaks thrash, moonlight drifts
the ceiling, as if I’m under water.
Propane coils, warms my bones.
Gone are the magics and songs,
all the things our grandmothers buried—
piles of feathers and angel bones,
inscribed by all who came before.
When I was twelve, my cousins
called me ugly, enough to make it last.
Tonight a celebrity on Oprah
imagines a future where features
can be removed and replaced
on a whim. A moth presses wings
thin as paper against my window,
more beautiful than I could ever be.
Ryegrass raise seedy heads
beyond the bull thistle and preen.
Everything alive aches for more.
For more information on Kari Gunter-Seymour, please click here.
My new poems podcast, Words by Winter, can be found here.
@alisonmcgheewriter
Last week I was weeding my garden on a steambath afternoon when clouds tiered overhead, the air turned greenish, and a breeze sprang up. There’s a tall pine tree in my tiny front yard, with limbs that sweep down to earth, and when the first drops splatted down, I stepped inside them to watch the storm.
Do you ever semi-wake up and not know where you are, how old you are, who is next to you (or not), what it is you are meant to do, who it is you are meant to be? As I typed that question just now, the words fugue state drifted into my mind. What exactly fugue state means I didn’t know until a second ago, when I looked it up, but it fits the feeling of those half-asleep wakings. 
Yesterday I had a hitch installed on the back of my car. The U-Haul installation place was off a busy frontage road, its entrance blocked by men who came running up to my car, masks askew, shouting at me in Spanish, a language I (still) don’t speak, holding up fingers —one? two? and pushing each other: Me! Me! No, me! 
When my kids were little and nothing else worked I used to resort to the dreaded counting threat. I’m going to count to ten. One. Two. Three. Why this worked I don’t really know, but I never had to count past three. 
On a moonless night a long time ago, just off the highway, I leaned against a cinder block wall with a payphone pressed to my ear. The only light came from passing cars and a bug-stained fluorescent bulb mounted above the phone. The voice on the other end was bored, disinterested. Across the miles I felt the connection diminishing, no, diminished, no, gone. 
Yesterday I sat at the table all day and labored through every paragraph of every page of a forthcoming novel, trying for the many-eth time to get the timeline perfect, and then I got up this morning and did it again. If Micah disappears on Wednesday night and Sesame starts looking for him on Thursday morning and winter break is a week from Friday and the weekends don’t count then how many days will it take for blah blah blah blah blah. Scratch paper and pen to my right, calendar to my left, stuck in the middle with my own inadequacy. 
One of my daughters had a friend when she was little, a friend the rest of us couldn’t see. He had a strange name which we all loved. Sometimes we would check in on him. “He’s asleep,” was the most common answer. Sometimes “He’s visiting his grandma,” or even “He went away.” Once, disturbingly, “he died.”
Alison McGhee 