poems | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Sarah Sadie

Posted on June 30, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Two lovely Japanese maple trees in a front yard one block south are symmetrically planted amid cement squares filled with small white stones. For eight years I walked past this house every day, so I could admire the way the owners, whom I always pictured as two calm men, swept the leaves and raked the stones into perfect, weed-free squares. Looking at this yard calmed my spirit. A few years ago the house was sold, and since then it has been reclaimed by wildness.

Last week, as I made my way through a morning-long panic attack, I weeded my gardens, cleaned my kitchen, and folded laundry. Laundry has always been meditation to me. Give me your towels, your fitted sheets, your underwear even, and I will make symmetry of it all. Strangely, later that same panicky day, I came across the poem below. From wildness we improvise order.

Folding the Clothes, by Sarah Sadie

Even the most capacious bath towels fold
into squares, and the wash cloths fold
into smaller squares. Pants meet themselves

and quiet down nicely. Underwear
resigns itself, socks domesticate, and the shirts,

well, the shirts get wrinkled.

They’ll have plenty of time to relax
dreaming through hours a rumor of buttons.
Which is not to say shirts meditate, but

there’s almost a Zen to the job, if that weren’t so trendy.
Almost the little sand garden with its rake
and its rock.

Its imagined snake.

For more information about Sarah Sadie, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

Posted on June 22, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Alison and Donald When I was nine my father brought me a huge, bright-green, horned bug from our garden: Look! You can bring it in to school for the bug project! When he turned away I placed some tomatoes on top of the bug, and later had to admit in shame that I had ‘accidentally’ crushed it. Alison! What the hell were you thinking?

Looking back, I see a girl who was afraid of that enormous bug and afraid of her father, a girl who could not admit fear and could not ask for help. And I see a young, gruff man who had found something magic and brought it as a gift to his daughter, sure she would love it. A scared daughter, a bewildered man. Who both, over the years, kept sailing on, finding out the story by pushing into it, until only love and laughter were left.

Voyage, by Tony Hoagland

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book’s end more beautiful.

And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, “I’m only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It’s turning cold.”

Sunset like a burning wagon train
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That’s the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage —

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass
& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,
I forgot about the ocean,
Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,
and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,
under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it —
The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

For more information about Tony Hoagland, please read his obituary.

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Poem of the Week, by Margaret Hasse

Posted on June 9, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Steuben, looking north Old friend, it has been decades since that last summer before college, the last time I ever lived at home. But when I return to visit my parents and drive by the street where you once lived, I remember you. I remember rain on a canvas roof, darkness all around, the silent sleeping breath of other friends. I remember how surprised I was that someone wanted to kiss me –me?–and I remember your gentleness. Let me tell you now that you were the one who first showed me how touch could open up a new world. At seventeen I could not have known how the memory of that fleeting sweetness would sustain me in future dark times. This achingly beautiful poem brought back the memory of you.

High School Boyfriend, by Margaret Hasse

You are hometown.
You are all my favorite places
the last summer I grew up.
Every once in a while
I write you
in my head
to ask how Vietnam
and a big name college
came between us.
We tried to stay in touch
through the long distance,
the hum and fleck of phone calls.

It was inevitable
that I should return
to the small prairie town
and find you
pumping gas, driving a truck, measuring lumber,
and we’d exchange
weather talk,
never able to break through words
and time to say simply:
“Are you as happy
as I wanted you to be?”

And still I am stirred
by musky cigarette smoke
on a man’s brown suede jacket.
Never having admitted the tenderness
of your hands, I feel them now
through my skin.
Parking on breezy nights,
in cars, floating passageways,
we are tongue and tongue like warm cucumbers.
I would walk backwards
along far country roads
through late evenings cool as moving water,
heavy as red beer,
to climb into that August.

In the dark lovers’ lanes
you touched my face
and found me here.

For more information on Margaret Hasse, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Dante di Stefano

Posted on May 19, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Write about something you’ve never told anyone before. That was the prompt a few years ago, given to a tableful of sundry people sitting in a library far from the big city. You have twelve minutes. I’ll let you know when you have two minutes left. Pens to paper. Fingertips on keyboards. We went around the room and read aloud, everyone listening intently.

One older man read about the night in Vietnam when his best friend died in his arms. How he tried to keep him from dying. How they were both nineteen. How he had whispered to him and his friend whispered back as he bled to death. How he had thought of that boy every day of his life since. When he finished, we were all silent. He looked up at us in confusion and wonder. I have never told anyone about this before, he said, not even my wife.

Prompts (for high school teachers who teach poetry), by Dante di Stefano

Write about walking into the building
as a new teacher. Write yourself hopeful.
Write a row of empty desks. Write the face
of a student you’ve almost forgotten;
he’s worn a Derek Jeter jersey all year.
Do not conjecture about the adults
he goes home to, or the place he calls home.
Write about how he came to you for help
each October morning his sophomore year.
Write about teaching Othello to him;
write Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven.
Write about reading his obituary
five years after he graduated. Write
a poem containing the words “common”
“core,” “differentiate,” and “overdose.”
Write the names of the ones you will never
forget: “Jenna,” “Tiberious,” “Heaven,”
“Megan,” “Tanya,” “Kingsley,” “Ashley,” “David.”
Write Mari with “Nobody’s Baby” tattooed
in cursive on her neck, spitting sixteen bars
in the backrow, as little white Mike beatboxed
“Candy Shop” and the whole class exploded.
Write about Zuly and Nely, sisters
from Guatemala, upon whom a thousand
strange new English words rained down on like hail
each period, and who wrote the story
of their long journey on la bestia
through Mexico, for you, in handwriting
made heavy by the aquís and ayers
ached in their knuckles, hidden by their smiles.
Write an ode to loose-leaf. Write elegies
on the nub nose of a pink eraser.
Carve your devotion from a no. 2
pencil. Write the uncounted hours you spent
fretting about the ones who cursed you out
for keeping order, who slammed classroom doors,
who screamed “you are not my father,” whose pain
unraveled and broke you, whose pain you knew.
Write how all this added up to a life.

For more information on Dante di Stefano, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Alison McGhee

Posted on May 11, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Whether you’re a parent or not, everyone was once someone’s child. This one goes out to all of you.

Bargain
– Alison McGhee

The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight
Venus and Jupiter will conjoin
in the southwestern sky,
a fist and a half above the horizon.
They won’t come together again for seventeen years.
What the article does not say is that Mercury, the
dark planet, will also be on hand.
He’ll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.
I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.

Seventeen years from now, where
will I be?
Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,
let me propose a trade:
Auburn hair, muscles that don’t ache, and a seven-minute mile.
Here’s what I’ll give you in return:
My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for
French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and
the memory of having once kissed Sam W.

Then I see my girl across the room.
She stands on a stool at the sink,
washing her toy dishes and
swaying to a whispered song,
her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.
The planets are coming together now.
Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.
Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red
plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.

Mercury, here’s another offer, a real one this time:
Let her be.
You can have it all in return,
the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell
and the softness of Sam’s mouth on mine.
And my life. That too.
All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence
she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes
I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.

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Poem of the Week, by Ed Bok Lee

Posted on May 4, 2019 by alisonmcghee

“Is it lonely to be a writer?” “What is the greatest and worst thing about being a writer?” “I loved your book because the brother in it is mean to his sister and my brother is mean to me.” “What if reading is really, really hard for you – can you still be a writer?” “My grandma used to read to me but she died.”

And, as the others file out, the solemn child who stands before me and whispers: “I’m the new kid.”

When I first began writing, I wrote only novels for adults. I couldn’t have imagined that my life would someday include visits to schools where hour by hour, first and second and third and fourth graders sit in criss-cross-applesauce rows on the carpeted library floor, listening. Watching. Thinking.

Why do I do so few school visits? Because kids. Their questions go straight into your heart, and then you carry them around with you forever. We bring kids into this fraught world and they have no idea what awaits them. But there they are, like the child in this poem below, by the brilliant Ed Bok Lee, turning their faces skyward.

Pink Lady’s Antenna Receives the Future

Atop my shoulders, she trots me like a Clydesdale.

Pink pussy hats & hearts, 100,000, thronging the Capitol.

When it begins to rain, some head for shelter,

Most chant even louder.

Is she okay? I shout.

Bridget momentarily lowers our umbrella & takes a picture:

Between pink hat and pink scarf,

Babygirl’s tongue, extended skyward like a stamen.

For more information on Ed Bok Lee, please check out his blog

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Poem of the Week, by D.R. Goodman

Posted on April 13, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Last week I dreamed a dream so disturbing that I was afraid to google its meaning and asked the Painter to do so for me. The closest interpretation I can find says it’s about something you once dreamed of doing, he said. You want to reclaim something you’ve lost in yourself.

The interpretation hit me hard. Thinking about it over the next few days, I kept remembering a late afternoon almost twenty years ago when I was wandering trail-less through a quiet forest. At one point I stopped and looked up and met the eyes of an owl looking back at me. This was the first time I had ever seen a living owl. I tilted my head to take it in, and the owl tilted its head the same way. Back and forth we went, observing each other. I don’t know exactly what that owl or this poem below –a poem I’ve held in my heart ever since I first read it–have to do with my terrible, galvanizing dream. But I intend to figure it out.

Owls in the City Hills, by D.R. Goodman

how they hunt us,
casting their deep vowels like feathered hooks,
to pull us from shallow sleep or simple talk,
and out to the night, the stand of eucalyptus

a looming silhouette, the black above us;
we, barefoot on the littered deck, and blind,
stare wide into the dark and hear the sound
move eerily from tree to tree around us;

our backs to the spreading net of city lights
below, we’ve nothing but the trees, our eyes,
the dark, the sound, these owls we cannot see—

though once at dusk, by chance, I saw one light
and spread its wings, and tinged by copper skies,
lay silence to the city, utterly.
For more information on poet and martial arts expert D.R. Goodman, please click here.

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Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on March 23, 2019 by alisonmcghee

The suicide of Alan Krueger last week, a man I didn’t know but whose work I admire, a man clearly beloved by so many, hit me hard. It brought me back to my early twenties, when the suicide of someone I loved both ended his life and permanently altered mine. Crying comes hard to me and does not bring relief, but it came anyway this week. At one point I found myself alone, apologizing out loud for things I wish I’d done differently.

I’m haunted by the sense that the cruelty and hatred so on display these days made things worse for Alan Krueger. It makes things worse for everyone. The only thing I can do, like the poet below, is try to subvert it with kindness.

For the Sake of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a retarded* child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

*Note that this poem was published in 1994, when this word was in common usage.

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please check out her website.

Poem of the Week, by Martin Espada

Posted on March 16, 2019 by alisonmcghee

IMG_E2022 One of the top-rated MFA programs in the country once recruited me to fly out and interview for a fiction position. A day into the interview, deep in discussion of teaching technique with the faculty and students, I subtly began to portray myself as less interested in criticism and more interested in nurturing a creative spark. This wasn’t what they wanted in a teacher and I knew it. I was in effect throwing the interview, but I wasn’t sure why.

Years later, I do. In the midst of the enormous talent gathered in that interview room, I wanted to be back with my students. My immigrant, refugee, loan-burdened, first in their family to go to college, work two jobs and raise a family and still make it to class students. Listening as they read their work aloud, then clapping for their gargantuan effort. Seeing a poem they wrote make their classmates cry. When news broke last week of the college-admission bribery scandal, this stunning poem by Martin Espada instantly came to mind, and I thought of my students, their hands upturned and burning.

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper
by Martin Espada

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Yellow paper
stacked seven feet high
and leaning
as I slipped cardboard
between the pages,
then brushed red glue
up and down the stack.
No gloves: fingertips required
for the perfection of paper,
smoothing the exact rectangle.
Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands
would slide along suddenly sharp paper,
and gather slits thinner than the crevices
of the skin, hidden.
The glue would sting,
hands oozing
till both palms burned
at the punch clock.

Ten years later, in law school,
I knew that every legal pad
was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,
that every open law book
was a pair of hands
upturned and burning.

For more information on Martin Espada, please check out his website.

Poem of the Week, by Adam Tavel

Posted on February 16, 2019 by alisonmcghee

Screen Shot 2019-02-16 at 10.16.17 AM My five year old nephew is currently huddled behind closed doors inside his family’s new freestanding pantry, where he fits neatly into the bottom cupboard. I know this because my brother texts me ongoing updates as to this fixation with the pantry, along with the fact that my nephew just declared he’s no longer a ninja genius but a secret agent. (Didn’t surprise me at all. I never bought the ninja genius line.) My nephew cracks me up and breaks my heart the way all little kids, over and over, break my heart.

The poem below makes me want to put my arms around every little kid in the world – the solemn-eyed children at the schools I visit, the cardboard sword-wielding child in this poem, my secret agent nephew, and every single one of the migrant children I keep seeing in photos, crying at the border. Maybe they don’t know how tiny they are. Maybe we don’t know how strong they are.

Halloween Vespers with Homemade Vader, by Adam Tavel

Bless the amber porch light that coronets
his flimsy helmet’s sheen and the ringlets
this dusk breeze bounces on elastic
straps, thin as earthworms baked black
atop the stoop. Bless the dragging cape
I forgot to hem that brooms its scrape
of maple leaves trailing down beyond
the sidewalk to a dozen murky ponds
pocking our gravel drive with day-old rain.
Bless this Sith Lord’s right glove stained
with juice — it transubstantiates to blood
from rebel galaxies that fought the flood
of clones who stomped peasant martyrs free
of blasters, cause, and zealotry.
Bless the cardboard saber crayoned red
that hums its slash through Wookiee dread,
each Tusken Raider’s door we dash
to swell our bucket’s mounting stash
before we tramp across another lawn.
Bless the mask that slides for coughs and yawns.
Bless the snacking boy who curses Jedi scum,
this son who cleaves my hand and calls me son.

For more information about Adam Tavel, please click here.

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