Poem of the Week, by Steve Healey
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.”
The invisible friend was a shadow part of our family. Mentions of him made us laugh, but I used to wonder if he helped my daughter figure out the world and cope with it in ways I, her mother, couldn’t. It’s hard for me to be around small children, the way they march forward into the world despite their tininess. How their inherent, bewildering bravery propels them toward all the things that will break their hearts. How they keep going anyway.
How About, by Steve Healey
the house is haunted but
all the ghosts are nice ones
mostly nice but sometimes mean
when they eat our snacks without asking
how about there’s a ghost horse
with big snack lips but she’s nice and gives us
slow-gallop rides over furniture hills
all the ghosts are part of our family
but grown-ups can’t see them
how about I’m the daughter you’re the son
or we’re both half daughter half son
half comet half horse
going around the carousel
over there is the black hole where
we ate crackers and grapes today for snack
in that corner all the galaxies
that don’t care if we don’t
say please and thank you
how about Dad never says we have to clean up
this mess because he’s our tiny cute baby
he’s always napping in his crib
or he’s in the room where he writes poems
and inside him there’s a baby who has
another baby inside him
how about the babies have a war
inside him and become orphans or
how about we’re the orphans in a poem
Dad writes then we’re adopted
by the ghost horse and off
we ride through the snowy air
we say the words
and disappear
For more information about Steve Healey, please check out his website.
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Hiking the other day up a steep and narrow trail, my eyes kept searching for where I should step next. And then my feet kept setting themselves down exactly where I wanted them to be. I didn’t have to look at them; they knew what to do. But how? How does this body of mine know how to do all the things it just. . . does? Dance and run and knead dough and type and shuffle a deck of cards and tell me when I’m hungry or cold or full or tired? How do all those signals make their magic way from eyes to brain to nerves to muscle and bone? Even though I don’t play basketball I felt my own self moving to every line of this beautiful spin of a poem. My body, all our bodies, are wondrous. 
Before taking the city bus for the first time, I was scared. How much does it cost and what if you don’t have exact change and what are those green cards everyone else seems to be holding and oh crap what about that scanner thingie? Etcetera.
A few years ago, from my front porch, I watched an enormous, dark turtle labor its way across Emerson Avenue. It was winter. Snow and ice and slush. A giant turtle? 
Would your life be worse then than it is right now? is a question to ask yourself when you wake up every day in fear and dread of something that hasn’t happened but might happen. Something you fight and fight and work and work to prevent happening, to you or to someone you love. Foreclosure. Suicide. Recurrence of cancer. Loss of a job, a friend, a romance.
This past week: the friends in a group discussion admitting they can barely ask what the honorarium is because it feels so selfish. The friend who wonders can I back out of this event in NYC because I just noticed there’s no travel reimbursement and I literally can’t afford it but I can’t stand to let anyone down. The friends who say they know it’s their own fault for feeling ashamed of their bodies and why can’t they just ignore all the ads for liposuction, juvaderm, lip filler, neck filler, breast augmentation, tummy tucks, and vaginal rejuvenation.
This was back in the days of dial-up modems with their squealy screechy sounds. The first line of the first review of my first novel came shimmering up on that clunky old computer screen: “First time novelist tries but fails to move or matter.” 
Alison McGhee 