Poem of the Week, by Stephan Pastis
We used to call them the funnies, and I have a memory of sitting on my dad’s big lap while he folded the newspaper in half, then quarters, so he could read them to me. This would have been on a Sunday, because I remember the strips as being full-color. I still read the daily comics, even though most of them are terrible – tired, unfunny, boring, and retreading the same exact ground for decades on end. Once in a while a strip comes along that’s electrifyingly good –Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, Cul de Sac–but they don’t last long, usually because their creators have the courage to cancel them when they’ve run out of steam. So I read out of habit, with no expectation of transcendence. But every once in a while one of them pierces my heart, like today’s Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis.
Tree Stump o’ Deep Thought You’re Not Usually Capable Of, by Stephan Pastis
No one knows what we’re doing here.
Some have faith that they do, but no one knows.
So we are scared.
We are alone.
We end.
And we don’t know where we go.
So we cling to money for comfort.
And we chase awards for immortality.
And we hide in the routine of our days.
But then the night.
Always the night.
Which, when it has you alone, whispers that
maybe none of this has any significance.
So love everyone you’re with.
Because comforting each other
on this journey we neither asked for
nor understand
is the best we can do.
And laugh as much as you can.
Minnesotans! I’m offering three free workshops this spring on the transformation of trauma. 
I’m thinking of the man in the white shirt and the black pants, the one holding a briefcase, who stepped in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and stood there. I’m thinking of the girl in the long dress, the one who slid a flower into the barrel of the gun the officer had trained on her. I’m thinking of the woman who began a conversation with and ended up becoming a second mother to the boy who murdered her own son. I’m thinking of this tiny beautiful prayer by Danez Smith. A new year to all. May ruin end here.
“It was a time like this. . . when all things fall apart.”
A house I used to live in was filled with a dark and ominous energy that I felt every time I approached the front door. When I dreamed, dark birds hovered silently in the air around me, landing on my shoulders and head. The dark birds wanted me — they wanted me dead. I lived in a state of permanent exhaustion, surrounded by the forces of darkness. 
Hey there, elected employees, thanks for an especially sickening week. Proud of yourselves and your ongoing attempts to destroy our democracy? 
This semester I taught a class about creative writers, identity and race. Forty students of wildly different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions and race sat in a huge square in an underground room in a building next to the train tracks midway between Minneapolis and St. Paul. We were strangers to each other. On the first day of class, I gave them a writing-from-life prompt. They wrote quickly and in silence, then some of them read their pieces aloud. The class is over now, and in their final paper, one student wrote of that first day, back in August, 
When my children were tiny they went to a neighborhood preschool two or three mornings a week. It was a gentle place, taught by lovely teachers who never got upset if a glass of milk was toppled or if someone broke a crayon. There was a dress-up corner, a story-time corner, a Lego corner. In nice weather the kids went outside and worked and played in a flower garden the school had created along a biking and walking path. 
Alison McGhee 