Poem of the Week, by Dorothea Grossman
My son was two years old and we were in the backyard. It was early spring, and I was digging around in the dirt when he suddenly bent double and started laughing and pointing. Dinosaurs, he said, dinosaurs! I followed his pointing finger to the patch of ferns next to us. They were just beginning to unfurl their fronds, and the stem of each was bent and curved, and in that instant I saw what he saw: the long curved necks of T-Rexes. My laughing little boy, looking at the world in a way I’d never seen it before. I have never looked at ferns the same way since. The memory of that day almost chokes me up, and so does this small poem.
The Two Times I Loved You Most in a Car, by Dorothea Grossman
It was your idea
to park and watch the elephants
swaying among the trees
like royalty
at that make-believe safari
near Laguna.
I didn’t know anything that big
could be so quiet.
And once, you stopped
on a dark desert road
to show me the stars
climbing over each other
riotously
like insects
like an orchestra
thrashing its way
through time itself
I never saw light that way
again.
For more information on Dorothea Grossman, please click here.
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@alisonmcghee
Rough, rough week. Children torn from their parents at borders, the suicides of loved people who projected happiness, the cruelty of our elected employees and the ongoing and unfathomable cowardice of their minions who stand by, watching our democracy crumble. Last night I scrolled through poem after poem, looking for one with clear eyes and a level gaze, like this one below. A poem that sees the situation for what it is and imagines it as it can be. Time for us to be the goddesses who remake this world. 
Yesterday, after heavy rains, I went for a long walk. I kept hearing opera music and I looked around to see a man grinning at me and nodding from his car, where the windows were open and the volume turned way up. I laughed and waved back at him, and the below poem leaped up into my mind. My grandmother, whose life was extraordinarily hard, used to recite it to us with an unfamiliar lilt in her voice. 
Old men who hold their wives’ handbags for them as they put on their coats. Young fathers who hold their toddlers’ hands as they cross the street. The girl who jumps up to open the door for the woman using the walker. The cafe manager who keeps a water bowl outside, filled with cool water, for passing dogs. The man with the truck who goes up and down the rural road, plowing out his elderly neighbors. Everyone waving goodbye, tears in their eyes, as the ones they love disappear into the airport, like in the movie Love Actually*. The movie Love Actually. A note left in a poetry box, thanking the “poem attendant” for “all the good poems.” A carful of grinning men chattering in Spanish, pulling over to the side of a snowy road and pushing the young woman’s car out of the ditch. The world is full of sweetness. When I need to remind myself of that, which is often, in these days of bewildering cruelty and greed by our elected employees, this is one of the poems I recite to myself. 
Last week my water filter leaked into the storage bin where my youngest’s childhood mementoes are kept. I brought it upstairs and spread her things out to dry. Onesies, footie pajamas, overalls with ripped-out knees. Her high school graduation cap. Notebooks filled with book reports and drawings and journal entries. Cards she’d written to me, mostly construction paper drawings along with I love you mom. The arc of eighteen years spread out on the kitchen table and counters. The tiny quilt I made for her before she was born and which she wore to literal shreds was damp, and I picked up the strands and held them to my heart.
You know those maps where you fill in all the states you’ve been to? The only one missing from mine is Alaska (I don’t count the time that I landed at the Anchorage airport on my way to China). I’ve been to all the lower 48 states, most of them multiple times, because road trips are big in my life. The earth is a living being beneath the tires, rising and falling, sweeping west and shrinking east. Most of the time I’m solo, like last week, when I drove 2089 miles in three days. When I get tired, or when it gets dark, I tuck my old tiny car behind a semi for comfort. Truckers sometimes get a bad rap, and once in a while it’s justified, but for the most part they drive their trucks way more safely than most people drive their cars. 
I’ll rewrite this whole life and this time there’ll be so much love, / you won’t be able to see beyond it. 
Alison McGhee 