poetry

Poem of the Week, by Bradley Trumpfheller

Posted on by alisonmcghee

​Minnesotans! I’m offering three free workshops this spring on the transformation of trauma. Click here for more information and to register. All are welcome, no writing experience necessary. (Non-Minnesotans, note that I will be adding these to my workshop offerings in the future, and they will always be free.)

When you fold laundry you see the insides of clothes and sheets and towels –their raggedy seams and straining buttonholes and raveling threads–before you turn them right side out so they’re presentable for public viewing.

I’m like that laundry. No matter what’s unraveling inside, I know how to look smooth and together. Maybe most of us are like this.

This poem makes me think about the invisible seams in everyone. From heartbreaks mended (you’re never the same), memories beautiful or awful (you remember them all), dreams you dreamed that came true (or didn’t), a place or a person you return to in your mind when you need to be soothed.

Loom, by Bradley Trumpfheller

My mother says when she is anxious she finds a seam, 
finds stitches on her clothes, on furniture she’s near, always 
a verge has that feel, birch joints, wrinkles. It’s a relief
to think with the hands. Not with what years do, 
not with rings or someone else’s sadness. With the repair 
in a sheet her sister tore, breeze-fretted in the yard. 
Finds exactly where the hickory trees start themselves
against the yard. And shows me on the photograph 
which is only one of several, where though again 
they did not touch each other, standing on some shore, 
her mothers’ shadows touch each other. 
She shows it to me now to soothe me. As if soon 
it will be that blue in the air. Soon is what 
she thinks with. What she runs 
the edge of her thumb, her index finger over. 

Click here for more information about Bradley Trumpfheller. Today’s poem was published in 2024 by the Academy of American Poets. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Three new free workshops for Minnesotans

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The Transformation of Trauma

Have you gone through something awful, either recently or a long time ago? Maybe someone you love died, or you lost your job or home. Maybe someone you love is an addict, and you struggle with conflicting feelings on how best to care for them and yourself. Maybe someone sexually assaulted you, or abused you over a long period of time. Maybe as a child, or adult, you struggled through domestic violence or emotional manipulation. If your life is compromised by any of these experiences, and you’re looking for some relief and support, welcome to these workshops.

Note that I am not a therapist. But as a lifelong writer, as well as a trained crisis counselor, I know that the making of art, in all its many and varied forms, can be a profound way to help cope with experiences that were grievous, unfair, unwanted, or cruel. In each three-hour workshop, we’ll work on three creative writing exercises, read and discuss a few short readings, and hopefully find ways to unlock your own power.

These workshops are offered free of charge via Zoom. You do NOT have to be a writer, or even be interested in writing, to enroll. I’ve designed them for people of any or no writing experience – all are welcome. There’s no feedback or public sharing of work in these workshops (unless you want to), so you are free to unburden yourself and follow the prompts in whatever way is beneficial to you without fear of anyone seeing your work. Enrollment in each workshop is limited to 30.

To register for any or all of the workshops, email me directly at alisonmcghee@gmail.com. Feel free to share this note with anyone who might find the workshops helpful.

Please note: While these first three workshops below are open only to Minnesotans, I plan to add them to my regular workshop offerings in future, and they will always be offered free of charge.

Tuesday, March 25, 6-9 Central Time, via Zoom. Mapping the Unmapped
This workshop is designed for anyone living in the wake of loss: of a loved one, a job, a home, a relationship, a long-cherished dream, physical or mental health.

Sunday, April 6, 1-4 Central Time, via Zoom. Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self
This workshop is designed for anyone living with the memories, recent or long ago, of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault.

Friday, May 2, 1-4 Central Time, via Zoom. The Echo That Remains
This workshop is for anyone who loved someone who died of suicide, substance abuse, or untreated mental or physical illness.

Poem of the Week, by Anna Belle Kaufman

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My father, who died two years ago today, was a giant man. Some of his clothes hang in my closet: his old army jacket, his Dairylea windbreaker, one of his Yankees baseball caps.

After he died I turned two of his other shirts and a pair of his worn pants into a simple patchwork quilt for my mother. It was hard to cut up his clothes. Wait, this is his favorite shirt, he’s going to need it, even though he wasn’t.

I still need him though. His enormous presence –that giant laugh, that hurricane hug, his absolute solidity–was grounding in a way I didn’t understand until he was gone.

Cold Solace, by Anna Belle Kaufman

When my mother died,
one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.
I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,
so it waited, pardoned,
in its ice cave behind the metal trays
for two more years.

On my forty-first birthday
I chipped it out,
a rectangular resurrection,
hefted the dead weight in my palm.

Before it thawed,
I sawed, with serrated knife,
the thinnest of slices —
Jewish Eucharist.

The amber squares
with their translucent panes of walnuts
tasted — even toasted — of freezer,
of frost,
a raisined delicacy delivered up
from a deli in the underworld.

I yearned to recall life, not death —
the still body in her pink nightgown on the bed,
how I lay in the shallow cradle of the scattered sheets
after they took it away,
inhaling her scent one last time.

I close my eyes, savor a wafer of
sacred cake on my tongue and
try to taste my mother, to discern
the message she baked in these loaves
when she was too ill to eat them:

I love you.
It will end.
Leave something of sweetness
and substance
in the mouth of the world.

​Click here for more information about poet, artist, and writer Anna Belle Kaufman. Today’s poem first appeared in The Sun magazine in 2010. 

 alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Robert W. King

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My house is more than a century old and filled with handcrafted woodwork and leaded glass bookcases and windows so beautiful that some days I stop just to admire them. I wonder about the craftspeople who made them, and how many hours and weeks and months and years of painstaking work it took them, and for only a single purpose: to make something beautiful and durable that would last for hundreds of years, far beyond their own lifetimes. Something for others to depend on. Something to be nurtured and cared for.

The people who made my house are the opposite of people who move fast and break things –things like the idea of democracy–that others, for centuries, have loved and cherished and protected and given their lives for.

Work, by Robert W. King

The workmen over and above the fence
fit bricks, lift mortar, slap it accurately
in place. Guilty by sitting idle, I
imagine they envy my luxury
of doing nothing until I remember
the days I had my hands full of shovel,
the dragline plowing the ditch of a sewer
through a future subdivision and how
I pitied those who walked by our work
with no apparent occupation,
denied the pleasure of making something,
piece by piece—even if it would soon
be buried—they would depend upon.

Click here for more information about poet Robert W. King. This poem was first published in 2008, in the online journal Rattle #29. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Danusha Laméris

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​Where are they now, those fictional people I spun up out of thin air and set free? I miss them: Clara and Mallie and William T., The Bartender and Tamar and Crystal. I miss Will, lonely boy wandering the streets of LA, leaving kindness in his wake.

My people live in an invisible world parallel to ours. Sometimes I’m able to coax them through the scrim. Sometimes they fill me in on their lives. Sometimes I wish I could change things for them, but they are their own selves now, and they get to be who they are. I wish I could have them all over to dinner, make their favorite foods, tell them how much I love them.

Fictional Characters, by Danusha Laméris

Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the movie theater
to catch the two o’clock
Anna Karenina sitting in a diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
serves up a cheeseburger.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires the tulips.

Maybe they grew tired
of the author’s mind,
all its twists and turns.

Or were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

For others, it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they’d been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason,
here they are, roaming the city streets
rain falling on their phantasmal shoulders.

Wouldn’t you, if you could?
Step out of your own story,
to lean against a doorway
of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee,

your life, somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

Click here for more information about the wondrous poet Danusha Laméris. Today’s poem is from from The Moons of August, published in 2014 by Autumn House Press.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by June Beisch

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When your world is being swamped with cruelty and greed, when you’re exhausted by the hatred and pain others seem determined to unleash, what do you do? How do you resist? One way is to write fiction. Not as an escape, but a conjuring.

Doesn’t matter if you’re not a writer, write the world you want to live in. Write the world you do live in but make it better, full of people who see others as they truly are – fellow humans with dreams, hopes, sorrows, loves. Don’t give away your power. Understand that conjuring begins with knowing that things that seem impossible right now aren’t. Think of those bulbs that flower under snow, and imagine the world you want to live in, and then stubbornly live in it as if it already exists. Will a better world into being until it blooms.

Henry James, by June Beisch

“Poor Mr. James,” Virginia Woolf once said:
“He never quite met the right people.”
Poor James. He never quite met the
children of light and so he had to invent them.
Then, when people said: No one is like that.
Your books are not reality, he replied:

So much the worse for reality.

He described himself as “slow to conclude,
orotund, a slow-moving creature, circling his rooms
slowly masticating his food.”

Once, when a nephew asked his advice
on how to live, he searched his mind.
Number One, be kind, he said.
Number Two, be kind and
Number Three, be kind.

Click here for more information on June Beisch. Today’s poem was first published in 2004 by Cape Cod Literary Press in Beisch’s collection Fatherless Woman. 
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by James Baldwin

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It’s hard to live in the world. This line has spoken itself in my head throughout my life, especially right now. Don’t let them get to you, Allie. That little mantra got me through some hard times when I was a child, and while it’s a flawed philosophy it’s still a helpful one when it comes to bullies, because bullies love reactions.

Who do you turn to in hard times? That question was asked a few weeks ago in my church, where the only creed is love, compassion, kindness, inclusion, and social justice. Those who have gone before me, was my instant answer. Those who have done the hard things. Those who have already stepped through those distant doors and did so with courage and heart. Like James Baldwin. What seems hopeless isn’t, because the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, and nothing is fixed.

For Nothing Is Fixed, by James Baldwin

For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out. 

Click here for more information about poet, essayist, short story writer, critic, novelist and iconic American James Baldwin.  

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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​More than half my country’s wealth is hoarded by a few hundred billionaires. A few of them have bought their way into power and have said they’d like to take away the bare-bones security our government guarantees to ordinary hardworking people. They call it ‘disruption,’ but it’s chaos and destruction and pain. It doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to let it be this way.

When they were tiny and had a bad dream I held my children and sang to them and soothed them so they would feel loved and secure and safe. Isn’t that what we were born to do? Don’t we reach out instinctively to help those who are hurting? We’re not going to be able to live in this world if we can’t take care of each other.

Shoulders, by Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

 Click here for more information about the iconic Naomi Shihab Nye. Today’s poem is from her collection Red Suitcase, published in 1994 by BOA Editions. 

alisonmcghee.com
My poetry + conversations podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kasey Jueds

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When the world feels too much, too scary, too overwhelming, too helpless, my dog brings me back to his world, the world of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. The world of warm fur, small thudding heart, searching eyes I feel gazing at me until I lift my eyes to his and he thuds his tail rapidly, over and over again, shifting on his front paws and willing me to motion for him to jump up onto my lap to push his cold nose against me and butt me with his head harder than you think he’d be capable of until I pet him. Over and over and over he wants to be petted, and over and over and over I pet him until he’s ready to get on with his day, his stores of affection and attention, and mine, having been renewed.

Claim, by Kasey Jueds

Once during that year
when all I wanted
was to be anything other
than what I was, the
dog took my wrist
in her jaws. Not to hurt
or startle, but the way
a wolf might, closing her mouth
over the leg of another
from her pack. Claiming me
like anything else: the round luck
of her supper dish or the bliss
of rabbits, their infinite
grassy cities. Her lips
and teeth circled
and pressed, tireless
pressure of the world
that pushes against you
to see if you’re there,
and I could feel myself
inside myself again, muscle
to bone to the slippery
core where I knew
next to nothing
about love. She wrapped
my arm as a woman might wrap
her hand through the loop
of a leash—as if she
were the one holding me
at the edge of a busy street,
instructing me to stay.

​Click here for more information about Kasey Jueds (pronounced Judds). Today’s poem is from her book Keeper​, published in 2013 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
alisonmcghee.com
My poetry podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by lucille clifton

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If you’d like to treat yourself to a quiet, creative start to the new year, a few spots remain in our January 6-11 morning Write Together session. Each hour begins with a brief reading and a guided prompt, and then we all write together silently in our little Zoom boxes. 10-11 am Central Time, $100. I’d love to see you in the zoom room. Click here for all the details. 

In a tiny room at the top of my house all the memorabilia of my life are stored in boxes and on shelves: copies of all the books I’ve published and not published, dozens of syllabi, thousands of lesson plans, notes and paintings and poems by me and also by my then-tiny children, photos, signed contracts, old mortgages, the spoof newspaper I wrote for my family every year beginning at age 22, and a gigantic tub filled with hundreds and hundreds (thousands?) of cards and letters from friends and family dating back to high school. That’s right: high school.

The past week has been spent opening up the past and seeing where it led. It stuns me how many words I’ve written, how many books and essays and speeches and lectures and poems and stories have poured out of me since age six. The old years blow back like a wind and I’m sifting through endless, endless papers and oh my God, I have tried so hard. That’s almost impossible to say out loud for some reason, so with help from lucille I’ll say it again: I have tried so hard.

i am running into a new year, by lucille clifton 

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

Click here for more information about lucille clifton, one of my lifelong favorite poets. Today’s poem can be found in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980.
alisonmcghee.com
Words by Winter, my poetry podcast.