writing

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

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Poem friends, if you are on both this list and my Substack list and want to be removed from one or the other, please let me know. None of us need yet more extraneous emails! Thanks.  

In grad school one night, at the end of the workshop, one of my classmates jokingly referred to me as the workshop’s den mother. Why? Because I sometimes baked muffins and brought them to class? Because I had a toddler and I was pregnant? I can still hear his voice. I’m not your den mother, I said. You kind of are though, someone else said, and I went silent.

Did they not think of me as a writer, a peer, their full and complete equal? Did they not see the fire that burned inside me, the fire that had always burned inside me? I was burning then, I’m burning now.

Moon in the Window, by Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Click here for more information about wondrous poet Dorianne Laux.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Tangerine Bell

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Write Together 2026 is now open for registration! Come write with us for an hour each morning, January 12-17. Each day’s Zoom session features different readings, different prompts, and the chance to write quietly together in solidarity and appreciation. Click here for more information and to sign up. 

What I love about Tangerine Bell, who published her first book at 94, is her absolute refusal to shrink into the shadows. To efface herself because of her age or her gender. To pretend she didn’t care, had grown out of wanting. Nope. Give me my due, she says. I so admire people who boldly stake their claim in the world, their right to exist and be heard. I wish I’d known her.

Epitaph for an Unpublished Poet, by Tangerine Bell

No resurrection hymn can budge from dead
The one whose pungent verses rot unread.
So do not sing your songs to rouse my head.
Sing mine; sing mine. Sing mine instead.

Click here for more information about Tangerine Bell. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Write Together 2026!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

Write Together 2026: January 12-17, 10-11 a.m. Central Time every day (note time zone)

Welcome to Write Together 2026! In our popular Write Together sessions, we convene each morning in our Zoom Room for a one-hour session. Each hour includes a brief reading and continues with a 30- to 45-minute guided prompt related to the theme of the day. Each day’s theme is different, each session features a different reading and a different prompt (usually two to choose from), and all are designed to wake up the magical writer who lives within us all.

The Write Together sessions were inspired by my regular January solo practice of a week devoted solely to generating new ideas, having fun, and playing around with cool new prompts. There’s something so comforting and freeing about knowing that a whole group are writing together at the same time, each of us in our little Zoom boxes, with no expectation of sharing or feedback. We do extend the last day’s meeting for an open mic session – anyone who wishes is welcome to read something generated during the week for applause and appreciation.

You won’t have to take time off work or your daily routine –unless of course you want to–but in the mini-session you will have six hour-long opportunities to write in a focused, intensive, exhilarating way in a room full of others doing exactly the same thing. Come have fun and see what you come up with!

Registration and payment for the January 2026 session: $100. To register, email me at alisonmcghee@gmail.com or simply send payment and note you’re registering for Write Together 2026. Registration is tentative until payment is received. You may send payment via Venmo to @Alison-McGhee-1, Zelle to alisonmcghee@gmail.com, or by personal check. Please email me with any questions. Note: I offer two half-price scholarships ($50 each) for this workshop – if you need one, let me know and it’s yours, no questions asked.

Poem of the Week, by Czeslaw Milosz

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Here’s the fourth-floor walkup you called home. Here’s the tiny room overlooking Joy Street where your sister used to roll her waitressing change into paper tubes for the rent. Here’s your room, with the big saggy bed left by a previous tenant. Here’s the bathroom where you didn’t pee at night because darkness was the domain of the cockroaches. Here’s the plant in the sunny window that you wound around itself because it was out of control.

Here’s the curbside rocking chair that your friend lugged up for you. Here’s the curbside rug on the living room floor where you used to host Chinese dinner parties. Here’s the couch you were lying on that spring Thursday when the phone call came. This is the place you fled a few weeks later. The place where you were a girl and then not. The place that comes back to you in dreams, just the way this poem does. 

Encounter, by Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

For more information on Czeslaw Milosz, please click here. 
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter 

Poem of the Week, by Alice N. Persons

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When walking in crowds I sometimes think that man could be a rapist or that man could be a serial killer or I wonder if that’s a loaded gun in that bulgy pocket. There’s no fear in these thoughts, just a kind of distant, idle curiosity.

I’m switching things up now, though. Maybe that woman runs a senior dog rescue; maybe that man sings show tunes in a nursing home every Thursday; maybe she’s a pediatric oncologist; maybe he roams the neighborhood every day with a plastic bag; picking up trash.

Maybe that woman with the dark hair and sparkly eyeglasses once saw a young man standing by the edge of a tall building, and she sensed he was gathering his strength to jump, and she approached gently and told him how she had once felt the same way, and she was there to listen if he wanted to talk, and he did, and she listened, and now a decade later they send each other a tiny daily text, just to say Hi, thinking about you. Sending love.

the man in front of you, by Alice N. Persons 

is just tall enough
has soft black hair
and golden skin
wide shoulders
and smells good

you stand behind him
in the movie line
or buying flowers on boylston street
or see him on the subway
not far down the car
his clean brown hands
on the overhead rail

the man in front of you
could have just killed someone
or might have a bitter face
may love no one
or always sleep alone

the man in front of you
hurries out of the station
or rushes around the corner
and vanishes into a cab
you never see his face
but in dreams he comes to you
and does not slip away

Click here for more information about Alice N. Persons. Today’s poem appears in Never Say Never, published in 2004 by Moon Pie Press.  
alisonmcghee.com​ 
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limón

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A few months ago I was tromping around the Zurich airport train station, backpack heavy on my shoulders, following signs, twisting and turning down this hallway and that. Now to figure out the ticket kiosk. Now to find the right platform. Now to double check the time. Tired. Hungry. Thirsty. Worried worried worried and so sad about my country.

Ticket in hand, I turned a corner and locked eyes with a small brown dog who looked at me calmly, as if she’d been waiting for me. I dropped to my knees next to her and held out the back of my hand and she lay her head on it. The animal part of me wanted to live with this dog forever, and I looked up at her human, who smiled in understanding. The world was calm for a moment.

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart, by Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Click here for more information about Ada Limón. Today’s poem is from The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Charlotte Parsons

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The elementary school bus I grew up riding, nearly an hour each way to and from school, was an ongoing nightmare. Fights, bullying, cruelty, all egged on by our horrible bus driver. That school bus has appeared and reappeared in many of my novels, always as a place of fear and torment. (There’s a reason I’m a fiction writer.)

We can replicate that kind of cruelty or we can push back against it. It’s beyond exhausting and beyond terrifying to see our current vicious administration rise up against our fellow humans. We are all in this together. We will all come to an end one day. Those who called from the planes and towers on 9/11 were calling with messages of love.

Nine-Eleven, by Charlotte Parsons

You passed me on the street
I rode the subway with you
You lived down the hall from me
I admired your dog in the park one morning
We waited in line for a concert
I ate with you in the cafes
You stood next to me at the bar
We huddled under an awning during a downpour
We dashed across the street to beat the light
I bumped into you coming round the corner
You stepped on my foot
I held the door for you
You helped me up when I slipped on the ice
I grabbed the last Sunday Times
You stole my cab
We waited forever at the bus stop
We sweated in steamy August
We hunched our shoulders against the sleet
We laughed at the movies
We groaned after the election
We sang in church
Tonight I lit a candle for you
All of you

Although today’s poem has been featured on hundreds of websites I’m unable to find out any information about poet Charlotte Parsons other than that this poem first appeared on The Writer’s Almanac on September 11, 2017. This leads me to suspect that Charlotte Parsons is a pseudonym for someone else. If anyone’s in the know, please clue me in. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Rob Ingraham

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In elementary school we had to write a lot of book reports, and this felt unbearable to me. How can a book possibly be boiled down to a few lines of plot and description of style? It would have crushed my soul, so I had to come up with an alternative, which was to make up imaginary books and then write book reports about them.

Most of my imaginary books were about winter pioneers, trying their best to survive in a one-room unchinked cabin, huddled around meager fires, facing the endless snows of winter. (Yes, I’m a northerner, and yes, I spent a lot of time reading the Little House books.)

To this day I can’t read book jackets, and it’s almost impossible for me to write jacket copy for one of my own books. I feel the same way about resumés. How can a bland listing of degrees and jobs possibly convey the truth of a human being?

Resumé, by Rob Ingraham

In French, it simply means a summary,
which limits what it can and can’t convey
despite my padding and hyperbole.
No room to cite the winter night I lay
inside an ambulance (my friend was dead),
they strapped me down, the flares lit up the snow.
No place to say how luckily I wed,
or itemize what took me years to know.
The format’s not designed to mention awe;
transcendence can’t be summarized at all.
And nowhere on the page to say I saw
a plane explode, I saw a building fall.
But these are skills not easily assessed;
all references provided on request.

I’ve been unable to find out more personal information about Rob Ingraham, but you can click here for another of his poems. Today’s poem was first published in Rattle #22 in the winter of 2004. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Hafiz

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Excerpt from a small blue diary I kept when I was in fifth grade: It’s weird but when you walk into a room of people you can feel the air. The air is a color and a texture that you can see and feel and it’s how people are feeling. But what’s really weird is you can change how they feel if you concentrate really hard.

I believed this at ten, and I still believe it. In our early twenties my sister and I used to go to parties and some of the parties were flat and dull. We would look at each other and murmur social overdrive, social overdrive, and then throw ourselves into the scene and try to put everyone at ease and make everyone feel connected and happy.

Social overdrive social overdrive is a mantra for me in these vicious times. How to lift up another human being, or a roomful of them, or a nation. How to change the energy in the room, how to channel not anger and bitterness but love and kindness and acceptance. Something that Hafiz, who lived and died 700 years ago, knew well.

With That Moon Language, by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud;
otherwise, someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?​

Click here for more information about this poem, attributed to the Persian poet Hafiz/Hafez. Please note also that reputable sources say that most of the beloved poems attributed to Hafiz were actually written by his purported translator Daniel Ladinsky.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Keetje Kuipers

Posted on by alisonmcghee

The other day, after a funeral, longtime friends and I had a quiet, deep conversation about the possibility of something beyond the rules of any one religion, lives before and beyond this one, a higher consciousness and good that transcends the castigation and stone-throwing surrounding us.

My definition of God? Maybe something like the feeling of my children on either side of me as I read them to sleep when they were little. The high school students I used to teach, ringed on the floor of our classroom on the giant pillows  I’d made, silent and absorbed on Friday afternoons as I read to them. Crouching in my garden, bees and butterflies floating from flower to flower as I dig in the dirt. The idea and feeling of peace, of a place where only love and comfort dwell. Poems that open my heart in a way that almost hurts, like this one.

Prayer, by Keetje Kuipers

Perhaps as a child you had the chicken pox
and your mother, to soothe you in your fever
or to help you fall asleep, came into your room
and read to you from some favorite book,
Charlotte’s Web or Little House on the Prairie,
a long story that she quietly took you through
until your eyes became magnets for your shuttering
lids and she saw your breathing go slow. And then
she read on, this time silently and to herself,
not because she didn’t know the story,
it seemed to her that there had never been a time
when she didn’t know this story—the young girl
and her benevolence, the young girl in her sod house—
but because she did not yet want to leave your side
though she knew there was nothing more
she could do for you. And you, not asleep but simply weak,
listened to her turn the pages, still feeling
the lamp warm against one cheek, knowing the shape
of the rocking chair’s shadow as it slid across
your chest. So that now, these many years later,
when you are clenched in the damp fist of a hospital bed,
or signing the papers that say you won’t love him anymore,
when you are bent at your son’s gravesite or haunted
by a war that makes you wake with the gun
cocked in your hand, you would like to believe
that such generosity comes from God, too,
who now, when you have the strength to ask, might begin
the story again, just as your mother would,
from the place where you have both left off.

Click here for more information about Keetje Kuipers. Today’s poem was originally published in the winter of 2007, in Rattle, Issue #28.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter