Poem of the Week, by Lucille Clifton

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Did you ever read the astonishing novel Feed, by M.T. Anderson? In it, humans walk through a world where constant ads present themselves wherever they go, shimmering in the air, instantly absorbed.

The news is like that these days for me. No need to read it; everything that’s happening is already in me, by osmosis. To stay sane I hit delete over and over, but still, ask me anything about world events and I already know it all.

But then! I watched the new Presidential Library dedication the other night: The Obamas, John Legend, Springsteen, all the performers and speakers, and everything in me suddenly hit pause. Hit rewind. Hit play, and play, and play again.

HOPE. Hope is a verb, a choice, action. Hope is joy. Hope is the thing with feathers, the long view in the midst of all the daily assaults. Wow did I need reminding of that. Afterward I sat scrolling the artists who feed my soul. Thank you, Jacob Collier, thank you Jon Batiste, thank you musicians, visionaries, poets. Thank you Lucille Clifton.

Won’t You Celebrate with Me, by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed. 


Click here for more information about the one and only Lucille Clifton.

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by C.L. O’Dell

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When I was little the state fair concessionaire stands sold pink puffs of spun sugar in paper cones, mesh bags of tiny buttered salt potatoes, paper containers filled with fried fat-bellied clams glistening with oil. Paper cups filled with lemonade made from a squeezed lemon stirred with sugar and cold water.

A single afternoon at the New York State Fair always shimmers up in my mind, me and my father, that man I was so often so afraid of but not on that day, not on that one day when I sat on a red stool beside him, under a red awning there at the fair, drinking lemonade and eating those salty buttered baby red potatoes and fried clams he treated me to.  

I was seven and he was thirty-one and he was happy, and I was happy too.

Decades later I stand in my kitchen making lemonade in just that way: A single lemon, big spoonful of sugar, water cold from the tap. Stir and stir and stir.

Forsythias, by C.L. O’Dell

I think about time.
The forsythias
and the man singing
in the car ahead of me.

When I enter the space
the same shape
he made a moment
before me,

where is the music,
the taste of honey
in his mouth and now
mine, the thought

of kissing his wife good-bye
and the words of a song
lifting off my tongue
as if from memory, but his?

What is mine stays with me,
my heart in the glitter
of his heart. My dreams
have no bones. Love

is never saved in layers
of rock. So much of me
will never be found
on this earth.

For more information about C.L. O’Dell, please visit his website.
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Words by Winter: my podcast

Poem of the Week, by Kirsten Dierking

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A while ago a writer friend and I hiked through the Vermont woods and talked about how at some point you understand it’s too late to become fluent in five languages, to have a sixty-year marriage, to make a life on an island off the coast of Maine, to undo what you wish you hadn’t done.

We talked about how some things you thought you wanted were precluded from the start by circumstances, or by your own personality. Because you were frantically busy trying to earn a living, or raise your children, or hold yourself together. Because you crave solitude, time to make art.

We went to a restaurant we loved, where the pieces of cake were unfathomably gigantic. We talked about our books, and how often we feel like failures. I laughed at him, one of the greatest writers in the world, and he laughed at me. Then I said Should we split a piece of Gigantic Cake, and he said Hell no! I’m getting my own damn Gigantic Cake! and now I’m laughing all over again. I feel so lucky to have friends like him, and to live this odd life of mine, so full of failure and love in equal measure.

Lucky, by Kirsten Dierking

All this time,
the life you were
supposed to live
has been rising around you
like the walls of a house
designed with warm
harmonious lines

As if you had actually
planned it that way.

As if you had
stacked up bricks
at random,
and built by mistake
a lucky star.

Click here for more information about Kirsten Dierking. Today’s poem first appeared in Northern Oracle, published in 2007 by Spout Press.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter 

Poem of the Week, by Lucille Clifton

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Ten years ago at a book conference overseas, the women writers at my table told me they felt sorry for American women like me, that I not only had to work so hard at my writing career but also at home, cleaning and cooking and doing laundry and taking care of my children, while they had cooks and drivers and housekeepers and nannies.

I think every day about the systems of racism and sexism and vast wealth disparity so many of us struggle within. I think about famous people, past and present, and all the people behind them in the shadows, overlooked, overworked, underpaid. Every time I read the last line of this poem the entirety of this country’s history comes over me.

study the masters, by Lucille Clifton

like my aunt timmie.
it was her iron,
or one like hers,
that smoothed the sheets
the master poet slept on.
home or hotel, what matters is
he lay himself down on her handiwork
and dreamed. she dreamed too, words:
some cherokee, some masai and some
huge and particular as hope.
if you had heard her
chanting as she ironed
you would understand form and line
and discipline and order and
america.

For more information about Lucille Clifton, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Craig Santos Perez

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Last night two writer friends and I were plotting how to join another writer friend’s new and fascinating workshop without her knowing. How, though?

Maybe we should all register under anagrams of our names! I said. She’d just see three unusual names and figure she had some cool new people in her workshop and then our smiling faces will pop up!

I immediately began trying to anagram my name: Chemise Along. Cholimia Gens. Egma Cholines. Mein Galoches. Chameleon Gis. Ciel Hogmanes.

Then I remembered this poem, which I hadn’t thought of in a long time, but wow, do I need it right about now. Maybe you do too. Let’s make canoes out of whatever we can –wood, words, our own determination not to give up–and keep paddling our way through this neverending nightmare.

Ars Pasifika, by Craig Santos Perez

when the tide

of silence

rises

say “ocean”

then with the paddle

of your tongue

rearrange

the letters to form

“canoe”

For more information about Craig Santos Perez, please click here. Today’s poem was originally published by the Academy of American Poets on May 22, 2020.
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My podcast: Words by Winter

SOMEONE LIKE ME, a new picture book giveaway

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My new picture book, Someone Like Me, illustrated by the wonderful Hatem Aly, will be in the world as of June 2.

Someone Like Me began life eight years ago, when I was thinking about one of my great, silent fears as a child, which was that my family and I would have to move from our home in Upstate New York to someplace unknown, someplace new, someplace where I didn’t know anyone.

A new house.

A new school.

New everything.

This fear was based on nothing concrete, but I remember lying awake at night worrying. What if we had to move? How would I cope? How would I possibly make new friends? What about everything –my treehouse, my woods and creek, my house, my beloved people and places–that I would have to leave behind?

Everything hard feels so much harder at night, doesn’t it? In one of my favorite illustrations of the book, our little girl sits awake on a bus in the dark late, late at night, worrying and wondering. The bus is shown from above, snaking through the dark countryside on its way to wherever it’s taking the child. It’s as if Hatem Aly was channeling my child self when he came up with that illustration.

I wish I could reach down into the illustration and tell that little girl that everything will be okay. That if she could see what lies ahead of her in the last few pages of the book, she will feel so reassured.

Our publisher, Two Lions Press, is hosting a giveaway on Goodreads and anyone in the U.S. is welcome to enter. Sign up here – and good luck!

Poem of the Week, by V. Penelope Pelizzon

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A few weeks ago I found a folder labeled Student writing I love and opened it to find copies of stories and poems and memoirs collected over years.

A story titled Eight Days brought me back to a woman who entered the classroom silently, eyes down, and slipped into a seat. She never raised her hand, she never read aloud, she emanated shyness and something else, something that told me someone awful had made her feel she didn’t matter. Pay attention to her, I thought.

A memoir passage about a child who hid on a high shelf in a closet because her mother couldn’t reach her there brought me back to the eighteen-year-old who walked through the door of my memoir-writing classroom, her motorcycle helmet tucked under one arm. Pay attention to her, I thought.

I remember standing outside classrooms when I was going through times that felt impossible, thinking I had nothing left, no way could I walk through that door and teach. But a single line or look from a student can restore me to myself. The art of writing is sacred, and so is the art of teaching.

To Certain Students, by V. Penelope Pelizzon

On all the days I shut my door to light,
all the nights I turned my mind from sleep

while snow fell, filling the space between the trees
till dawn ran its iron needle through the east,

in order to read the scribblings of your compeers,
illiterate to what Martian sense they made

and mourning my marginalia’s failure to move them,
you were what drew me from stupor at the new day’s bell.

You with your pink hair and broken heart.
You with your knived smile. You who tried to quit

pre-law for poetry (“my parents will kill me”).
You the philosopher king. You who saw Orpheus

alone at the bar and got him to follow you home. You
green things, whose songs could move the oldest tree to tears.

For more information on V. Penelope Pelizzon, please click here.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Someone Like Me, a brand-new picture book giveaway!

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When I was little I used to stand on our porch and look up at the sky. We lived way out in the country on a hundred and twenty acres of woods and fields and there were no lights visible other than the ones in our own house. On a clear night, the sky glowed with stars, thousands and thousands of stars, pinpricks of glimmering light.

It was almost unfathomable to me that the stars were always there, even when the sun came up and the sky turned blue.

So many things are invisible but real. In Someone Like Me, my brand-new picture book illustrated by the wonderful Hatem Aly, a little girl and her family are moving. As she says goodbye to the people and places she loves, she wonders about her new, unknown home. She looks up on a warm summer night, when the moon and stars are the only light, and wonders: will they still shine as bright once she’s out of sight?

Is home the place she used to be? Is home somewhere ahead? Is home a place inside her heart?

As someone who writes but doesn’t illustrate picture books, I try always to hold only the vaguest of images in my mind for a picture book so that the artist is free to do their thing. When the first sketches from Hatem came floating into my inbox my first feeling was Ohhh, that’s what she looks like. I love Hatem’s artwork and how he brought this little girl to lovely, shimmering life on the page.

To celebrate the publication of Someone Like Me on June 2, Two Lions Press is hosting a giveaway on Goodreads for U.S. readers: One hundred digital copies will be given away! The giveaway is open now through June 2. Here’s the link to enter.

Illustrator
http://www.metahatem.com/
Bluesky / instagram

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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Molly Brodak

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In our pottery class we were warned that pots might fling themselves off the wheel, but it was still shocking when one of mine suddenly leapt into the air and smashed itself on the floor. I mushed it back together as best I could and returned it to the wheel.

Everything was going well (as well as anything can go when you are the beginningest of beginning potters) when suddenly POOF, the pot flung itself off the wheel again and this time landed on the window ledge.

Maybe the pot didn’t want to live? I wanted her to live, though, so I nicknamed her The Child and kept going. Maybe she could be a lopsided gravy boat, maybe a lopsided vase, maybe just a lopside. The Child made it through her first firing. I painted her and glazed her and dipped the rim again and everyone in the class blessed her and off she went for her final firing.

I’m a perfectionist in one way only and for that I’m grateful, because otherwise The Child wouldn’t be sitting in my kitchen now, making me smile every time I look at her.

How to Not Be a Perfectionist, by Molly Brodak

People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long—


Click here for more information about poet and memoirist Molly Brodak. Today’s poem was first published in New York Tyrant on November 25, 2017, as part of a grouping called “Three Poems by Molly Brodak.”


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My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Bob Hicok

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My garden is giant, the kind now referred to as a pollinator garden, with tons of bees and butterflies and worms and bugs, and I’m constantly trying and failing to keep even a few of the weeds in check.

My fingernails are permanently blackened and broken (gloves are not for me), my back hurts, I hack crazily from the Russian sage which I must be allergic to, my legs cramp. And that’s after a few hours, which is nothing.

This one goes out to everyone who keeps the world humming while the billionaires lord it over them: servers and mechanics and plumbers and caterers and farmers and housecleaners and personal care attendants and orderlies and shift workers and convenience store clerks and landscapers and farmworkers and everyone else doing the actual, unsung work of this world. 

By Their Works, by Bob Hicok

Who cleaned up the Last Supper? 
These would be my people. 
Maybe hung over, wanting 
desperately a better job,
standing with rags
in hand as the window
beckons with hills
of yellow grass. In Da Vinci,
the blue robed apostle
gesturing at Christ
is saying, give Him the check.
What a mess they’ve made
of their faith. My God
would put a busboy
on earth to roam
among the waiters
and remind them to share
their tips. The woman
who finished one
half eaten olive
and scooped the rest
into her pockets,
walked her tiny pride home
to children who looked
at her smile and saw
the salvation of a meal.
All that week
at work she ignored
customers who talked
of Rome and silk
and crucifixions,
though she couldn’t stop
thinking of this man
who said thank you
each time she filled
His glass.

Click here for more information about Bob Hicok. Today’s poem was first published in 5AM, after which Verse Daily featured it on December 24, 2002. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter