Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Amanda Quaid

Once, long ago when she was tiny, one of my daughters was asking me about death, and if everyone had to die, even me.

I wanted to reassure her so I told her if something happened to me her father would take very good care of her, and she would miss me terribly but she would be okay.

I wouldn’t miss you, she said, in an untroubled way.

You…wouldn’t?

Nope. Because I’d be dead too. I couldn’t live without you.

Patient and Daughter Appear Closely Bonded, by Amanda Quaid

My toddler takes a bite of tater tot and tells me
she wants me to die.

The social worker says I should respond and not
react to things like that

so I ask why she says she wants me to die
as though it’s just

a thought-provoking notion that has never
crossed my mind.

She thinks for a moment, chewing, her tiny lips
stained with blueberry juice.

“I want you to die so you can show me
how to die.”

I take that phrase and tuck it in my breast—she’s
given me a gift, I know,

a task or blessing or could it be—would you not
call it permission—

“And you could come back as a peacock!” she cries
with a grin

“And so could I, and then we could be friends!”
She cackles at me and I smile

back at her and see us in the next
go-round, two peacocks

preening our plumes in the Sri Lankan sun,
finally peers and bickering

over the last mangosteen
in the grove.

Click here for more information about Amanda Quaid.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Tess Gallagher

Posted on 7 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

Friends, I’m leading a FREE creative writing workshop via Zoom this coming Friday, March 20, 1-4 pm Central Time. Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self is designed for anyone living with the memories of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault. I’d love to see you in the room. Email me if you’d like to sign up.

Sort through blackberries. Pick out ones too far gone and toss them into a compost pail. Next to you other volunteers bag mushrooms, sort apples, count boxes of organic greens and other donated supplies. How many people will this one afternoon of work feed? Not enough, you think, and suddenly your blackberry task seems so dumb. Futile.

When your own government seems bent on destroying everything you’ve worked for your whole life, when people you didn’t elect and despise are dropping bombs on little kids, are swinging their heedless wrecking balls against everything you hold dear, how can you feel anything but despair?

That’s how they want you to feel, Alison, you tell yourself, for the thousandth time, and you look up from the blackberries, around the big room filled with people working steadily to help others, to take care of them when the people who control the money won’t. This is the flip side of the brutality coin. This is what you have to remind yourself of, every day, all day.

Most of us don’t want to cut down the nests. Keep going, you tell yourself, and you do.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

(for Drago Štambuk)

Click here for more information about poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. Today’s poem appears in her collection Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

Posted on 14 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

Friends, I’m leading a FREE creative writing workshop via Zoom on Friday, March 20, 1-4 pm Central Time. Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self is designed for anyone living with the memories of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault. I’d love to see you in the room. Email me at alisonmcghee@gmail.com if you’d like to sign up.

I miss the pace of snail mail. I miss the anticipation of a letter and the tactile feel of it in my hands. In a tiny never-used room at the top of my house are bins and boxes full of all the pre-email letters I’ve never been able to throw away.

Last November I added a new box to the storage room, a small Whitman’s candies box filled with the letters my father sent my mother daily from basic training. I couldn’t open any of those letters, couldn’t open them, couldn’t couldn’t couldn’t, and then, one morning last week, I did.

My father was a giant man with a hot temper who terrified me as a child. But my God, these letters. His hidden gentleness, his love and longing for my mother, are in every one of those handwritten missives. So much innocence and excitement about their upcoming wedding. In his letters I see the decency of a young, good man who had fallen in love, whose whole life was yet to come. I know him so much better now.

My Father’s Diary, by Sharon Olds

When I sit on the bed, and spring the brass
scarab legs of its locks, inside
is the stacked, shy wealth of his print.
He could not write in script, so the pages
are sturdy with the beamwork of printedness,
WENT TO LOOK AT A CAR, DAD IN A
GOOD MOOD AT DINNER, LUNCH WITH MOM,
TRIED OUT SOME RACQUETS—a life of ease,
except when he spun his father’s DeSoto on the
ice, and a young tree whirled up
to the hood, throwing up her arms—until
LOIS. PLAYED TENNIS WITH LOIS, LUNCH
WITH MOM AND LOIS, DRIVING WITH LOIS,
LONG DRIVE WITH LOIS. And then,
LOIS! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! SHE IS SO
GOOD, SO SWEET, SO GENEROUS, I HAVE
NEVER, WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE
TO DESERVE SUCH A GIRL? Between the tines
of his W’s, and liquid on the serifs, moonlight,
the self of the grown boy pouring
out, kneeling in pine-needle weave,
worshiping her. It was my father
good, it was my father grateful,
it was my father dead, who had left me
these small structures of his young brain—
he wanted me to know him, he wanted
someone to know him.

Click here for more information about the wondrous Sharon Olds. Today’s poem is from Blood, Tin, Straw, first published by Knopf in 1999.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Shilpa Kamat

Posted on 21 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

Remember when things used to not be evil? When life was normal? I overheard someone saying into their phone the other day, and I started to silently agree, then stopped.

Normal used to mean my grandmother couldn’t vote, my mother had to hide being pregnant with me to keep her job, that if you were gay you pretended you weren’t. Normal used to mean the legal enslavement of Black people.

If neighbors being abducted from their homes and sent to “detention” centers without due process begins to feel normal, if tiny children being gunned down in our schools begins to feel normal, if .1% of our population hoarding over half the money while most have no safety net at all begins to feel normal, then what’s evil?

the demons were never, by Shilpa Kamat

evil just regular
people who prayed
and were granted

thunderbolts
ethers
before their hearts
were grown
enough to keep
up

For more information about Shilpa Kamat, please click here.

Poem of the Week, by Judith Viorst

Posted on February 21 by alisonmcghee

Last summer my family and I were waiting for a new family member to arrive. I was in Boston with my daughter and son-in-law, hanging out. Making dinner. Watching movies. Writing. Teaching. Waiting, waiting, and hoping: for an uneventful birth, a quick recovery, a healthy baby.

In me as I waited were shadows, worry ghosts haunting me. Worry my daughter’s birth would be as hard as mine were, worry the baby would not be ready for the world, worry my daughter would suffer but keep it to herself. I tried to cope with these ghosts the way I cope with most things, by silently tripling down on determination.

It wasn’t until a few months after the baby was here that I understood the scared ghosts in me were remnants of my former self, that overwhelmed girl who never told anyone she couldn’t cope and just struggled through. And now here is this new presence, making us all laugh and smile, fixing us with those bright brown eyes. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get a chance to comfort our past selves.

Between Mother and Other

My heart is younger, higher than
at any time since I held
your beginning life against it.
The mirror does not lie,
I am as my mother was,
as I, of course, would never be.
On this day of days, time is gracious.
It has, I think, a special fondness
for first-time grandmothers
and so leaves one thing unchanged –
I love your daughter as I loved
the daughter cradled in my
arms, that long ago yesterday when
I was you, and you were she.

Today’s poem is by Judith Viorst, poet and author of books for adults and children, including Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Kim Addonizio

Posted on February 14 by alisonmcghee

A few years ago a minor heart glitch I was born with spiraled out of control and needed fixing. I didn’t want to worry anyone so I stayed quiet until just before the procedure. But as the masked nurses pushed the gurney into the OR, I suddenly felt terrified. I don’t want to die, I said. Please don’t let me die.

Their eyes filled with surprise and they all immediately bent over me. Everything will be okay. We’ll take good, good care of you. And then I was under the lights and then I was floating away and then I was waking up to the surgeon, standing at the end of the bed with his arms crossed, grinning. Do you remember telling us to stop setting your heart on fire?

That whole day came washing back over me when I read this poem below. The kindness of the nurses and doctors. The wondrousness of a world in which a heart can be precisely burned in multiple places and emerge okay. The openheartedness of an unknown person who, long before their own death, chose to save another’s life with their own body. The knowledge that we get just one heart, and whether we’re conscious of it or not, it’s always on fire.

February 14, by Kim Addonizio

This is a valentine for the surgeons
ligating the portal veins and hepatic artery,
placing vascular clamps on the vena cava
as my brother receives a new liver.

And a valentine for each nurse;
though I don’t know how many there are
leaning over him in their gauze masks,
I’m sure I have enough—as many hearts

as it takes, as much embarrassing sentiment
as anyone needs. One heart
for the sutures, one for the instruments
I don’t know the names of,

and the monitors and lights,
and the gloves slippery with his blood
as the long hours pass,
as a T-tube is placed to drain the bile.

And one heart for the donor,
who never met my brother
but who understood the body as gift
and did not want to bury or burn that gift.

For that man, I can’t imagine how
one heart could suffice. But I offer it.
While my brother lies sedated,
opened from sternum to groin,

I think of a dead man, being remembered
by others in their sorrow, and I offer him
these words of praise and gratitude,
oh beloved whom we did not know.

Click here for more information on the wondrous poet Kim Addonizio. Today’s poem first appeared in What Is This Thing Called Love, published by W.W. Norton in 2004.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Posted on February 7 by alisonmcghee

The food share encourages volunteers to take home a bag of food for themselves. “I don’t feel right about that,” I said to my friend. “Why should I take a bag when I can afford to buy groceries?”

My friend looked at me calmly. “By not taking a bag, you set yourself apart from people who do. You implicitly demonstrate that those who volunteer here, the ones who can afford groceries, are somehow superior to those who come for food.”

This was one of those moments when the world suddenly pivoted a fraction of a degree for me. What is the current ICE occupation here but the action of people who perceive themselves to be superior?

Racism is core: the implicit assumption is that if your skin is not white and/or your English is accented, you are suspect. You can be hauled from your car, your school, your place of work, your asylum hearing, because you have been deemed automatically inferior by those currently in power in our administration.

Who am I to judge myself even remotely different from anyone else? I took a bag of food home with me and cooked up a big batch of soup to share with others.

Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Click here for more information about Naomi Shihab Nye. Today’s poem is from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, published in 1995.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Joseph Fasano

Posted on January 31 by alisonmcghee

-6 degrees, same as it’s been for weeks. Bundle up, put on your whistle, put phone in pocket. Walk as far as you can, scanning for ICE. Once home, call twenty senators: “I live in south Minneapolis, where we’re under invasion by our own government. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else anywhere else in this country but it can and it will unless you defund ICE.” Sign off. Feel energized because you took action, and action creates hope.

Drive to a distribution site while scanning for ICE. Help unload delivery truck, pack boxes for Minneapolitans who don’t have enough to eat, who don’t have basic supplies, who are terrified to leave their homes no matter their “status.” Think how wrong it is that so few in this country hoard most of the money. Envision, as you constantly do, a world in which we all took care of each other instead of competed against each other. Then think: hey, Minneapolitans are taking care of each other. Load up your car, distribute to the needy. Go home. Feel energized because you took action and action creates hope.

Watch a video someone sent you in which the lady in the pink coat talks about watching them cut the nurse’s clothes off, maybe to try CPR (why? he was gone) but no, no, oh God no, they’re counting the bullet holes. Like they’re hunters and he’s a deer. This undoes you. But no, you can’t be undone. You have to stay strong and resist. Check in with neighbors to say you’re here for them. They respond with “Same.” Their caring gives you energy and energy helps you act and action creates hope and hope is what will keep us going.

For Alex Pretti

Because his last words were for a woman;
because he asked,
are you okay, are you okay;
because he had learned to say it
by standing each night beside the dying;
because sometimes he held their hands;
because he had lived only long enough
as the scent of childhood in an album;
because he was a son;
because he sang once;
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
because of all of it,
tell it, tell the story:
a breath has left;
a country is dying;
and a man laid his face
on the pavement today
as though he were listening
to a patient’s heart–
even then, even at the ending–
to do what he was there to do: heal.

Click here for more information about Joseph Fasano. Today’s poem first appeared on Instagram in January, 2026.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

Posted on January 24 by alisonmcghee

A few days ago I drove before dawn down Lake Street, the major city street that runs through south Minneapolis. It was dark. Nearly all the restaurants and bodegas and auto repair shops and gas stations were closed. But through the windows I could see the shadowy outlines of morning shift workers in the restaurant kitchens and storerooms, so many of them immigrants.

How many of them are terrified, here in this city where we have been invaded by our own government? How many of them can’t even risk coming to work, here where daily acts of vicious cruelty are making it hard to breathe?

Later that morning came the honks and whistles that mean the presence of ICE . Up and down the block people ran out, one in pajamas, all of us with our whistles and our phones. A friend texted me from an elementary school she was monitoring to make sure the kids and staff got in safely. Another stood vigil at the site of Renee Good’s murder. Later that afternoon I helped pack endless boxes of food for people who don’t have enough.

That night a friend texted me from the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant he was monitoring to make sure staff got home safe. And yesterday, so many thousands of Minneapolitans braved -11 degree weather to march in peaceful protest. All of us doing what we can, because we can, for the sake of strangers: human beings just like us.

For the Sake of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Click here for more information about Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Today’s poem first appeared in For the Sake of Strangers, publish in 1994 by BOA Editions.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Gwendolyn Brooks

Posted on January 17 by alisonmcghee

Friends, I’m leading a FREE workshop, Mapping the Unmapped, next Saturday, January 24, from 12-3 pm Central time. This workshop has been updated for anyone living in the midst of tremendous upheaval, e.g., the ICE invasion in the Twin Cities. No writing experience necessary; while we’re welcome to share reflections, we won’t be sharing or critiquing our writing. My hope is we’ll all leave with some useful techniques to help keep ourselves steady and grounded in the midst of upheaval of any kind. Email me to sign up.

Three friends and I stood for hours behind a table in 11 degree weather at a massive protest last Saturday, dishing up brownies and cake and water and hand warmers and gloves from a local food justice nonprofit to shivering, energized protesters of all ages and races and backgrounds. “I love you!” one young woman shouted at me. “I love you right back!” I said, and we hugged each other.

In the past week: Two of my neighbors were tear gassed as they yelled at ICE agents who had just crashed a car driven by a brown man. My nephew walked through an ICE raid at the high school adjoining his middle school. Workers remodeling a friend’s house and housecleaners for other friends are too afraid to leave their apartments. I turned the corner onto my own block and had to pull over to avoid three ICE vehicles zipping the wrong way up our one-way street. Whistles, car horns, and observers filming with their cell phones as multiple armed men haul brown people out of their cars or apartments or places of work and throw them to the ground are now commonplace.

What is happening here, with these nonstop raids, is not about returning people who came to this country hoping for a better life, nearly all of whom work nonstop to support their families and do not rely on any kind of public assistance, back to their countries of origin because they lack documentation. It is about racism. It is about terror. It is about cowing all of us into submission.

Paul Robeson, by Gwendolyn Brooks

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

Please click here for more information about Gwendolyn Brooks. Today’s poem appears in The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, published in 2005 by the Library of America.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter