Alison McGhee's Blog

Young woman across the street, waving and calling to me as I trudge through the snowdrifts on the way home from my astonishingly wonderful church for the non-churchy, where I go seeking solidarity amongst my equally post-election troubled neighbors and friends: “Mama! Mama!”


Me, calling back: “I’m not your mama!”


YW: “Thank you, mama, come here!”


Me, crossing the street in an Oh, what the hell sort of way: “. . . Yes?”
YW, gesturing to a small car with two enormous rolled rugs sticking out of the trunk and windows): “Please mama, please help.”
Me: “Honey, are you nuts? You’re half my age and twice as solid.”
YW: “Thank you mama, God bless you mama.”
Me, after deciding that the universe has brought me this interesting experience and I might as well roll with it, heaving the first rug out of the trunk/window and dragging it with difficulty and no help across the entryway to her apartment building, then repeating the process with Rug #2, at which point she gestures happily for me to follow her down a hallway with Rug #1: “No way, sister. You’re on your own now.”

YW: “Thank you mama! God bless you mama!”

Whatever the above anecdote –which ended with me heaving both rugs down the hallway, angling them into her apartment, propping them against the wall of her living room and then leaving without unwrapping and arranging them for her, much to her chagrin– has to do with today’s poem of the week, I’m not sure, other than it falls into the categories of Life is interesting and mystifying and Some people have no qualms asking for exactly what they want and My back hurts now and Sometimes I just feel like saying yes.

God Says Yes To Me

– by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

For more information on Kaylin Haught, please click here.

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Poetry sites are bookmarked on my computer and the first thing I do when I wake up is go from one to the other, reading poems. Four per morning, sometimes more. I hardly ever read any poems I like. Why do you read poems you don’t like? asks the man who knows me best, watching me sigh and roll my eyes. Because I have to read a ton of poems I don’t like in order to find one I do like, which is the truth. Maybe one out of a hundred poems will seize me. Even so, one out of a hundred poems adds up. They add up and up and up, to a beautiful tumble of beautiful poems I will keep reading forever. You know what else adds up? Cruel statements add up, and vicious diatribes add up, and chants of lock her up add up, and rallies of falsehoods and hatred add up. But good deeds add up too, damn it, and so do people who fill a hollow no one else can fill, as in this beautiful poem below. Hail to the unsung and underpaid caregivers, for they are the ones who mend the wounds, smooth the sheets, clean the vomit of humanity from the streets and from our souls.

People Who Take Care

     – Nancy Henry

People who take care of people

Get paid less than anybody

people who take care of people

are not worth much

except to people who are

sick, old, helpless, and poor

people who take care of people

are not important to most other people

are not respected by many other people

come and go without much fuss

unless they don’t show up

when needed

people who make more money

tell them what to do

never get shit on their hands

never mop vomit or wipe tears

don’t stand in danger

of having plates thrown at them

sharing every cold

observing agonies

they cannot tell at home

people who take care of people

have a secret

that sees them through the double shift

that moves with them from room to room

that keeps them on the floor

sometimes they fill a hollow

no one else can fill

sometimes through the shit

and blood and tears

they go to a beautiful place, somewhere

those clean important people

have never been.

For more information on Nancy Henry, please click here.

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I’ve been teaching a few free creative writing workshops in various Minneapolis neighborhoods over the last week. It’s a small thing, but it’s something that I can do. In one of the workshops yesterday, fourteen participants sat around a big conference table at a library, each with a name sign propped in front of their notebook. They wrote about someone they knew very well, and then they wrote about a moment in their past, and then they jumped off the fictional cliff and wrote a scene between a conjured person and a conjured object. Everyone read everything they wrote out loud, and we clapped after each reading. Why? Because each reading was beautiful, or funny, or hauntingly sad, or made us catch our breaths in some unexplainable way. In the room was an older gentleman with cerebral palsy; an E.R. nurse from Somalia; a middle-aged man with his young wife, who was in the later stages of early-onset Alzheimer’s and whose three writings were each about her love for her husband; a military veteran; a trans activist; a born-again former felon; a burkha-wearing mother of three; a million-dollar realtor, and more. Everything that the world needs to be better was in that room yesterday, among those disparate people: the willingness to share, the willingness to listen, and the willingness to imagine. Don’t ever tell me we can’t get along. Don’t ever tell me we can’t be generous with each other. Don’t ever tell me we can’t celebrate someone whose life is fundamentally different from ours. I have seen with my own eyes in hundreds of classrooms over dozens of years that Yes, we can.

The Light That Shines When Things End

     – I Wrote This For You

I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it’s about to end.

And if you’re never going to see someone again, it’ll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, “It was nice to have you in my life while I did, good luck with everything that happens after now.”

And maybe if you’re never going to eat at the same restaurant again, it’ll shine and you can order everything off the menu you’ve never tried. Maybe, if someone’s about to buy your car, the light will shine and you can take it for one last spin. Maybe, if you’re with a group of friends who’ll never be together again, all your lights will shine at the same time and you’ll know, and then you can hold each other and whisper, “This was so good. Oh my God, this was so good.”

 

For more information on I Wrote This For You, please click here.

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I was born too late to be a hippie and I grew up in the rural north, not exactly the site of mass protests and marches in the streets (we had hardly any streets). But I remember being a little girl and sitting in the high school cafeteria before elementary school started (my mother was a high school teacher and we sometimes rode to town with her to avoid the school bus horror show) observing the gigantic and intimidating high schoolers and wondering what the black armbands on some of their arms meant. It isn’t easy to give up hope, to escape a dream, says Dorianne Laux in this haunting poem. Nor should it be.

 

Listening to Paul Simon

     – Dorianne Laux

Such a brave generation.

We marched onto the streets

in our T-shirts and jeans, holding

the hand of the stranger next to us

with a trust I can’t summon now,

our voices raised in song.

Our rooms were lit by candlelight,

wax dripping onto the table, then

onto the floor, leaving dusty

starbursts we would pop off

with the edge of a butter knife

when it was time to move.

But before we packed and drove

into the middle of our lives

we watched the leaves outside

the window shift in the wind

and listened to Paul Simon,

his cindery voice, then fell back

into our solitude, leveled our eyes

on the American horizon

that promised us everything

and knew it was never true:

smoke and blinders, insubstantial

as fingerprints on glass.

It isn’t easy to give up hope,

to escape a dream. We shed

our clothes and cut our hair,

our former beauty piled at our feet.

And still the music lived inside us,

whole worlds unmaking us

in the dark, so that sleeping and waking

we heard the train’s distant whistle,

steel trestles shivering

across the land that was still ours

in our bones and hearts, its lone headlamp

searching the weedy stockyards,

the damp, gray rags of fog.

 

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here.








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Once, at a magic show held at night in a converted barn in rural New Hampshire, I watched a girl gasp in amazement as a happy young man in a cape pulled a rabbit from a hat, and then –somehow– made a bird in a cage disappear from the stage and reappear at the back of the room. Did you see that? the girl said to me. That was amazing. She was fifteen at the time, and I remember thinking how beautiful it was that she could still be captivated by magic. Some years later, from her first job, a year spent at the poorest elementary school in the poorest neighborhood of a big city, a job which taxed her spirit to the limit because of the nearly unimaginable suffering her students lived under, she sent me a text. It was “Atten-Dance” day for the fourth-graders, a day on which all the students with good attendance got to stay after school for a dance put on for them by the girl and her colleagues. This is the best day of the year, her text said. My babies —which is what she, at 22, called her students– are so excited. They’re jumping around like the little kids they for once get to be. Like the poem below says, we can make this place beautiful. Even now.



The Good Bones
     – Maggie Smith





Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.







For more information about Maggie Smith, please click here.

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I am so sorry. Especially to the beautiful young people whom I know and don’t know, I am sorry. To my Muslim and Somali, Hmong and Black and Latina/Latino and Asian and LGBTQ students and friends, I am sorry. To my own children, I am sorry. This country and the world have been in hideous places before now –before the end of slavery, before the beginning of civil rights and women’s right to vote and women’s right to sovereignty over their bodies– but from here on out I am stepping it up. I vow to be as kind as I can, whenever I can. To speak up when I see someone being bullied. To call out the perpetrators when I see acts of racism and sexism. To protect the right to a safe and legal abortion for all the young women who, like me when I was a terrified and birth control-using teenager, make that agonizing decision. To listen, no matter the views of the person speaking, so that I can try to connect in even a tiny way, one human heart to another. To put one foot in front of the other for the next four years and for every year after that to make this world a better place.

Tough choosing a poem this week amidst the hours spent hiking, walking, trying to tromp my way into some form of inner calm. More hours on the couch scrolling through my thousands of poems. Searching for certain poets, the ones who bring me comfort because they’re fearless, because they talk about life the way it is, because they use ordinary words to write about ordinary things that in their magic hands turn transcendent and remind me that I’m not in this alone. That I am never alone. That all over this country right now, there are others waking every morning and breathing in and breathing out and reminding themselves that the world has never been easy, that humankind has always been under threat by the few among us who take pleasure in being cruel, in inciting violence, in tearing apart the social fabric because . . . why? because they can, I guess. Yes, we are always under siege by those who would divide us for their own sick pleasure, and also yes, we are always fighting back. Sometimes with harshness, and sometimes with a book that lasts for a lifetime, as in this beautiful poem.

Reading to My Kids

     – Kevin Carey

When they were little I read

to them at night until my tongue

got tired. They would poke me

when I started to nod off after twenty pages

of Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket.

I read (to them) to get them to love reading

but I was never sure if it was working

or if it was just what I was supposed to do.

But one day, my daughter (fifteen then)

was finishing Of Mice and Men in the car

on our way to basketball.

She was at the end when I heard her say,

No, in a familiar frightened voice

and I knew right away where she was.

“Let’s do it now,” Lennie begged,

“Let’s get that place now.”

“Sure, right now. I gotta. We gotta,”

and she started crying, then I started crying,

and I think I saw Steinbeck

in the back seat nodding his head,

and it felt right to me,

like I’d done something right,

and I thought to myself, Keep going,

read it to me, please, please, I can take it.

For more information about Kevin Carey, please click here.

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Driven, impatient and judgmental person that I am, I constantly work to hold myself in check. Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle*, I remind myself. Every time I’m about to walk into a room, a classroom especially, because teachers have enormous power and please, please do not ever let me abuse that power, I recite those words to myself. Be gentle, Alison. Be kind. Keep the lesser angels of your nature in check, because you don’t know the whole story. You will never know the whole story.  

 

A Good Day

     – Kait Rokowski

Yesterday, I spent 60 dollars on groceries,

took the bus home,

carried both bags with two good arms back to my studio apartment

and cooked myself dinner.

You and I may have different definitions of a good day.

This week, I paid my rent and my credit card bill,

worked 60 hours between my two jobs,

only saw the sun on my cigarette breaks

and slept like a rock.

Flossed in the morning,

locked my door,

and remembered to buy eggs.

My mother is proud of me.

It is not the kind of pride she brags about at the golf course.

She doesn’t combat topics like, ”My daughter got into Yale”

with, ”Oh yeah, my daughter remembered to buy eggs”

But she is proud.

See, she remembers what came before this.

The weeks where I forgot how to use my muscles,

how I would stay as silent as a thick fog for weeks.

She thought each phone call from an unknown number was the notice of my suicide.

These were the bad days.

My life was a gift that I wanted to return.

My head was a house of leaking faucets and burnt-out lightbulbs.

Depression, is a good lover.

So attentive; has this innate way of making everything about you.

And it is easy to forget that your bedroom is not the world,

That the dark shadows your pain casts is not mood-lighting.

It is easier to stay in this abusive relationship than fix the problems it has created.

Today, I slept in until 10,

cleaned every dish I own,

fought with the bank,

took care of paperwork.

You and I might have different definitions of adulthood.

I don’t work for salary, I didn’t graduate from college,

but I don’t speak for others anymore,

and I don’t regret anything I can’t genuinely apologize for.

And my mother is proud of me.

I burned down a house of depression,

I painted over murals of greyscale,

and it was hard to rewrite my life into one I wanted to live

But today, I want to live.

I didn’t salivate over sharp knives,

or envy the boy who tossed himself off the Brooklyn bridge.

I just cleaned my bathroom,

did the laundry,

called my brother.

Told him, “it was a good day.”

 

For more information on Kait Rokowski, please click here.

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*Wise words attributed, variously, to Philo of Alexandria or Plato or Ian MacLaren.

My dog is sleeping on the couch right now. We can read each other’s minds; before I get up from this table in a few minutes to go for a run, he will already have jumped down and trotted over to me, knowing I’m about to leave. When I return, he will be waiting at the door to greet me. He doesn’t wake up disturbed like me at the daily news, which even though I don’t watch television and  I avoid certain headlines, I know anyway. It’s in the air, in the invisible waves that connect us to each other and the world. It’s a battle not to give in to the disgust and despair and cynicism and snark that sometimes feels omnipresent and, weirdly, more socially acceptable than hope. Hope is harder, and so is the steadfast work that makes things better. The dog in this beautiful poem reminds me of my own dog. Not everything is bad, he says, in action if not words.

The Leash

     – Ada Limon

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear,

the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,

the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,

that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw

that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s

left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned

orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can

you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek

bottom dry to suck the deadly water up into

your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to

say, Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish

comes back belly up, and the country plummets

into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still

something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.

But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing

like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move

my living limbs into the world without too much

pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight

toward the pickup trucks break-necking down

the road, because she thinks she loves them,

because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud

roaring things will love her back, her soft small self

alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,

until I yank the leash back to save her because

I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,

and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings

high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay

her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.

Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards

the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love

from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe

like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together

peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

 

For more information on Ada Limon, please click here.

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I used to define “sexual assault” in my own head as rape. So, in my own definition, I had never been sexually assaulted. Then I woke up, and took a casual glance back at my life: 1) Fifth grade, waiting with my class to go back in after recess, a classmate reached out in front of everyone and twisted my breast bud as hard as he could. The shock and physical pain were so severe that I almost vomited. I still think about this pretty much every day. 2) In high school, the jocks lined up on both sides of the hallway to rate the girls on a scale of 1-10 as we walked in. 3) At age sixteen, as an exchange student in Portugal on a sardine-can-crowded bus, a man pushed himself against me, ran his fingers up under my skirt and shoved them inside me, all the while laughing and rubbing his face against mine. 4) In college one winter, there were rumors of multiple rapes on campus, never publicized by campus authorities, which had us all uneasy. My solution was to wear a long coat, hulk up my shoulders and stride across campus if I had to be out at night, so that I would be perceived as a strong man. 5) Also in college, a male friend would corner me when he got drunk and grope me while pinning me against the wall with his knee and telling me he couldn’t help himself because I was just so hot. 6) Age 23, I went on a date with a man who yanked my underwear down and from whom I ran away, to find out the next morning that he had preemptively gaslighted me by telling others that it was clear I had very little experience with men and was, sadly, a tease. These are a few small incidents out of a lifetime of incidents, almost all of which I’ve left out,  including the masturbating perves. My experiences are completely run of the mill and common to all my women friends. I’m still grateful that I haven’t been violently raped, and I am sad that I just used the word “grateful” and that I actually feel that way.

Rape Joke

– Patricia Lockwood

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.

OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student — your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends — haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.

For more information about Patricia Lockwood, please click  here.

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