Alison McGhee's Blog, page 4

My Tattoo Story: Kim

Kim, Wisconsin

My tattoo is a crescent moon. I have a past with my mother and family, and my tattoo symbolizes new beginnings and the making of dreams into reality.

My Tattoo Story: Jacob

Jacob, Los Angeles

My very first tattoo was what started my career. It was a determined step forward into a new life and a step toward new goals. It was a statement of commitment, whether or not I knew how far I would have to go. All of my tattoos inspire me to try to be a better person and are constant reminders to me to keep working hard and to never give up. And occasionally they make me feel like a super hero.

The question marks and bass clefs came together on the back of a book while I was on the road supporting America’s Got Talent runner-up Cas Haley on his first big tour. “Bass clefs for what I do, and question marks for the inevitable uncertainty of what it is that I do,” is what I told myself. It was something that I kept drawing on night after night after our gigs. By the time we got back home I had finished the pattern and blew a good part of my paycheck on getting it tattooed onto my self. Through the course of my career, this first tattoo has become my business logo and shows up on my website, my business cards, it’s inlaid on the front of two of my electric basses, and it’s even on the front of my first record. Don’t be surprised to see it on t-shirts soon!

 

Poem of the Week

I wrote this poem seventeen years ago, after watching one of my daughters standing on a stool at the kitchen sink. A few things have changed in those years: that daughter and her brother and sister have grown up, I’m happy with blonde hair and I’d settle for an eight-minute mile. But everything else still holds. My bargain with the planets remains the same.

Bargain

     – Alison McGhee

The newspaper reports that at twilight tonight

Venus and Jupiter will conjoin

in the southwestern sky,

a fist and a half above the horizon.

They won’t come together again for seventeen years.

What the article does not say is that Mercury, the

dark planet, will also be on hand.

He’ll hover low, nearly invisible in a darkened sky.

I stare out the kitchen window toward the sunset.

Seventeen years from now, where

will I be?

Mercury, Roman god of commerce and luck,

let me propose a trade:

Auburn hair, muscles that don’t ache, and a seven-minute mile.

Here’s what I’ll give you in return:

My recipe for Brazilian seafood stew, a talent for

French-braiding, an excellent sense of smell and

the memory of having once kissed Sam W.

Then I see my girl across the room.

She stands on a stool at the sink,

washing her toy dishes and

swaying to a whispered song,

her dark curls a nimbus in the lamplight.

The planets are coming together now.

Minute by minute the time draws nigh for me to watch.

Minute by minute my child wipes dry her red

plastic knife, her miniature blue bowls.

Mercury, here’s another offer, a real one this time:

Let her be.

You can have it all in return,

the salty stew, the braids, the excellent sense of smell

and the softness of Sam’s mouth on mine.

And my life. That too.

All of it I give for this child, that seventeen years hence

she will stand in a distant kitchen, washing dishes

I cannot see, humming a tune I cannot hear.

 

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@alisonmcghee

 

 

My Tattoo Story: Siobhan

Siobhan, London

My tattoo story begins in sadness and ends in happiness. Five years ago my partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We thought he had only a short time to live. At one point, early into the shock of it all, he said to me in passing, “You’re a shooting star.” It was such a beautiful thing to say, and so surprising to me, because I don’t think of myself that way. But more than that, the idea that he had said this to me in the midst of what he was coping with made me think, Okay, I can do this. I can be strong. And I got this tattoo on my forearm to remind me of what he’d said. He survived the cancer –we are so lucky–and I treasure my tattoo.

My Tattoo Story: Dennis

Dennis, Houston

I just published a book titled “The Play’s the Thing,” aimed at young adults, with the goal of making Shakespeare something that you want to read instead of have to read. Shakespeare’s plays have been incredibly meaningful to me, and I decided to commemorate the end of the project with two tattoos.

The first is from Henry IV, Part One. Falstaff, reluctant to go to war, says, instead, “Give me life.” The second is from The Winter’s Tale, in which Leontes, convinced his wife has been fooling around with his best friend and certain that his newborn daughter is not his, orders Antigonus to take the child to a remote place and abandon her there. Which Antigonus does, but after he leaves her, the audience hears hunting horns and barking dogs, which leads to the greatest stage direction ever: “Exit pursued by a bear.” (He’s eaten off stage.)

So on one arm, there’s give me life. On the other, an acknowledgment that when you least expect it, you can get eaten by a bear.

My Tattoo Story: Kim

Kim, Utah

This tattoo is on my right shoulder. I’m a writer, and this is how I view what I do. I bring words to life. I let them leap off the page and become their own creatures.

My Tattoo Story: Liz

Liz, Seattle

My parents literally have my back. My mom and I got matching tattoos a few years ago — roses, because Rose is her middle name. I’d said I might go for it on Facebook, and the next time she visited me in Seattle, we both went for it!

And on my dad’s birthday, November 22, in 2014, I had the first of three sessions on a sunflower/dahlia tattoo. Sunflowers were his favorite flower (he loved Van Gogh!), and I’d been wanting this tattoo for a long time. On that same birthday, he was in intensive care after surgery for the cancer that took his life five months later. I’m grateful he got to see my sunflowers — something permanent can be very comforting.

 

 

My Tattoo Story: Heather

Heather, New York City

I loved this line from Song of Myself by Walt Whitman as soon as I read it in a Romantic Literature class in college. I carried it around in my pocket for ages, thinking how it captured my whole life philosophy so well in just a few words. (The whole line is Do I contradict myself? Very well. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.) And I had the idea to tattoo it onto my forearm. But the aesthetics never quite came through for me, because choosing a font was impossible. I knew whatever I chose I’d end up hating in a year or two. I was talking with a good friend about it, and he said, “Why not get it in Walt Whitman’s handwriting?” And it was the aha moment I’d been waiting for. I scanned the internet looking for the right manuscript pages. Turns out they didn’t exist, but I was able to cobble the words together from a few separate sources. (If you look closely, you can see that “multitudes” changes style in the middle…it gets messier at the end, because it came from two entirely different words from different poems written years apart.) The artist was Michelle Tarantelli at Saved Tattoo in Willliamsburg. I admired the nuance she was able to get in her black and white art, and knew she’d be able to capture the feeling of a fountain pen.

Poem of the Week, by David Kirby

 

There’s a video somewhere in my house, laboriously taken on a huge VHS camcorder and then laboriously transferred years later to a cd, of a Rope Power competition at my children’s elementary school. Rope Power is a compilation of incredible feats of jump ropery –synchronized jump roping, trick jump roping, speed jump roping– practiced for weeks and months on end.  At the completion of Rope Power there’s a performance that all can attend. Loud music. Team t-shirts. Scads of children wildly jumping to the gasps and applause of the audience. Toward the end of my home video the gym clears for a special performance by an ace jump roper, who enters with one leg wrapped around his neck, jump-roping on the other. At one point he may do a sort of flip-thing while still jumping. It’s not clear, because at that point in the video the camera suddenly jostles and you can hear me yell (having just realized it), “Holy shit! That’s my son!” There are many reasons why I love this poem, and the line But I also wanted to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your right hand and then jump through with your other leg is one of them.

 

Taking It Home to Jerome

     – David Kirby

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was

always urging his listeners to “take it on home to Jerome.”

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it

didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all

we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

do good, and find work that fulfills you. But I also wanted

to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your

right hand and then jump through with your other leg.

Everything else was to come, everything about love:

the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,

all hearts are broken. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem,

I feel as though I’m operating that crusher that turns

a full-size car into a metal cube the size of a suitcase.

At other times, I’m just a secretary: the world has so much

to say, and I’m writing it down. This great tenderness.

 

For more information about David Kirby, please click here.

My Tattoo Story: Erin

Erin, Illinois

My dad passed away last year suddenly. My sister and I were devastated and decided to do tribute tattoos for him on our right wrists. My original idea was to copy a poster he had made in the garage in his handwriting. It was a Chevy Symbol with the Words 1 HOT VET. He restored Corvettes as a hobby and I came up with the specialized plate for the 1962 (he also restored a 1958) which was 1HTVET. However, after thinking about it, I wasn’t really crazy about having to explain why my wrist says “1 Hot Vet” on it. So, luckily, my sister was going to do a poppy with his signature as the stem. I fell in love with her idea. My dad  served in the Air Force during Vietnam, and at the time of his death was the Commander of the VFW Post in Bloomingdale, IL. Being a Veteran was very important to him.  Poppies are a symbol of remembering our Veterans. My Dad is obviously my favorite Veteran. Finding his signature for the stem was not as easy as one might think, but we got it. In the end my sister also changed her mind and went with just his signature. This is by far the tattoo that gets the most compliments.