LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: menopause

  • Hawthorns, bogs, & undersongs

    Hawthorns, bogs, & undersongs

    The BurrenSometimes you bring pain along like a walletof funny-colored bills or a mobile phone.Here’s a knotted neck for the Burren. A spirit-fissure to echo the limestone grykes. Karstpavement matches you: riven grays, white lichen,sky pale with tiredness. Stand on a clint and becomeinvisible, perfectly camouflaged by pain.Yet in the watery gaps tiny pink flowers…

  • Stars in my eyes, birds in my belfry

    Stars in my eyes, birds in my belfry

    Just for fun, here are a couple of panels from Jamie Fernandez’s Is This How You See Me?, spotted by Chris Gavaler, my spouse and resident comics scholar. It’s not very often that discussions of menopause occur in the comics. Speaking of hot flashes, here we are in Leo. Leo’s my ascendant sign, I just…

  • Report from hagdom

    I’ve been sending missives from menopause and perimenopause over the last few years, and sometimes they feel like dead letters. Well, almost all poems land softly–but the so-called change of life feels so BIG to me that it feels like there ought to be a much larger body of literature about it. So I was…

  • Why You Should Be Reading About Menopause

    Why You Should Be Reading About Menopause

    You know how obsessions grow on you and into you, like fungal hyphae bursting through carpenter ants’ heads and disseminating spore? I’m currently fixated on fungi, but a few years ago I developed a more explicable obsession with perimenopause and its sequel. Like puberty, this process has major effects on mind and body. I know…

  • Becoming Unbecoming

    My debut novel launches this Friday, May 15th, 2020. Here’s the story of how the book came to be. I was in my late forties in 2015, sending my oldest child off to college and feeling glum about the next phase of my life. Hormonal shifts were not helping. On a walk with my spouse,…

  • Dear poetry professor on submissions (plus dropped balls, tombstones, & “Hap”)

    The New York Times ran a “Working Woman’s Handbook” section in the print edition this Sunday, and I read it from cover to cover, even though it defeated the REASON I get the print edition on Sunday mornings, the whole indulgence-with-a-pot-of-tea-on-the-sofa vibe. The handbook made my adrenaline surge and muscles tighten: “Negotiating While Female,” “Ditch…