LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: sweet

  • Dreaming

    Deferred Action   Look at the mountain, find my boots, abandon walls, look at the mountain. It’s all I do. The president tweets DACA is dead while the magnolia publishes other news: the future will be pink. Whom should I listen to? Beets for lunch. Do not think of my father, who loved them, as […]

  • Practicing Hope

    I’ve never had much talent for hope, and what hope I’ve managed to summon tends to get squashed. It’s a feeling I’ve learned to distrust. Yet widespread public outrage at police assaults to Black lives and dignity: it springs from that four-letter-word. Protests and anger, imply at least some tiny spark of faith that the […]

  • It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall

    …The dark threw its patches down upon me also, Walt Whitman wrote in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Nearly as often as he reflects on his own tingling senses, Whitman, it turns out, writes about distance and solitude, sometimes expressing pain about it and reaching for touch across impossible gaps. “It avails not, time nor place–distance avails […]

  • The ending’s beginning

    One cheerful thing about bare trees is the omen of changed rhythms: the hard work of fall is coming to fruition, with dream-time ahead. Two more weeks of teaching, then I hope I’ll finish making decisions about the terrific poems lingering in Shenandoah‘s inbox. Editor-in-Chief Beth Staples is frantically gearing up to relaunch that magazine […]

  • Feeling good?

    No, of course you’re not–the world’s a mess, and by cruising social media right now, you’re basically meeting the sewage face-first. So read some poems. My “Feeling Good,” about dumb pleasures, is up at Sweet. Bonus: follow the link in my bio to the National Zoo’s Panda Cam. Furry naps, bamboo-munching, and art. If you’ve got […]