LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: SWWIM

  • The Great Pink Sea Snail rides on

    The Great Pink Sea Snail rides on

    During my ridiculously lucky 3-night residency in Miami last week–praise to SWWIM and the Betsy Writer’s Room!–I worked on a multipart poem I started in October. The sequence begins by conjuring a tiny land snail. A brainstorm occurred to me on the sand, because in South Beach you’re basically obligated to do some of your…

  • Stars, luck, and revelations

    Stars, luck, and revelations

    “The Instagram astrologers says big positive changes are coming for me this week!” I yelled from my reading chair to my spouse at his laptop, although the cats seemed interested, too. He said something like “that’s nice, honey,” or maybe just a neutral “mmm” because he was concentrating on the hundredth book of comics scholarship…

  • The knife

    The knife

    At one of the many events I attended this fall, a magazine editor, reflecting on downsides of a generally rewarding job, sighed and said something like “so many bad poems.” What’s hardest for me about selecting poems for Shenandoah is how many good poems I receive, way more than I can accept, given a limited…

  • Harvest (while still sowing)

    Harvest (while still sowing)

    I’ve always loved the idea of a harvest dinner with loved ones as the days get short–celebrating squash, apples, mushrooms, and whatever fall in the region dishes up–but the actuality can be difficult. When I was young, Thanksgivings leaned toward the terrible. My siblings and mother and I felt giddy in 2012 when my right-wing…

  • Snagged in the antlers

    I’ve been dreaming of my mother as a younger woman, the way she looked when I was a child and teenager, although in these dreams, she’s also somehow elderly and dying. The night of the summer solstice, she was sick in bed staring at a crack that had just formed on the ceiling. It looked…

  • Stupid human bodies

    Look at the god, good-looking, how he looks at the ground, willing it real, willing himself to love where he hardly lives, in his stupid human body, an always ailing thing. The good editors at SWWIM published my poem “Energize” this week and I’ve been thinking about late fall 2015, when I composed it. A…