Forecasts Can Be Invocations
Snow, vote down that grass.
Snow, hush the root-shifted
vehemence of sidewalk slabs.
Please bring your storm watch.
Your vortex. Your crystal.
Your level. Your holy knack
for flake and stick and blanket.
Pile and pile on transmission lines.
Snow, fall among us and
in my bothered mind. I’m calling
you, snow, and beginning to wonder
if supercool silence is your reply.
Harrowing
When I tender cash for shiny baby turnips,
the farmer steps back, afraid. The sky looks
plush, but softness is non-essential.
The foodbank begs for volunteers. I take a shift,
strain my back, retreat to stare at a calendar
washed white as a vegetable the root of whose name
is revolution. The owners of closed stores deadhead
pansies to prettify unpeopled streets
as people sicken, refusing to save or be
saved. These days are like, what even are they like?
Ruptured soil. Ruin. Meanwhile, bulbs mull
their underground life, how it sharpens them.
Lesley Wheeler is the author of the hybrid memoir Poetry’s Possible Worlds, the novel Unbecoming, and five books of poetry, most recently The State She’s In. Her poems and essays appear in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, Poets & Writers, and Guernica, and her work has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, and the Sewanee Writers Workshop. She is poetry editor of Shenandoah.
Read “The South,” a Letter to America poem by Lesley Wheeler appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by congerdesign, courtesy Pixabay.
