Stadler Center Writers Series

Betsy Wheeler
11th Annual Drew Darrow
Memorial Poetry Reading

Tuesday, March 19, 2013
7 p.m., Bucknell Hall

Co-sponsored by the Writing Center

 

Betsy Wheeler is the author of the poetry collection Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room, and Start Here, a poetry chapbook. Her poems have appeared in notnostrums, Bat City Review, Forklift Ohio, The Journal, and elsewhere. From 2006-2008, she was the Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University. She earned her MFA in poetry from The Ohio State University in 2006. Currently, she serves as editor of the limited-edition poetry chapbook publisher Pilot Books, and Managing Director of the Juniper Summer Writing Institutes.

The Drew Darrow Memorial Reading Series honors the memory of Drew Darrow, a 1986 Bucknell graduate. A student employee of Bucknell's Writing Center, Darrow later worked as an actor in New York City. He died in 1997.

 

 

---

 

Betsy Wheeler

Buffalo Church

 

By and by the sound of women's singing presses its gentle knees to my ears.

By the river they wanted to lead me.

Past the groundswell; little homes stuffed into hillsides.

The silence between high-notes was scary-scary.

The air terrarium-still, or stuck like jellyfish poison slowly sewing its way through the ocean's
deep breezes.

Pioneers no doubt would have fled.

But look at us standing here, remembering 1773 as a year of great darkness; the foreman all
broken up about something or other, his hands steamy and sad, brushing away brown
rivulets of sweat.

Flung into thirst, we ride through past and present all at once.

Church me, you say. Church me the hell out of here.

And I will.

Replace my heart with stone and I will.

I will fling me, church you, toward that light that stands a mile to the north.