Make Sure To Wear Comfortable Shoes by Lesley-Anne Evans

October 17, 2023
Poem title: Make Sure To Wear Comfortable Shoes Poet name: Lesley-Anne Evans Poem: The necessity of setting blistered heels once more down hard on an uneven surface that won’t necessarily hold you. The momentum required to move to the next line, and the next stanza—a maze where you pray the minotaur is sleeping or away on vacation. Is this prose? (It can’t be a real poem, can it when it pours and pools without edits?) A poem is a stream that undercuts asphalt. A poem can also be a gathering of rain in tall branches, and a pause before drops fall on you, wandering oblivious, underneath. Writing and walking—every baptism of the road, each small trial of one word then another set in space, synapses burning. End of poem. Credits and bio: Copyright © Lesley-Anne Evans Irish-Canadian Lesley-Anne Evans, is author of Mute Swan, her debut poetry collection from The St. Thomas Poetry Series (Toronto, 2021). Her work appears in The Antigonish Review, Barren, Cascadia Review, Contemporary Verse-2, Ekstasis, Lake (UBCO), Letters (Yale Divinity School), and Presence, among other periodical publications. A meaningful milestone experience occurred in July, 2023, when Lesley-Anne was selected to join a small cohort of poets at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Summer School, Queens University, Belfast—the city where she was born.