Sister Catherine’s Art Shelves

ISSUE: Spring/Summer 2023

Milk-tack, sugar cubes, cotton balls, chalk;
coffee filters, marshmallows, artificial

cabbage moths; satin ribbon, tape, flour,
crepe doilies, cellophane, silver glitter,

vats and vats of glue; tongue depressors,
bleached shells, paper towels, almond slivers,

plastic forks and knives and spoons, foam
bowls, pearly beads; xeroxed snow-

flakes, wide-eyed sheep, light-bathed crowds
of saints ascending canopies of cloud;

and however much we wanted, whatever
we could take, matte sheets of card stock—

across which we could draw, erase, draw
ourselves—indifferent, vibrant, blank.

Shara Lessley

Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife (Wisconsin UP, 2018), winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues, 2012), and coeditor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades, 2018). A former Stegner Fellow, her awards include an NEA Fellowship, “Discovery”/The Nation prize, Mary Wood Fellowship, and Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship, among others. Lessley’s work appears in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is Editor-at-Large and Associate Nonfiction Editor at West Branch.