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      August 27, 2021The WildSarah Wheeler

      My mother lives in a little yellow cottage
      that rests in the tall shadow of
      Grandfather Mountain. At night,
      she smears peanut butter onto pine cones
      and sets them out on the porch,
      leaving them for the bears
      the way children leave cookies for
      Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
       
      My mother knows that this is a silly
      (some say foolish) thing to do, but she
      will not be told. Something in her
      always longs for more Wild. So she
      stands barefoot in her flannel nightgown
      on her snow-covered stoop
      and calls it to her door. Leaves
      the windows open as she sleeps—even in
      the February chill—and this is how
      I learned.
       
      How I learned to hold my chest wide, an open
      invitation. How to be a refuge
      for all wandering and hungry and sometimes
      wounded, sometimes dangerous
      things—
       
      Once, I pulled a screaming
      baby bunny from the clamped jaws
      of a stray cat—
      (and didn’t I get scratched?)
      and didn’t I sit up all night
      holding it under a lamp
      dabbing warm goat’s milk into
      its little mouth?
      And didn’t I feel the chill, too,
      when its tongue grew cold
      beneath my fingers? When
      its body became still (so still)
      and the little house I built for it
      suddenly turned into a casket?
      And how many times?
       
      How many times did we bring our feral finds
      home—The cats? The dogs? The raccoons
      whose mothers someone had squashed in the road?
      And didn’t we love them? And didn’t they teach us
      that loving meant
      allowing space?
       
      And didn’t we learn not to reach or clasp
      or clamp, but to drop our hands to our sides,
      open cups? To pretend cool indifference
      when they finally came and pressed
      their wet noses into our palms—
      They taught us:
      never jump at love, or else
      you’ll scare it away.
       
      So it only makes sense then
      that when I met a coyote
      of a man along the road, I
      invited him back home. And
      this is what I said to him:
       
      come in, 
      help yourself to everything you want. 
                    stay a while! 
      or don’t— 
       
      (but underneath my breath
      this is what I prayed:
      God, make my heart 
      an 
      unclenched 
      fist— 
       
      let me be 
      an open 
      cup—but 
       
      please God, 
      make him 
      drink.) 
       
      How
      many times?
      Too many
      times.
       
      Because this
      is the lesson I always choose to forget:
      you can make an untamed thing
      want you, even
      trust you,
      even
      love you, but
      you cannot make him
      stay.

      from #72 – Summer 2021

      Sarah Wheeler

      “I was nearly eight years old in the summer of ’98 when my parents decided to uproot our family of ten from the suburbs of Virginia Beach and plant us on the side of a mountain in rural North Carolina. Growing up deep in the woods—surrounded by animals and hills and trees—so much of my early life consisted of simply taking in the natural world around me. The physical land I grew up on has informed so much of how I see and how I move in the world, so, as a writer, landscape and natural elements feature heavily in the work I create. As an adult, I’ve lived across the United States—in large cities and small towns and everything in between—but regardless of where I find myself, I am always striving to hold true to that unhurried pace of the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

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