reflection toward ‘John’s Table’ (Piżama Press 2026), poems by Lesle Lewis

JOHN’S TABLE
Lesle Lewis, poems
Piżama Press (2026)

Again the world is much worse than I remember. Who can I talk to, walk toward, now that my room’s been taken from me and given to a door? In this inner, in that, the poet Lesle Lewis is still the author of John’s Table. Each place I leave becomes a church. I leave early because there is something inside of my hand that has never been held. I’ve read John’s Table just this morning and am convinced some not all ghosts got together to straighten their story of paradise might the angels let them be. What I mean is that there is a surplus of theater goers secretly abandoned by those called to build homes for extras. Lewis writes ‘this is but this is too’. I have been trying to write all morning in this order: sadness, body, yesterday. Someone here is in the hospital and they are doing the third math of loss and they feel small but are even smaller in the accident footage sent to them secondhand. Lewis is a poet of the unguessed whose verse presses for calm and for the missed vein. Whose voice records itself twice being comforted by the eldritch curiosities of its normalcy. What comes first, sure, if you can predict without knowing what comes next. If you can find it within another to do so, get this book. Lewis wrote the whole thing.