Some links to writing online

"Stop Motion": Harper's

I drove from Madison back to St. Louis, took the usual exit from the freeway, and got lost.  There were so many roads.  All of them were gray. 

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/10/stop-motion-sharon-wahl-everything-flirts/

"Helen Jo": Action, Spectacle

My mother does not have dementia.  But she wishes she did.  She yearns for the blank, the absence: of responsibility, of action, of effort.  Of decisions.  What to keep.  What to let go of, forever. 

https://www.action-spectacle.com/winter-2023-part-i/wahl

"Everything Flirts": Woven Tale Press

But as always, I have gone for the possibility of accidental touch.  It's what I have for a sex life these days, an eroticism of highly magnified brief contacts: rubbing elbows at talks and in theaters, brushing hands while passing books or papers or plates of food, pressing thighs if I squeeze onto a bench where there is not quite room. 

https://www.thewoventalepress.net/2022/04/19/the-first-night-out/

"The Calculus of Felicity": The Iowa Review

So many people complain that they can’t find a person to love.  But what do they do about it?  I used to sit alone in my apartment thinking about all the other people sitting alone in their apartments.  A map of the town with tentative hearts marked in pink, several to a block.  Hello?  Hello, are you there?  If only they could hear us, the hearts think in their simple straightforward way.  They know what they want. 

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/id/15037/

"The Pea": Cafe Irreal

http://cafeirreal.alicewhittenburg.com/wahl.htm

“Erotic Sufferings: Autobiography of Red and Other Anthropologies”: The Iowa Review

I have been a devoted reader of Anne Carson for several years now, and when I saw her novel Autobiography of Red in a bookstore last spring, I bought it immediately.  I left the bookstore and went to the nearest cafe to drink espresso and read, as that is what I do with books I am preparing the love. 

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/id/21129/

"Tractatus Logico-Eroticus": The Iowa Review

Just as there are no love potions, there are no love arguments: there are no deductions from which love follows as a necessary conclusion. 

And yet, the feeling in me believes that if it tells you enough, it will pass itself on to you.  No matter that we know differently, even that saying what you feel is not possible.  It has come to believe that these are not just words but word-feelings, not an account of the facts of my feelings but particles lightly fixed to this page, floating things light as dust that might encounter you directly. 

https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/iowareview/article/id/16592/