Tyler Robert Sheldon
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA
tyrsheldon@gmail.com

The leather patches
on the tweed elbows
of the brown blazer
from the simpler sixties
when my grandfather

taught English classes
at the storied college
where my parents met

and where decades later

I took English classes
now rub my own elbows,
lapels just a little wide
on this still-sharp brown blazer
as I teach English classes
seven hundred miles south,
and I whisper that I hope
it is enough, and I breathe
and I push up my glasses,

my grandfather gone now
seven months, who made
teaching seem so easy,
and I undo the button
on the blazer, take a seat,
and my students open books,
and we carry on the legacy.

Author Bio

Tyler Robert Sheldon has seven poetry collections including Everything is Ghosts (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and When to Ask for Rain (Spartan Press, 2021), a Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist. He is Editor-in-Chief of MockingHeart Review and Poetry Co-Editor of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Pop Culture and Pedagogy, and his work can be found in Dialogue, The Los Angeles Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and other places. He earned his PhD at LSU and his MFA at McNeese State University, and he lives in Baton Rouge.