Lesley Wheeler’s poetry collections are The Receptionist and Other Tales; Heterotopia, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; and Heathen. Her poems and essays recently appeared or are forthcoming in Subtropics, Gettysburg Review, Rattle, and Poetry, and she blogs about poetry at www.lesleywheeler.org Wheeler is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
One day even glittery vagabond princes fade into sepia. Images stay: elegant long-necked canvas men keep burning. Charcoal women, naked except for their stockings, remain as vital as ever. And stories stay warm in our mouths: Schiele’s drawing ignited by an outraged judge over a candle flame; Modigliani born under a pile of silver and damask because by law, no… Read more →
Take a walk in the hill’s beard of seeding grasses. Insects rise up with an electric buzz like the cry of an apartment call-button. I am not at home in this body. Further down, near the lake, bullfrogs twang their low strings. Raise my foot over an inch of warm water and tadpoles dash around so frantically I’m… Read more →
If every poet on earth stopped writing right now, forever, what would be lost? Bubbles fall through the water, each containing a choice. This is a test of your artistic commitment. Once they were a long cold drink. Now fountains are ornamental. Who needs this monument? Perhaps lovers, concealing themselves behind white noise in fragrant jardins d’amour. Travelers… Read more →
Deep inside the cave, a red ochre animal gallops across the wall. She painted it to summon food. She painted it to banish nightmare. The painting is a lamp that shines on the maker and sometimes the stranger who wanders into silence with a shiver. It’s all about what you’re not supposed to see: the body’s inner pink. A… Read more →
Sometimes your head is full of wings. Sometimes tender monkeys hover in the foliage. Plush safe you think but the world can be brutal. Both Kahlo and Basquiat spent months in bed after collisions. His mother brought him Grey’s Anatomy. Her mother made a special easel. Soon he was an x-ray. He could render the brain’s wiring… Read more →