LESLEY WHEELER

Author: Lesley Wheeler

  • Prove or disprove and salvage if possible

    Both your children will be away, people said, thus you will have a productive summer. In honor of my younger child, who is studying number theory for six weeks straight, let’s do the math. On the plus side: Cooking, cleaning, shopping, and laundry are far easier and cheaper. (I cannot BELIEVE how much less money…

  • Not fleeing

    When I was eleven, I started to plot my escape. Financial independence seemed like the prerequisite, but the 50 cents an hour I earned babysitting weren’t going to take me far. So, baby steps. I started by purchasing my own shampoo and toothpaste, keeping them separate from the family stuff. I figured I’d gradually work…

  • #RedHen

    You’d Better Believe These Rhymes Are Slant Inspired by the co-owners and staff of the Red Hen Restaurant This sonnet politely requests the entire Trump administration to leave the establishment. It’s the seizing of children from migrant parents, the cages and proposed internment camps, that curdle the cream and knock the meter wobbly. I lack…

  • Paternity suit

    Father’s Day used to be a hard one. When my father was alive, I knew he wanted to be fussed over, but he was an unpredictably mean-spirited person who’d praise my intelligence one minute and mock me the next for my unattractiveness, my career choices, or my politics–and he was doing the same to my…

  • Hundred-year nap

    For the last week, I’ve lived in the land of the long blink. We arrived home eight days ago from the aforementioned intense trip to Europe, and I dutifully took sunlit walks to reset my body clock, swallowed melatonin at the appointed hours, and vigorously swept out my email inbox–begone, reference letters and peer review!–while…

  • Venus/ dodo

    I didn’t even know the Venus of Willendorf inhabited Vienna’s Natural History Museum when deciding to spend our last afternoon in the city there. My son was weary of paintings, so while Madeleine and Chris headed to the Leopold Museum, Cam and I staggered through flocks of taxidermied rare and extinct animals. The museum was…

  • Current weather and forecast for the Confederacy

    I’m often proud of my brainy, big-hearted students and colleagues, and I’m occasionally even proud of an administrator–when I hear, for instance, that someone deployed funds to help my advisee get through a crisis. Wealthy small liberal arts colleges can be very good places to work and study. And in ways I did not expect…

  • My mother as live-in nurse, 1962

      Numismatics, 1962 Strange to feel inferior, but that was the job of live-in European servants: to confer shine for a pittance. English nurses, Scottish maids, Estonian women doing laundry, German POWs pruning roses. Out through glitter, back to the dock. Mrs. Anthony motored around town in a humble Ford wagon, but in her garage,…

  • May the river/ remember you

    “In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Bryan Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, says in “A Lynching’s Long Shadow” by Vanessa Gregory. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that…

  • That’s why they call it a practice (NaPoWriMo Day 29)

    Threads Meditation pisses me off. All that non-striving time on the floor, therapist-prescribed, noticing the rope of my breath swinging up and down, ringing me like a shivered bell, adds up to another chore I must perform and I have a lot of them— twisted muscles to lengthen, children who need the brushed-hand of a…