LESLEY WHEELER

Tag: poetry

  • Poetic housekeeping

    The main piece of housekeeping wisdom my mother passed down to me was just make it LOOK clean. If the counter is wiped down, people will admire your kitchen. They’ll never know about the dust under the fridge or even see the crumbs on the floor. Was the family home immaculate? Rarely. Did the below-eye-level debris matter?…

  • Crazed poet-parent launches daughter and book

    Now my daughter is off in radioland–away at college but constantly present in my imagination, and intermittently present through texts and posts. A message with cheerful emoji has such an instant calming effect on my blood pressure–it’s amazing that when I went to Rutgers, I could only communicate with my family once a week or…

  • Women on the radio

    Broadcast, by Zayneb Allak It’s about loneliness. A woman from Birmingham tells us about the time she was lonely. When I left Birmingham the Bull Ring was still ashen. I remember it in the slush: a lady in a pink and gold sari with a grey anorak over the top dragged blue and white plastic…

  • Elephant blessing

    On Sunday afternoon I took a bubble bath–I know, tough life–during which I was visited by an apparition. My spouse and kids say I overheated myself, and I did emerge flushed bright-red and a little dizzy, but I swear I spent that half-hour with an elephant made of bubbles. This wasn’t just a heap of…

  • So many mountains

    I am very glad I attended “Writing the Rockies” to discuss poetry and place with Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Tom Cable, Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, and many others. Getting there and back involved three flights each way, as well as some mild altitude sickness and a chagrined recognition that I’m too bad at sleeping in the…

  • Let us hold hands and look

    In a Bath Teashop, by John Betjeman “Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another — Let us hold hands and look.” She such a very ordinary little woman; He such a thumping crook; But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels In the teashop’s ingle-nook. I have it on…

  • Why Edna St. Vincent Millay ate herbs in Dorset

    Most of the female poets I read as a young woman had no children, or one. They steered clear of sexual relationships with men or, not having access to birth control, sought abortions. This fact had a terrible fascination for me in my early twenties, especially since the zero-or-one rule also held among so many…

  • Lines Composed in Bath a Few Days After Visiting Tintern Abbey

    Lines Composed in Bath a Few Days After Visiting Tintern Abbey and Also Nottingham, Coleford, Netheravon, and Miscellaneous Places Viewed Accidentally Because We Forgot to Reserve a Car with Sat-Nav and Had No Map. June 22, 2015. Twenty-six years have passed!–two advanced degrees, two mortgages, two beauteous teens raised to height if not to wisdom…

  • Flashing through spacetime

    In theory, in two days, all this year’s schoolwork will be in recycling bins on the curb, I’ll be the parent of a rising high schooler and a rising first-year college student, and we’ll all be flying towards an English city full of ancient Roman ruins where my spouse is already teaching a fiction-writing class…

  • Doctored

    The latest Wheeler-Gavaler time-travel expedition: a Virginia bed and breakfast presided over by a former patient of Dr. William Carlos Williams. Ten or twelve years ago, my mom came to stay with the kids as Chris and I, feeling desperate from too much work and too much toddler-chasing, retreated to Warm Springs for a weekend.…