Lesley Wheeler

An Underworld


I stopped my breath for as long as I could 
           in the grit beneath my little brother’s bed,
afraid of my father. Even the dust would 
           betray me if it dared, and what then?
Pupils so flared a kid could hide in there. 
           My mother loved but wouldn’t save us
or didn’t believe there was a passage out.
           My father’s laughter scattered hail. 
His step cracked rifts in the ground.
           So, shadow, what should I have done? 
Words make no shelter, lone or shared. 
           Left him, left them, the darkness says.

---

Map Projections


When my father died, 
I said to my sister, 
I’m sorry I let 
him do that to you. 


           My sister said, No. 
           I wasn’t even on his radar. 
           He didn’t think I 
           was worth it. 
           He aimed for you. 

…

           A peninsula of cabinets
           divided kitchen from dining room. 
           My father sat at one end of the table. 
           In my memory’s seating plan,
           I claimed the furthest
           chair, stranding my sister 
           in range of his hands.


I don’t know why we called
the kitchen peninsula an island.
My mother blockaded herself
behind it with my brother’s highchair,
as if she could save only one. 

… 


Meanwhile my sister, marooned.


It’s as vivid to me as a history book. 


My father slapped her head 
during the hostage crisis, 
after his double martini, and 
under Reagan, dry-drunk 
on the Atkins plan, 
greasy from chewing five 
unsalted burgers naked
and fuming on the plate.


           I can travel back 
           through corridors of shag
           and chart it all: the mock-
           Tudor Styrofoam beams wishing 
           they could support the ceiling, 
           the stink of fried meat. I remember 
           the sting of how he flicked  
           her skull, middle finger snapping 

           past a thumb that pretended 
           to want to restrain it. 
           It hurt more than you’d think. 

…

                                                 
Wait, whose skull? Disorienting.
The truth is a shoreline. It moves.
I wonder which of us he loved enough 
to give latitude to or fix in sight.

…

           I always wanted to live
           on an archipelago. 

…


My pulse still bangs at the dinner hour.
The word island makes me think of my mother,
a compass rose who wheeled off the edge of the map.

 

 

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From the Author: I don’t remember much about writing “An Underworld,” except that most of it came in a rush and the results were hard to revise. Its smallness, though, inspired me to write a more expansive related poem about episodes of violence in my childhood; an asymmetrical pairing feels right for poems about power asymmetries. “Map Projections” was originally a long block of a poem, and someone told me to try more white space. I was irked, at first—I’m usually irked at first when someone tells me what to do—then I thought oh, islands! I turned it into an archipelago of stanzas, and it finally worked.

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