I Was Just Frosted

By Susan Wheeler b. 1955 Susan Wheeler

Thanks, Ray, this is just what the doctor ordered.

No, you never see me have one with olives—your father likes

olives but I can’t stand them.

No, cocktail onions are just picked small. Turn that down, Dan.

Avocados, toothpicks. Coleus, root sprawl.

The diffident glints of a late-day sun, rays

splintered by leaves: they shake and, in their

shaking, streak the light. Transparent murk

of glasses at the glass.

Would you move just one inch over? There. The light was in my eye.

Source: meme (University of Iowa Press, 2012)

Biography

Poet and writer Susan Wheeler earned a BA at Bennington College and did graduate work in Art History at the University of Chicago. Her first poetry collection, Bag o' Diamonds (1993), won the Norma Faber First Book Award. The Village Voice Literary Supplement described that book as displaying “limber intelligence and visual wit ... with influences including John Berryman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and the Language poets;” . . .

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