bio

Leonore Wilson lives in the wilds of Northern California. Sometimes she doesn't see another human soul for days. Like it or not, she inherited this primitive existence. However, land, no matter how serene and beautiful, comes with a straight jacket of conditions. Thoreau's Walden...ah, he was a wimp! She teaches at a small college, but lately decided to take time off. She has won awards as well as fellowships for her work. Recent fellowships were given by Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts and University of Utah. Her work has been in such magazines as Poets Against the War, Madison Review, Quarterly West, Third Coast, Pedestal, Laurel Review, Pif, DMQ Review, and Unlikely Stories. She is working on finishing two novels. Her poetry manuscript is in the hands of several publishers.

My Country

And what if I witness but do not choose
if I merely drive by, pull back
thinking of the one and only, if I am that
complacent to the woman with the purple bruises
around her neck, scourged neck, crown
of the black and blue. Christ
I see her weeping next to the oversized tattooed
drunk of a man. And what if I choose
not to aid her stalled U-haul, overheated
smoking machine of the underworld, near
where the wild irises bloom their white flags
from the red soil, where the unnamable
general in his nineteenth century bliss
shot one of the last Wappos from paradise.
And what if I choose not to aid her,
an entire life stuffed in the truck's
carapace, what if I drive by
keeping my thumb in my book
because I am terrified, made numb
and dumb as the virgin girl
when the word made flesh entered her,
when the ordinary mud swallow sang,
dove hollowed out, she who was asleep,
daydreaming, preferring the milk of the cathedral,
girl who knew there are blue abrasions
in the meadows, that light could scald;
she who knew men with eyes in their chests,
slobs, dogs, big babies smoking pipes.
What if I drive by, choosing to look
the other way, mother, wife,
because it is spring in my country,
and in spring it is easier to be ignorant, unaccountable,
then what, then who will stop, then who.


["My Country" first appeared in Wine Country: A Literary Companion, Heyday Books]