By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying 
compost out back,
I’m stopped 
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald 
on your lower wing. 

I hear her say, 
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting 
them differently?  
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop 
without any makeup,
and the way its face 
comes to a point 

at its delicate chin: 
really quite special.
To me, the mantis 
just stares, nods, 
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant 
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac 
is hard as cement to protect 
the eggs from heat, cold, 
even the occasional maternal 
appetite for its young.

---

Emily Wheeler is a freelance copy editor who lives on Cape Cod and is an MFA graduate of Warren Wilson in 2001. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, New Ohio Review, Orion, Massachusetts Review, among others. Formerly (from 1997 to 2009) she lived in the former East Germany. Since moving back, she has attended a weekly workshop with Alan Feldman through the Framingham Public Library.