Escaping Lee Miller
by
Anne Whitehouse
Anne Whitehouse’s poetry collections include Outside from the Inside, Meteor Shower, The Refrain, and Blessings and Curses. She is the author of a novel, Fall Love. Escaping Lee Miller is Anne’s second chapbook with Ethel Zine & Micro Press, following Surrealist Muse, about Leonora Carrington, in 2020.
from Escaping Lee Miller
Lee Miller had a thing for bondage
as long as she had a say in it.
It was a game, like a feat of Houdini,
to see what she could escape.
The Surrealists were all for games
to augment reality, or while it away,
or transform it. The element
of transgression, of danger,
acted on them like an aphrodisiac.
Lee Miller was good at getting out
of things she didn’t want. As a girl,
she got kicked out of every school
her parents sent her. At seventeen,
she sprung out of Poughkeepsie
and landed in Paris, where she got rid
of her chaperone and lived on her own.
In Poughkeepsie again, she fled to New York.
Then Paris, New York, Paris, New York, Egypt.
No place could hold her, and no one could keep her.
She was charming, and she was infuriating,
because even as she escaped, she stayed attached.
In the twenties, in Paris, when she was nineteen
and beautiful, she sought out Man Ray
as the teacher to enable her transition
from model to photographer.
In return for intimacy, she got
the undivided attention of a master.
Man taught Lee everything he knew,
and she was smart and talented enough
to appreciate his investment and come out ahead.
