Housewife-Poets

Image by Vicki Whicker

There she is with the coffee
Always the coffee
Bitter

And so much to drink
And drink it she must
After all she paid for it

And to be a poet is to be frugal
To mourn for money as it slips away
On two-dollar cups of coffee

The coffee is important
It sits in judgment
Of the journal
Of the poems
Of the chicken-scratch
Of the demented doodles

See the tiny Poet’s house she lives in
Cluttered
Awful
A falling-down house
The one with the neglected yard

It is the house of an old maid
Or an eccentric
The type of house that
Neighbors whisper of
And small children gravitate to

And inside
There is that oven
That siren
That illegal seductress
Enamel goddess

Barely used for frozen things
Yet patient
As the expanding Universe

Wise as a shaman
Always singing
In a pitch that only children
And Housewife-Poets can hear

About the Poem

The brouhaha surrounding gas stoves/ovens got me writing

About the Author

Vicki Whicker, poet and photographer, is a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective and Bright Hill Press’s Seeing Things Workshop. Her writing credits include Entropy Magazine, Pigeon Review, The Nonconformist, La Presa, 12 Los Angeles Poets and Literary Mama, among others. Her poetry and photography appear in the anthology Seeing Things (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her poetry collection, Caught Before Flight (Woodland Arts Editions) published in 2020.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *