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.