Chelsea Wagenaar

Housewife

Says the wife to the house,
we are not together. You have no heart
at all, no percussive blunder to ruin you.
Your rooms are cool and languid,
your doors open and close,
even the knives are stacked like kindling.
You give back everything you take.
The cacti peer from their clay pots
like waterless periscopes.
Nothing in me is where it belongs.

Chelsea Wagenaar is the 2013 winner of the Philip Levine Prize and her manuscript, Mercy Spurs the Bone, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared or been accepted recently in Plume, Mid-American Review, North American Review, and TriQuarterly. She is a doctoral fellow at the University of North Texas and lives in Denton, Texas, with her husband, fellow poet Mark Wagenaar.