A Complete Guide
for Every Branch of
Domestic Life
Margot Wizansky
*from the Enquirer’s Home Book, 1910
If the horse is broken-winded
from moldy hay, you’ll make a ball
of linseed-meal, lard, and Stockholm tar to settle him.
Chicken-keepers, we take a strip
of garden for our fowls.
We shade them with a wattled hurdle.
I sew your clothes and mine,
and do stitchery, lace and rosettes,
honeycombs with a firm steady hand.
As for metal-working, bell-hanging,
white washing--those are the chores
that fall to you.
In winter I’ll gut a bloater for you,
and gently poach it, sauté some seakale.
A snipe, house lamb,
and woodcock in March.
Come summer, you’ll gather
crayfish, net crabs.
In autumn, you’ll shoot wild duck
and ptarmigans and I’ll pick
apricots with skin that feels just like yours.
Margot Wizansky’s chapbook, Wild for Life, was published with Lily Poetry Review Books (2022). Her poems have appeared online and in many journals such as The Missouri Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron, River Styx, and elsewhere. She won two residencies, one with Writers@Work in Salt Lake City and also with Carlow University in Sligo, Ireland. Margot has recently retired from a career developing housing for adults with disabilities. She lives in Massachusetts.