Kathi Wolfe
LYING HERE IN THESE FIERCE PAJAMAS
after E. B. White
I'm stage struck when you glide,
like Grace Kelly checking out
the murder scene without wrinkling
her latest dress from Paris,
through the rear window
of my champagne-soaked dreams.
I don't want to be snowed
under the inelegant ice
of January, the reams
of papers prancing on my desk,
the news of war pounding
like a word worm in my head.
I want to dance with you
in our Cole Porter world
where anything goes except disaster
and the common currency is laughter.
You remind me,
that was another movie,
we're not dressed for it now.
YELLOW TULIPS
When I'm sweaty, like cotton candy
in the seventh inning stretch
of the final game of the World Series,
out-of-tune, like a piano
too drunk to debut in Carnegie Hall,
empty as a soothsayer with no truth,
frightened as glass afraid to shatter,
when the dead yellow tulips remind
me that we will all turn to dust,
I think of you, playing with my hair
three weeks before you died.
The soft white clouds, you said,
will always be there.
Not much comfort. But enough.
TOUCH TONE
for Louis Braille
My fingertips bleed.
I'm on a first date
in hell,
holding hands
with your
cranky-edged dots,
who want
no new members
in their secret society.
Crawling
through your night-writing
to read
"Mary had a little lamb"
is like climbing up
a cliff
barefoot
backwards.
Still,
I must
crack your code
or forget
myself.
Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet in Falls Church, VA. Her freelance journalism and commentary have appeared in The Washington Post, Utne Reader and many other publications. Her poetry has appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, The Potomac Review, Not Just Air (notjustair.org), The Innisfree Poetry Journal (innisfreepoetry.org), Gargoyle, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Kaleidoscope, Disability Studies Quarterly, Ragged Edge Magazine (raggededgemagazine.com), and The Christian Century. In February 2004, Wolfe completed a month-long poetry residency at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. In 2004, Moon Pie Press, a fine-letter press, published a limited edition of her chapbook, Surrealism Before 10 a.m. She has read at the Bethesda, MD, literary festival, the Joaquin Miller Cabin poetry series, the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon series, Iota, and elsewhere.
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