02-01-2023

​

Kathi Wolfe​

​

HAPPY HOUR

 

Seeing is a nightmare for the blind,

Uppity says, sipping a beer

at the Funhouse Pub. I must be dreaming,

she thinks, a roach

is doing the breast stroke in my glass!

The bartender’s nose hairs twitch.

Her polo shirt is Pepto-Bismol colored!

There goes my fantasy of romance.

 

A woman with smoke-stained teeth

sits next to Uppity, tapping

“what pimps read” on her iPad.

Uppity looks at the ceiling to avoid

going there.

 

Am I getting chubby? Uppity averts

her gaze from the bar’s green, moldy walls.

Am I going gray at 22? Would I kiss

anyone with zits? Or less than perfect abs?

 

Uppity munches pistachios, swigs more beer,

and plants her gold stilettos firmly on the ground.

Seeing isn’t for the faint of heart, she says,

I’m not ready for my close-up.

 

MIND'S EYE

 

If I were Queen of the World,

ruling with my Royal Smart Phone,

Bluetooth in tiara, walking

my besotted, blue-blood dogs,

regally motioning to my worshipful

subjects to stop curtsying,

only my bejewelled cane

would dig its way

into the tunnel of your vision.

 

If I won the Nobel Prize for cracking

the passwords of the dead,

only my encrypted, blinkered eyes

would register in your retinas.

 

If Sabrina and I were making love,

nymphs on the loose in the mid-day sun –

clothes, purses mindlessly abandoned

on the grass – only my blind

gaze would meet your mind’s eye.

 

SCENTSSPEAKEASY.COM: BLOGSPOT

 

Dear Editor,

You wonder how, I, sightless, can compare

a warm-blooded, full-bodied

fragrance to a Rubens or liken

a wild, disheveled beer

to Dennis Hopper biking

in a pot-filled haze.

I should take up piano-tuning, you insist.

 

Tin-eared scribe, your vision

blinds you. Can you see

if a beer tastes like rubies

or smells like unwashed hair?

Unhitched from eyes, I devour secrets.

Pickled, mango chutney with a touch

of papaya is my latest fave.

As a scientist maps genes,

I decode aromas, divine spirits.

Yours,

Uppity

​

-from The Uppity Blind Girl Poems (BrickHouse Books, 2015), winner of the Stonewall Prize, selected by Spring 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor, Sheila Black

​

Kathi Wolfe’s collections include Love and Kumquats (BrickHouse Books, 2019) and The Uppity Blind Girl Poems (BrickHouse Books, 2015), winner of the Stonewall Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times and other publications. Wolfe was a 2008 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellow. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem “Tasting Braille” was the Poetry Foundation Poem of the Day in 2021, and her poem “Mind’s Eye” is part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Collection. Wolfe is a contributor with The Washington Blade, the acclaimed LGBTQ+ paper. She won a 2023 Dateline Award from the Society of Professional Journalists’