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Blind Ambition

By Kathi Wolfe

I'm in my seat,
averting my eyes,
those funhouse mirrors,
from the numbers
swimming across the blackboard.

Figures are slimy
monsters who slobber
all over your picnic
basket on the beach.
I grab my white cane
and run away from them.

"If you were Helen Keller,"
my teacher says,
"you'd get a gold
star in arithmetic."
Her voice sounds
like she's just
met Prince Charming.
"You would be a perfect
young lady," she says.

I don't want
to make friends
with fractions
or skip rope
with multiplication tables.

I want to chase
lightning bugs,
pull my brother's hair,
open up all the presents
before the company
comes on Christmas morning.

I don't want to be any
Goody-Two-Shoes Helen.
I want to baptize
my new sneakers
in the mud.

Added: Monday, July 14, 2014  /  From "The Green Light" (Finishing Line Press, 2013). Used with permission.
Kathi Wolfe

Kathi Wolfe (1952 - 2024) was a writer and poet. Her work appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and other publications. She was a contributor to the groundbreaking anthologies QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Her books of poetry are The Porpoise in the Pink Alcove (2023), Love and Kumquats: New and Selected Poems (2019), The Uppity Blind Girl Poems (2015, winner of the Stonewall Chapbook competition), The Green Light (2013), and Helen Takes the Stage: the Helen Keller Poems (2008). Wolfe was awarded a Puffin Foundation grant and Writers grants from Vermont Studio Center. In 2008, she was a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow. She was a regular contributor to the acclaimed LGBTQ paper The Washington Blade, and was a twice a finalist in the DC Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists annual awards for her series “Queer, Crip and Here,” her profiles of disabled and queer leaders.

Image Description: Kathi Wolfe sits in a chair, which is positioned with its back facing forward. One of her hands holds the chair's back and her face rests in the other hand. Her head is tilted downward. Her light and dark gray hair is worn in loose curls. She wears a denim jacket and glasses.

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