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Love at First Sight

By Kathi Wolfe

In an elevator trapped
between the fifteenth and sixteenth
floor of her apartment building,
Sunday morning, Elizabeth, her cane
in one hand, coffee and bagels
in the other, just in from the deli,
met Sabrina and her poodle Toto.

Maybe it was Toto dancing
like a flying monkey
around Elizabeth’s cane, the wind roaring
through the elevator shaft like a twister
barreling down on Kansas, Sabrina’s
pomegranate scented hair, or Elizabeth’s
ruby red flip-flops.  Calling loudly
for help, pressing the emergency button,
needing to pee, they were headed toward Oz.

A week later, Elizabeth and Sabrina, in bed
followed their own Yellow Brick Road,
dreaming of rainbow ballads and Wizard blues.

“Will she have red or white?”
the bartender asked Sabrina
as she and Elizabeth sat,
holding hands at the Tin Man Pub.
She’ll have an Old-Fashioned,”
Elizabeth told the server.

“Elizabeth,” murmured Sabrina.
“Call me Uppity,” she said, “I’m the door
that won’t stay closed, the spy who cracks
the code.  No wicked witch will melt me
here with my sweetie in the Emerald City.” 

Added: Friday, July 10, 2015  /  From "Uppity Blind Girl," (Brickhouse Press, 2015). 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.

Other poems by this author