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 is a writer and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, and other publications. She is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthologies QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Wolfe is the author of four poetry collections: Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems (Pudding House Press); The Green Light (Finishing Line Press); The Uppity Blind Girl Poems (BrickHouse Books), and Love and Kumquats: New and Selected Poems (BrickHouse Books, 2019). Wolfe has been awarded a Puffin Foundation grant and Writers grants from Vermont Studio Center. In 2008, she was a Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow. She is a contributor to the acclaimed LGBTQ paper The Washington Blade.
