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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 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.

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