Kathi Wolfe

Two-hearted

“You look like a boy,” the child at the table next to me at the diner, hisses at me, “you
don’t smell pretty like a girl.”  He’s a tow-headed
tot – out of a squeaky-clean laundry ad.  Yet, his hiss fills me with
dread.  Will this tot sever my head if I don’t smell like girly soap?                                               

“Tommy,” his father says, “say you’re sorry!  Or no onion rights.”  “It’s weird,” the Dad
tells me, “Onion rings are his favorite thing.”  If

only that were the weird thing.  The little boy’s venom batters my bones, an apology is
bartered for onion rings. 

What monster has severed Tommy’s head?  Yet, my own severed
head can’t deny its sins.  When I was five, I laughed at a fat

lady.  At nine, I made fun, behind his back, of my uncle
with the high, girly voice.  Now I’m a two-hearted twin.  I

want to swagger like a guy chasing babes – to be a girl
at a cotillion batting eyes.  No matter how savory, I
won’t eat onion rings again. Or bite into an apology.

Copyright 2021 by Kathi Wolfe

Writer’s Statement:

My poem “Two-hearted” uses words and phrases from two of my poems “Tasting Braille” and “Love Calls,” and from The New York Times article “Review: ‘Hemingway’ Is a Big Two-Hearted Reconsideration.”  The article is about a PBS documentary on Ernest Hemingway.  “Tasting Braille” was published in “Poetry Magazine.”  “Love Calls” was published in “OutWrite Journal.”

Bio

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet.  Her poems have appeared in “The New York Times,” “Poetry Magazine,” “The Potomac Review” and other publications.  Her most recent poetry collection is “Love and Kumquats: New and Selected Poems (BrickHouse Books).  Wolfe is a contributor to the groundbreaking anthologies “QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology” and “Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.”  She was a 2008 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow.  Wolfe is a contributor to the “Washington Blade,” (www.washingtonblade.com), the LGBTQ paper.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review