Hitler Speaks

Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017

By Kathi Wolfe

You said
I was a has-been —
my day was done.
You wish!
I’ve been undercover,
before your unseeing
eyes.

I shaved my
moustache, changed
my accent, Tweeted — ordered
lattes at Starbucks. In khakis
and polo shirts, I was the boy
next door. My torches
were kept in the closet,
I only drew swastikas in the dark.

Now I can stop living
a double life. I’ll goose step
in the Easter Parade. Swastikas
will be the new Boy Scout badges —
I’ll model my torch on the next Vogue cover.
Welcome to my comeback tour!

Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer. Her most recent collection, The Uppity Blind Girl Poems, was published in 2015 by BrickHouse Books and won the 2014 Stonewall Chapbook Competition. She is a contributor to the anthologies QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology and Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Wolfe was a 2008 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Writer Fellow. She is a contributor to The Washington Blade, the acclaimed LGBTQ paper.

Photo credit: Dmitry Dzhus via a Creative Commons license.