THREE POEMS by NATALIE WOLF
The Care Bears Visit the Leon Trotsky House and Museum
Coyoacán, CDMX, 2023It was a last minute decision, after they realized
you had to book in advance for Frida’s house, and
let’s be honest, feelings were already running high
before they read the plaques about every depressing event
from 1870-1991 and passed by the pictures of Trotsky
with his ice pick wound, his blood-splattered desk.
Grumpy said this was sad even for him, and why
the fuck hadn’t Wish wished them into Frida’s house,
so Wish reminded him for the ten thousandth time
that she couldn’t actually make wishes come true
and said he really needed to get his depression
under control and see a real therapist because
Tenderheart was getting goddamn tired of helping him
process his feelings. Grumpy said he had every right
to be depressed, forty-two years old and living
off royalties from a dead career, going on second-rate
vacations with schmucks like them. Funshine
tried to make a joke to diffuse the situation, but
everyone knows that’s just a coping mechanism.
So Cheer butted in to say that no, things weren’t great,
but it wasn’t the end of the world. The children
would love them again; everything cycles back
to popularity eventually—groovy prints, Lisa Frank,
Communist revolutionaries. They’d made it this far
together, and they wouldn’t stop now. Grumpy was still
a little sad, and Wish was still a little pissed, and
Share reminded no one that the museum had been
her idea. But they did their best to power through,
and they stopped for some street tortas, and in the end
they made it back, to somewhere like home.
another semi-successful attempt to become a rainbow
my friend who’d just finished nail school / offered me a free set / I’d only ever / admired Cardi B on the internet / respected her ability to function / with the fingers of a glitter goddess / but known / I’d mess up worse / than cutting my own ass / she texted me pics / of French tips and teeny tiny fruits / but I wanted to bathe in the sparkle drawer / nearly choked on the chemicals / said never again / but now I have rainbow claws / my own nails growing slowly beneath / remembering the days / before the constant biting / before college and a pandemic / the fake ones getting longer / harder to clean / scraping hot cocoa from underneath / with a seam ripper / worrying my shimmer tips / will break off / in pain and blood and pus / but at least for a moment / I was a glitter goddess / a living rainbow / a little closer to Cardi
Burn / Blush / Bleed
The last time I burned myself
was in an elegant cafe in downtown suburbia,
my mother and I decked head to toe
in pink, rosy to match the floral wall behind us,
like a ballet slipper or the soft inside
of a pop singer’s pussy.
I’ve been seeing pussies everywhere lately—
Peruvian cliffsides, the New Age store
on Mass Street, the order tickets
at my own all-pink job. Who knew
we were omnipresent. Omnipotent.
You know what I mean.
The roof of my mouth was pink too,
before I burned it off. The tea
was too hot, I too impatient. My mother
and I decide that anyone working
at this cafe would have to embrace
their inner Barbie, recognize
that their insides are also
orchids and quartz stone,
panther and pepto bismol.
The next time I burn myself
is after this poem, washing dye
from my hair in a borrowed bathroom.
The shower is too hot, I
too impatient. No matter how long
I hold my head in the water, the pink
still pours out of me. It bleeds
onto everything. I don’t
try to stop it.
Natalie Wolf (she/her) is a writer and baker from the Kansas City area. She is an editor for Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press and a former co-editor and co-founder of Spark to Flame Journal. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Popshot Quarterly, I-70 Review, The Hooghly Review, JAKE, and more. Instagram: @nwolfcats