William Kelley Woolfitt is in his third year of a PhD program in American Literature at Pennsylvania State University.
His poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Nimrod, North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and he has completed a book-length sequence of poems titled Words for Flesh: a Spiritual Autobiography of Charles de Foucauld. Woolfitt goes walking on the Appalachian Trail or at his grandparents' farm on Pea Ridge (near Nestorville, West Virginia) whenever he can.
---------
The Slaw Woman
Architect of casseroles and gelatins,
she unwinds the cabbage shred by shred,
eats the clock gear by gear.
Her man gone to town to buy
communion cups, a bulb for the manger.
No golden seeds shine among
the apple guts she frees with her blade.
Another long day, a waldorf mound
for the matrons at the fellowship supper.
Shoulders locked in knots, hair wisping
away from its pins, she answers
the buzzer, lets in the salesman
at the door. Says he has something beautiful
he wants to show her. A vacuum cleaner.
He grabs the handle, plugs in;
they cut figure eights, two-step on the rug.
She brings and blooms for him a fistful
of blackberries, salt of her eye wetting
his cheek. Too many walnuts to shell.
She looks to the huckster,
burns back the hours and the years,
powders down to flake and tooth,
dust and lash as he wheels her away.