Ladies First | Kat Meads

Kat Meads is the author of Quizzing the Dead (Pudding House) and other books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, including For You, Madam Lenin, a novel. She lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains and teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency MFA program.     Abigail Powers Fillmore(1798-1853)“I think if I were a lady, and my husband should become president, I should run away.”—From a letter to the First Lady from her nephewWorthy advice. But how to jog on a bum ankle? A sudden dipIn a Buffalo sidewalk, her determination to march on: bad idea,Terrific excuse. Surely a First Lady on crutches can skipThe pomp and ceremony, the tedium, the banter, the galleriaOf primp and baubles, “the great vanity of costume, the effort to rival”Each the next? Her luxuries of choice: sudsy bath, stirring book,Dickens, Irving, Thackeray, the company of her strikingly beautifulSpouse, “unlettered” when they met. To teach Millard Fillmore tookTime, patience, sacrifice—for the lovely aspired to office,