A RECURRING NIGHTMARE ABOUT VOTING

E. D. Watson

November 3, 2024

Inside the booth I panic: I cannot find

my party on the ballot, the people’s party

party of the whale people wolf people bird people 

bear people frog people cricket people human people 

I can twist the dial on the voting machine, 

but it does not call my country into being, 

that lost land built from poems and dreams, songs

I learned as a child, stories that made our story clean 

oh my country, my people, I want to vote for who we

could be, where is it on the ballot? Beyond the booth’s 

flimsy curtain the world screams: Lesser of two evils! 

The Devil! Apocalypse! The burning end! Machine voices.

I remember to breathe and recite my mantra:

This land is older than we are and it will survive us. 

Meanwhile the names on the screen are shaped like bombs 

and I don’t know how to say them but I know 

they can make me. The machine voices are loud 

and convincing. And then: behind me, beside me

beneath me a rumble: tectonic plates and dancing feet

voices rising like the wind that pushes seas, razing towers

clearing the skies for birds to wing, clearing the coasts 

for the mangroves’ return, seven generations

of whale people wolf people bird people bear people 

frog people cricket people human people singing together; 

the power of the song splits the screen, 

a rainbow pours out, I climb up and away 

and this is not a nightmare after all, but a dream;

the nightmare comes upon waking. 

E. D. Watson is an award-winning poet, yoga teacher, and certified Practitioner of Poetic Medicine in Central Texas. She is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Honey in the Vein, and two chapbooks: Anorexorcism and Via Dolorosa & Advent Wreath, winner of the 2023 Cow Creek Chapbook Prize. Individual poems and stories can be found online at Rattle, Ms., and other journals.