Casting Out

Moumin Quazi

November 3, 2020

I have touched the screen that registers my vote

Just now. But, in my mind, I have touched that screen

A hundred times. No. Not a hundred times.

Two hundred times. No. Not two hundred times.

Two hundred and thirty thousand times and more.

One for every person who has died from a plague 

That the person I’m not voting for has given up even

Pretending to care about mitigating, other than to 

Restore a wrong perception of the health of the Economy.

I have voted in my mind so many times, for the children

Who have been separated from their mommies and daddies

At the border, as they sought asylum from tyrants who would

Wrench them from their mommies and daddies.

I have touched that screen so many times in my mind,

For all the Black Lives and Brown Lives and Young Lives that all

Matter and have been snuffed out by a majority that is 

Gasping their last gasp of majority-ness breath.

I am casting my vote like bread upon the water.

May it nourish whom it needs to nourish. May it help the ones 

Who cannot cast their own bread, cast their own vote,

Touch their own personal screen,  and wear their own little sticker,

And the ones who can, do, and will.

May my vote cast out the whited sepulcher supremacist.

Be a cast on a broken nation. Cast the dye for a future full of healing.

I have touched the screen that registers my vote

So many times.

Moumin Quazi is a professor at Tarleton State University. He co-edits the Langdon Review; hosts a radio show “The Beatles and Beyond,” and has edited CCTE Studies for seventeen years. He is also the treasurer of the South Asian Literary Association and the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers.