Texas Poetry Ballots
What Is
Loretta Diane Walker
October 25, 2020
1
Dripping with death,
COVID is an umbrella,
and one million souls
are evaporated raindrops.
2
Fire is rain in California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado
with air the color of burning.
I know a poet in Oregon who lost her house and farm to flames—
everything made with hands,
stones, and the splintered bodies of trees.
Gladness! Her spirit remains in the flesh,
rooted in the here and now.
3
Hurricane Sally, with her robust appetite,
ties on her September bib,
tries to swallow Alabama whole,
chews at one-hundred five miles per hour—
eight more join the vanished.
4
Black Lives Matter, still, only to some.
A Zoom poetry reading I attend is crashed
by “Jenna Bowser” who writes NIGGERS in chat,
fires obscenities from the cannon of her mouth,
face hidden behind a black screen.
5
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is dead.
Election Day climbs the steep stairs of anticipation
and the governor brews a potion to make ballot boxes
disappear; this hurts my heart
like the sharp axe of tongue chopping at a child’s ears
with cruel insults.
5
Is power deadlier than disease?
Is it a disease?
Is disease power?
6
A vote is one flame. One raindrop. One storm.
Change is a hoarse troubadour.
Words are ghosts
flying in and out of our bones.
Loretta Diane Walker, an award-winning poet, a multiple Pushcart Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee, won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award for poetry, for her collection, In This House. Loretta is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. She has published five collections of poetry.
Lights on the Billboard
Tom Murphy
October 23, 2020
Lights on the billboard went out
orange – purple clouds glowered dawn
the sitting president is supine at Walter-Reed
infusion of designer drugs courses his veins.
Lincoln said, “Play Dixie, it’s ours now.”
Strike up a dirge and let that ragga drop
like a shelf of granite plunging down off Glacier Point
bowling the forest down in a hundred-mile wind.
Democracy’s death comes within a month from today.
His recovery, the Evangelical will declare a miracle.
“God has voted for us and we need not go to the polls.
Triumphant Trump should be president for life—
amend the Constitution to make it so.”
Here, sitting in a Waco hotel room with nowhere to go.
Tom Murphy’s books include Pearl (FlowerSong Press 2020), American History (Slough Press, 2017), co-edited Stone Renga (Tail Feather, 2017). Murphy is Langdon Review’s 2021 Writer-In-Residence. Forthcoming work is scheduled to appear in Switchgrass Review, Langdon Review, Writing Texas, Locus Review, Corpus Christi Writers, Concho River Review, and Wine. Murphy lives in Corpus Christi, TX.
Inauguration, 2017
Katherine Hoerth
October 23, 2020
It seemed appropriate, a biopsy
scheduled for this January morning.
In the waiting room, you watched the news
as the president-elected arrived,
and wondered how to calm your anxious nerves.
You hear your name. A nurse assistant weighs
you, glances at your chart and feigns a smile.
You’ve lost a few more pounds. A Rabbi says
a prayer for America, a prayer
you want to wrap around your skin and bones.
The nurse hands you a little cup to fill,
and as the president stands up to take
his oath, you sit in silence in the bathroom.
He’s done before you, so you miss the moment:
history, your story, juxtaposed.
You lie in bed and watch the spectacle.
The nurse says, I won’t lie. It’s gonna hurt,
then sticks a needle in your bony wrist.
You halfway listen to his speech. She’s right.
She grabs her clipboard, reads you all the risks:
loss of blood (but we all bleed in red),
lingering pain (how many years of it?),
you might not wake up from the anesthesia
(will we ever wake up from this slumber?).
You sign it all away. The price is great.
Your fear is greater. As they sit for lunch,
(steak, you hear before you’re wheeled away)
you arrive in the OR. The lights
are dim but you can hear a cumbia
playing softly as another nurse
preps the doctor’s instruments. He sways
his hips and monitors your heart beat, hums
in perfect tunes and sings along, his voice
a whisper, and you feel relieved, at home,
not cold and naked underneath this blanket
with a room of men who soon will cut
a piece of you away. You figure now,
the politicians and the president
make small talk as they sip from champagne flutes
about a wall to keep the others out.
The doctor enters, and you recognize
her gentle voice, the way she rolls her r’s,
the careful way she says your German name,
the heavy diphthong like a piece of steak
on her nimble Costa Rican tongue.
She tells you everything will be ok.
You blink. You breathe. The gas invades your nostrils.
The world around blurs and turns to fog.
In Recovery, the television
drones as you sleep. The president devours
a giant piece of steak with chocolate sauce.
You haven’t eaten anything for days.
Your heart rate slows. The nurse begins to wonder
if you’ll ever wake. She shakes your body,
calls your name, but all you hear is silence.
She puts her knuckles to your chest and thrusts.
Today, your body is America:
mortal, fragile as a clavicle,
missing a piece of you, but breathing still.
This sickness didn’t happen overnight.
This darkness grew inside of you unseen,
one cell at a time. You wake. Your tongue
clunks in your mouth. You want to thank the nurse
who combs your tangled hair, unties your gown,
who helps you in your panties and your bra.
On the news, you watch the new first lady
greet the crowd. She’s elegant in white.
The doctor comes to see you, shows you pictures
of the depths of you. You cringe and face
your darkness, what you hid beneath your clothes,
your skin, your flesh, all in the open now.
Am I gonna be ok? you ask.
The doctor smiles and pats your shoulder, fills
you with the hope that only she can give.
You sigh and glance up at the television
as the president begins to work.
He slides a pen across a piece of paper
and you wonder where this world is headed,
if the body has the strength to fight
the coming darkness. We’ll know soon, she says,
once the biopsy results come in.
Katherine Hoerth is an assistant professor of English at Lamar University and editor-in-chief of Lamar University Literary Press. She won the 2015 Helen C. Smith Prize for Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots. In 2020, her fourth poetry collection, Borderland Mujeres, will be released by SFAU Press.
Tiny Bubbles
Kathryn Jones
October 22, 2020
0 Tiny bubbles float on paper,
0 color the ovals black,
0 fill in their emptiness,
0 give them purpose,
0 bind them to the page,
0 translate thought into action,
0 find a voice, point the way,
0 transfer power with the tip of a pen.
0 Tiny bubbles float in a machine,
0 gobble, digest them, spit them out,
0 transform them into numbers,
0 convert them to symbols, plus and minus,
0 count the rows, set the dials,
0 turn up the volume,
0 turn down the noise,
0 change the course with a calculation.
0 Tiny bubbles float in the air,
0 release them with the balloons,
0 will them to wander,
0 cast them into the jet stream,
0 drift into the collective dream,
0 intercept the energy,
0 ride the wave, let the foam blow,
0 seize the moment,
0 declare victory with a single vote.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
Drop a Colored Pebble
Kathryn Jones
October 22, 2020
Voting, past and present:
Drop a colored pebble
in an urn.
Use your voice:
yay or nay.
Raise your hand.
All in favor.
Line up over there
behind your candidate.
Toss beans in a hat.
Write out a name;
bring your own paper.
Drop a metal token
into a slot.
Punch holes in a card.
Mark an “X” in a box.
Pull a lever or push a button
on a machine.
Pencil in a bubble
by hand on paper.
Touch a screen
on a computer.
Keep your distance;
mail in a ballot.
Wash your hands,
though it’s all sanitized.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
Night-Rhyme
Sumera Saleem
October 21, 2020
Here comes the night when dreams
Take shelter in the big club of stars.
When it’s our turn to party, we choose
Among moons, a new light to revolve
Between the cycle of death and birth.
We dance not to disturb the universe
But to power the rhythm in the clock
And flex the muscle of time and ballot
Bearing the names of future muses,
Ready on the floor with heavenly grace,
Vaulting a new rhyme for old matters.
Under my breath, I wish this light
Would spin and spray warm rage
Against every moonless night.
Sumera Saleem is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Gold medalist in English literature from the University of the Punjab, and former sub-editor in the department of English, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. She has published poems in national and international literary magazines. She can be reached at: sumerasaleem386@yahoo.com
And still we hungered
Herman Sutter
October 21, 2020
This is the president
we elected without regard for who
he was. We wanted him
for our own,
because
he demanded nothing
of us. And we demanded
nothing
but that he be our king
and that he please
break something
(at least the monotony)
on his way to the throne.
Lest we forget:
Samuel stood before the people
warning them:
He will take your sons and daughters
take your vine and field
Take your best
and give it to his servants
and make of you
his slaves
yet still we hungered
for a king.
Herman Sutter is a school librarian and volunteer hospital chaplain, as well as the award-winning author of the poetry collection, The World Before Grace (Wings Press, 1991) and the blog The World Before Grace (and after). His work has appeared in Texas Poetry Calendar, tejascovido, The Langdon Review, St. Anthony Messenger, and the anthology: By the Light of a Neon Moon.
The Best Words, 45 Edition
Moumin Quazi
October 20, 2020
Meddling
Collusion
Upset
“So much winning”
Mockery
Projection
Squinting at the Sun during an Eclipse
“Stable Genius”
Sham
Ad Hominem
Dismantling
Convictions
Fast Food
Orange is the new White
Pivot
Golf
Cart on the Green
“But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Impeachment
Emoluments
“I don’t joke.”
Sarcasm
Tweeter
Cyberbully
“What about?”-ism
Pathological Narcissism
Nepotism
Fox and Friends
“It is what it is.”
Dodger
Rally
Hicks
Hope
Hoax
Interruption
Clown
“Stand Back and Stand By.”
Positive
Quarantine
Irony
Schadenfreude
Pardon?
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.
Pledge 2020
Carol Coffee Reposa
October 20, 2020
On November 3
I will coat
My hands
With sanitizer,
Put on
My heaviest mask
And drive
To the polls.
There I will cast a ballot
For the knee
Lifted from George Floyd’s neck,
For a corner diner in Ferguson
Where cops and locals
Sit down
Together
For chilidogs and beer.
I will vote
For lead-free pipes
In Flint,
For skies swept clear
Of greenhouse gas,
For rivers and seas
Flowing beyond
Plastic and sewage.
I will endorse
Refugee children removed
From their cages and returned
To their mothers’ arms,
The right of anyone
To see a doctor,
The resurrection
Of truth and fact.
But most of all
On that great day
I will stand and say
Yes to restoration
Of the one institution
Walt Whitman ever praised,
That grand institution
Nearly lost,
“The dear love of comrades.”
The poems, reviews and essays of Carol Coffee Reposa have appeared in The Atlanta Review, Southwestern American Literature, Valparaiso Review, The Texas Observer, and other journals and anthologies. Author of five books of poetry, member of the Texas Institute of Letters, four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the 2015 San Antonio Public Library Arts & Letters Award, she is the 2018 Texas Poet Laureate.
Conversation at the Gates of Hell
Jeffrey L. Taylor
October 19, 2020
“You can stand me up at the Gates of Hell, but I won’t back down.”
— Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
I merrily sing this song, taking
a principled stand for what’s right.
Later I realize those I oppose
also sing this song merrily.
We all know how this plays out,
wounded gridlock, unstoppable force
meets immovable object, people
broken and ground between.
Here we both stand at the Gates of Hell,
pretending we’re not close.
There’s no coffee shop
or coffee house for miles,
though I smell something roasting.
Clearly the A/C’s not broken.
Can we bend an ear to each other?
Tell of our fears instead
of our positions? Sit with the Other’s
wounded heart in our hands?
Jeffrey L. Taylor's first submitted poems won Riff Magazine's Jazz and Blues Poetry Contest. He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, The Perch, Red River Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Langdon Review. Serving as sensei (instructor) to small children and professor to graduate students has taught him humility.
American Ball
Chris Ellery
October 19, 2020
ballot (n.) 1540s, “small ball used in voting,” also “secret vote taken by ballots,” from Italian pallotte, diminutive of palla “ball,” for small balls used as counters in secret voting, from a Germanic source, from PIE root *bhel- (2) “to blow, swell.” Online Etymology Dictionary
On the classroom wall while music played
a little ball bounced atop the syllables of
“The Star-Spangled Banner.” As we learned to read
we sang the daily lesson America Is Best,
brave and free, and we were on that team.
Later on we played the game called Duck and Cover,
rolling like pill bugs underneath our desks.
We didn’t vote for that. We did not elect the wind
that stripped the trees, knocked houses flat,
and blew into our brains a hurricane of fire.
That bouncing ball grew up to be a bullet, dropping
out of school and ricocheting through the news
end over end. My Lai. Kent State.
Kennedy and King. Still we sang and rode
the glaring rocket to the moon.
Once old enough, we filled the little bubble in
ourselves, keeping carefully inside the lines
to draw a bullet hole beside the name of one
we hoped might lift our shredded banner up.
We got Watergate instead.
And so we came to our majority in a fall from grace.
We knew slave labor built our house.
We knew our cavalry massacred the Ghost Dance
at Wounded Knee to make the suburbs safe.
We knew the robber barons really called the shots.
Still, through all our disillusionment, we blacked
the bullet in, we hung the chad, we touched
with fingertips the tab that says in capitals: SUBMIT.
Thus we elected from among ourselves captains
all too like ourselves to sail our ship of state.
We’re tired. The revolution is too slow to come.
Now in the vortex of unceasing war, one man’s
tiny hands grope the Republic like a deflated ball.
No wonder our children take a knee.
What can we the people do?
The letters of
the anthem of America are grief and rage
and hope, cut from the ballots of two centuries.
So against the blast of yet another November wind
we must summon the founding faith in human light
and cast our little pebbles on the heap.
Chris Ellery is author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body and Elder Tree. He has received the X.J. Kennedy Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Dora and Alexander Raynes Prize for Poetry, and the Betsy Colquitt Award. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, Ellery teaches literature, creative writing, and film criticism at Angelo State University.
I Dedicate…
Jan Seale
October 18, 2020
…my pristine clean and easy vote--
coming to mailbox in green election envelope,
returned in white ballot envelope,
inside yellow carrier envelope--
to those on election day:
a mother whose baby seems to gain weight
in her arms while she stands in the queue;
a man who has worked a day flagging cars
now swaying to soothe his tired feet;
a young woman blinking at sun in her eyes
while the wind entangles her hair;
a lettuce handler, first time voting,
who worries he’ll be late clocking in.
I dedicate my vote to an old woman shifting
a purse heavy with unneeded credentials;
to an old man bound in van wheelchair
who awaits poll watcher, poll worker, assistant
advancing kindly with portable voting machine.
Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, writes poetry and
nonfiction from her home in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Her latest
book is A Lifetime of Words (Lamar University Literary Press) with
essays drawing on her experience as a writer and teacher.
A Love Letter To Fall
Juan Manuel Pérez
October 16, 2020
Fall, you are finally here. I missed you.
The spring and summer haven’t been so nice.
I mean with a virus, racial divide,
cops as judge, jury, executioner,
protesting, the wrong, wayward president,
a supreme court missing one of their own,
a congress knee-deep in hypocrisy,
melting ice caps, hurricanes, wildfires,
isolation, sky-high unemployment,
virtual schools, plus zoom meetings galore.
Fall, I’m so glad you are finally here.
We are going to try to fix this mess.
Early November will decide it all.
For you, Fall, carry swift, cool winds of change.
Juan Manuel Pérez, a Mexican-American poet of indigenous descent and the current Poet Laureate for Corpus Christi, Texas (2019-2020), is author of several books of poetry, including two new books: Space in Pieces (2020) and Screw the Wall! And Other Brown People Poems (2020).
Hope Floats, Yes?
Ulf Kirchdorfer
October 16, 2020
To vote, or not to vote: What does that really say
about my life, as I know I must dispense with the King
who has orange hair and face color to match.
That I even worry about writing “kill” and tone down,
like “collateral damage,” speaks more than the six
monologues and hither and dither I have exposed
millions to over the years. O King, how I hate your
sty actions in bed outside the marriage, love the name
Stormy, loathe your row of all the King’s men lingering
like Polonius, a rat I pierced and pricked into when I spoke,
summoned for my madness in wondering how to set
things right in Elsinore. We did not have the gates
you offer with barricades; a moat and draw bridge
were our pleasure, and things were simple then,
having few choices, and as I approach the voting
machine now, Dane-American, I summon courage
to vote and think scarfed in my sea gown I can change
the fate of me and King’s men traveling on a ship
that is tossed in waves and nausea waiting to find
a still harbor or to go aground. Hope floats, yes?
Ulf Kirchdorfer's book of poems, Hamlet in Exile, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press. When Ulf is not living in the land of poetry, he ventures out into the woods where he photographs birds.
Kavod
Casey Ford
October 15, 2020
"To be born into a world that does not see you, that does not believe in your potential, that does not give you a path for opportunity or a clear path for education, and despite this, to be able to see beyond the world you are in, to imagine that something can be different — that is the job of a prophet." - Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, remembering Ruth Bader Ginsberg, September 23, 2020.
Off to vote for Joe B.
Xing this risky little box
knowing you are no prophet,
that you’ve slid your tongue
into the mouths of us all
like you ran your hands over
figures of all these women.
Soon the earth will receive the
tiny frame of an immense woman,
a body I fear you will violate,
her servant vita for we
the people will rapidly petrify,
we the ones hiring you,
a lesser evil still one
she cannot pardon from there.
Casting into this shallow pond,
am I honoring the dead,
the intercessory life that has laid
Herself down again—and again—
uncanny justice, immortal backbone,
first funeral I’ve cried at in years.
Grief trails me into this booth.
Three teardrops fall into the machine
maybe to absolve us all.
Casey Ford is from Port Neches, Texas, a better place than it might appear in embarrassing 2020 events. Casey is an instructor in English and Modern Languages at Lamar University and an adjunct humanities instructor at Lamar Institute of Technology. She is studying for her MFA in Creative Writing at Fairfield University.
State of the Union
Jeffrey L. Taylor
October 14, 2020
State of the Union:
We’ve got the power.
By God we’re going to abuse it.
A change is gonna come.
Be part of it.
Jeffrey L. Taylor's first submitted poems won Riff Magazine's Jazz and Blues Poetry Contest. He has been published in di-vêrsé-city, The Perch, Red River Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, and Langdon Review. Serving as sensei (instructor) to small children and professor to graduate students has taught him humility.
Reluctance
Jean Hackett
October 14, 2020
At 19 with furrowed brow, lips firmly set
in a do not cross me line, you announce
you’re not going to vote.
Insist politics causes nothing
but arguments, nasty fights.
I won’t disagree.
I’ve seen you
steer conversations away from guns
when friends wax poetic about the gory glory
of blowing away axis deer, songbirds and squirrels
with AK47’s.
Hugged you
when you gave up on your crush who tried to drag
your agnostic ass to a religious retreat
because she couldn’t date someone
who wasn’t right with God.
Joined you
to slither away from Grandma’s table on Thanksgiving
as Uncle Q-Anon blasted your environmentalist brother
with chem trial diatribes about climate change,
afraid he’d shove another family member
head-first into the breakfast room table,
like he did your dad two Christmases ago over abortion.
Politics haven’t been kind to you,
but lots of folks get treated worse.
There’s your middle school girlfriend,
the pretty one with sea green eyes,
pregnant in 11th grade
since the State of Texas proclaimed
birth control for 16 year-olds a sin.
The boy a couple grades ahead of you
who quit community college
after commuting 1 ½ hours each day
each way by bus to campus,
because education and public transit
aren’t American priorities.
The wild child, once part of your crowd,
who quit drugs, got a GED,
but now struggles with bipolar disorder,
unable afford insurance or medication
in a Land of Plenty where health care isn’t a right.
I know you’re disgusted by squawks and squalls, dog whistles
the powerful promote as music to certain ears,
how they raise the volume of rage and conflict
with every twist of the dial. I know
you want to opt out, walk away.
But citizenship isn’t a party you can leave
if you don’t like the DJ’s play list.
Choose to drown out the cacophony
by joining others in harmonious song.
Promote hope and equity.
Vote!
Jean Hackett is a poet, education, and naturalist who lives and writes in San Antonio and the Texas Hill Country. Her most recent work has appeared in journal Voices de la Luna, the ‘zine Words for Birds, the collection of vulture poetry Purifying Wind, the collections of coronavirus poetry No Season for Silence, Tejascovido, and The Langdon Review. In addition, she’s had poems appear in in the San Antonio Express News/ Houston Chronicle, ArtsAliveSA, and on San Antonio’s VIA buses as part of National Poetry month in 2020.
To Donald Trump Regarding the Border Wall and Why I’m Not Voting for You or Paying for It
Kathryn Jones
October 14, 2020
The border is not
a line drawn on a map,
a river to swim across,
a wall to climb or tunnel under,
a fence to cut and tear down,
a boundary to keep people out,
a boundary to keep people in,
a political bargaining chip,
a militarized zone,
a hole to repair,
broken and needs to be “fixed.”
I crossed the border
at Laredo on a bridge of steel,
at Los Ebanos on a ferry pulled by rope,
on foot at Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend,
in a boat rowed by an old man at Boquillas,
in the sand at Boca Chica where the Rio Grande
spills into the Gulf of Mexico,
in a plane on the way to Monterrey,
with and without a passport,
when no one cared that I did or asked me why,
in my mind, which cannot be contained,
many times and am richer for it.
The border is
where countries and cultures overlap,
land interwoven like a tight wool rug,
people intertwined, fingers interlaced,
the seam that holds the fabric together,
a plate of steaming food for the body and the soul,
a trove of history, of conquerors and those
who would not be conquered,
blood flowing through time and soaked into soil,
a state of mind, a way of life,
a mystery, an enigma,
boundless and borderless.
Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
Exorcising My Right To Vote
Jerry Bradley
October 13, 2020
In that famous film, Max von Sydow commands
a pre-teen girl named Regan to renounce Satan.
Seven years ahead – and again four years after that –
I renounced Reagan himself. But unlike the young priest
who never made it to the end of the movie,
I never lost my faith -- only an election or two.
A near-half century later, I find myself
like Father Merrin, ready to oppose
narcissism’s demonic contagion again,
summoning a little logic and a large measure
of professional contempt as I do my civic duty.
Every time I face the fiends with a ballot,
I do so bravely. The man next to me,
uneasy himself this year, nods knowingly
when I intone avaunt thee! three times,
breathe in, and firmly press VOTE.
Jerry Bradley's latest collection of poems is Collapsing into Possibility. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he is Professor of English and the Leland Best Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Lamar University. He has published in New England Review, Modern Poetry Studies, Poetry Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review.
Barrow o’Votes - October 13, 2020
Ulf Kirchdorfer
So much depends
upon a ballot
even those
who have never read
William Carlos Williams
know it
Ulf Kirchdorfer's book of poems, Hamlet in Exile, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press. When Ulf is not living in the land of poetry, he ventures out into the woods where he photographs birds.