by Alixa Brobbey
 |
| Image Credits: Jim Watson/AFP/ (collage by TechCrunch) / Getty Images |
You are free to stand on the sidewalk
with your thumbs up. You are free to like
this Tweet. You are free to boo silently.
You are free to clap loudly. You are free
to give me a dollar to vote in this poll.
You are free not to vote. You are free
to choose between silence and tinnitus.
You are free to leave. Here is the back
door. You are free to leave without a
goodbye. You are free to swallow
thumb tacks. You are free to live inside
this snake’s nest. You are free to
decide: hunger pains or cyanide.
You are free to give me another dollar
to vote in a new poll. You are free to know
nothing—I change this game at my whim.
You are free to play this game by my rules.
You are free to leave. You are free to
shut up and like this tweet. You are free
to comment well wishes. You are free
to correct my science—once. You are
free to be fired. You are free to leave.
Go stand outside. Sip some blue air.
Ponder the wide and winding road
that led us, somehow, here.
Alixa Brobbey spent portions of her childhood in The Netherlands and Ghana. She has a B.A. in English from Brigham Young University, where she won the Ethel Lowry Handley Poetry Prize in 2020. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Blue Marble Review, Segullah, Inscape, The Albion Review, The Susquehanna Review, The Palouse Review, The Exponent II, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and others. She is currently a law student at Brigham Young University.