by Ron Drummond
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“The library is open.”
– RuPaul Charles
“Turn the page,” my candidate says,
and we are even more delighted
with this ambassador of sanity
than five-year-olds at story time.
I turn the page of a roll of voters
registered to the same party as me
and continue personalizing notes and
envelopes to possible “for” votes,
my handwriting in each letter
paired with a QR code spelling
how, where and when to cast
their vote. I band stacks of stuffed,
stamped envelopes – this batch
of over three hundred going to
a state where all zips begin with
two, the numeral that allows for
my finest work: a slight, lovely curve
that swoops to a taut, crisp horizontal.
At some point, I will put on some music,
but for now, I am flying solo.
I picture the recipient’s odd experience
of holding a hand-addressed envelope to be
like Sondheim’s Joanne pausing her song
to ask, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”
I relive the tedium of my factory job
working with extruded plastic, and those
night-shift endings at Denny’s “marrying”
the ketchups” – wedding the contents
of the bottles so that none are partly full,
leaving each with the sediment of ancient
condiment at their bottoms – when all
I want is dawn, and to go home to bed.
Within reach of where I stamp and seal
is a cigar box of campaign buttons, mostly
from lost crusades. I’m not a snob about them.
I don’t take pride in backing failed runs.
Most of the buttons promote anti-war pols,
and half are red, white and blue discs
with the much-later-to-be-assassinated
Allard Lowenstein’s name on them.
But when this current election is over
and I add a shiny new navy-blue one
to my collection, I envision this old
El Cid Corona Minors box – it once held
25 seven-inch (54 ring-gauge) cigars
with open feet & capped heads – being
transformed. It will no longer be a flat,
hinged urn. It will no longer be a grief box.
“Turn the page,” my candidate repeats,
using a gesture even the non-literate
can understand.
Ron Drummond is the author of Why I Kick At Night (Portlandia). A founding editor of Barrow Street, his poetry and translations have appeared in over forty journals, as well as in anthologies and textbooks. He has received fellowships from Ragdale, VCCA, Blue Mountain Center, and the Macondo Foundation. He lives in NYC with his husband Terry Cook.
