READING, WRITING, ARITHMETIC

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.

THE DOOR

by Katherine West

"But it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station—including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day—to work together to create a ‘new normal’ in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.”  —Barack Obama, May 29, 2020

There is a door—
someone has left it open
just a little bit
so a band of light
runs along the floor
to where we stand in the dark
touches the feet
of the first in line

I can tell this makes them happy
even though their backs are to me
something about the relaxed
line of their shoulders
the ease of the way they turn their heads
this way
then that
confident
it won't be long now

The band of light
doesn't touch my feet—
I'm about halfway down the line
even if I stood on tiptoe
or craned my neck to one side
I couldn't get a good view
through the door

So I look at the line—
it starts out white with reflected light
then gets darker and darker
the further away it reaches
down the dim hall where we wait—
the first in line are clear cut
their collars
their buttons
outlined in light
but the ones behind me blur
into a single
black
unmoving
cloud

I wait for someone to step out of this cloud
to show me details
beautiful details
of finger and face
soft lips
the curve of forehead
I wait for the music
of speech
laughter
for an empty space
inside me
to fill

Then I feel it
a weight
in the space that is not empty
a weight that shifts
like a child
impatient to be born—
then it kicks
something bursts
and I see
hundreds of eyes meeting mine—
candles, stars, constellations...
we all move at the same time and the line
is broken


Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness, performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov, and teaches seasonal poetry workshops that revolve around "wilderness writing."  She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and TheNewVerse.News  which recently nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize.