Electoral Divisions

Already almost two years have passed since his victory speech released on my birthday, November 9th of 2016. My well-wishes and annual greetings splashed with the hair grease of his red, comb-over. So happy, and yet so sorry, were paired, my birthday, his victory speech, and those were the depressed undertones written of, and to me, in the incoming messages of an America growing old.

I’d written about him in a dream piece, workshopped it while attending a class at the Oregon Literary Arts in which I was a free participant, given the building code with no question, as liaison, serving up tall water glasses before the others arrived and standing guard at the door letting only the right late comers in from the dark sidewalks and sideways rain, the front door always secured I presume, so that the unwanted wanders who make of their lives unpapered poetic misery, don’t walk in and toot their own horns, one-up the troubles of depressed west hill widows who write memoirs to include timely country-clubbed graphs, and an ordering of events that make clear sense.

There was the attorney who was applying to high-priced MFA programs and the older, curly-haired Jewish woman who both found problems with my fantastical narrative, titled Pop Quiz, which in loose associations tied my thoughts to the looming political circus, returned to me with arrows and notes neatly written on the copies I’d passed out for review. I read, happy you’re a writer, but this just isn’t your day.

On the same block, across from all the food trucks, I’d given the Black woman in cosmic print stretch pants the remainder of a gabapentin bottle that I’d been promised would help me fall into line, but had found the pills could be better described as mind erasures, she with no healthcare had somehow intuited to ask me for money, mentioning specifically the pills I held, and hadn’t finished the story of how she couldn’t buy her meds before I was opening my purse and presenting the brown bottle.

She blessed me with spirit-filled eyes as I passed, me questioning from which camp I was convening? Water servant of the professional hair-do’s, or someone with a true understanding of the low-runged, malfunctioning mental health system, for I too once voted Republican, saw the private therapist with purple violets in her mid-century windows, framing the pine forest which was her sprawling backyard. But, now I was relegated to “white shoes,” a middle-aged man who wears giant tennis shoes, whose office, on a weekly basis, continuously moves from three different community action centers. We never drink tea together, his knowledge of Jung barely perceptible, and each time I leave, I think it a good idea to not touch the doorknobs, bring hand-sanitizer.

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Photo Credits: Stephanie McCabe & freestocks.org both via unsplash