Last night I was visited by three sisters. They could have been twins, except there were three of them—the same gray hair, the same pale face. They asked me if I was planning to vote. They had name tags, the paper kind: “Hi, I’m .” No Karens in the bunch. I’m pretty sure one of them was named Atrophy. It was Greek to me. I said I still didn’t know who I was voting for. I was lying.
They told me I should vote for Trump, I asked them why. “Boots on the moon,” said the one. “I thought that was just a TV show,” I said. “No, it’s true. And Mars is next. The 51st and 52nd states. Only Trump can do that.”
“The end of disease,” said another. “Since Trump shut down the NIH and CDC, people have stopped dying of flu and ebola, smallpox, Dengue fever, you name it. Now we can watch God’s plan unfold without any human interference.”
“Peace in the Middle East,” said the third. “After that last nuclear exchange, you never hear about fighting there.”
I asked them if they were worried about climate change or the economy. What about white privilege, mass incarceration? No. Nope. All hoaxes. What did they think about mail-in ballots. A bad thing, they agreed. “So you’re voting on election day?” I asked. No, they said, they couldn’t vote. “Why not?” I asked. They said they were immigrants and didn’t deserve to vote, but that their husbands would. Their husbands had been in this country for a long time, almost from the beginning; they were almost as famous as the Founding Fathers. In fact, they were all political consultants. I might have heard of them: Famine, Pestilence and War.
Lee Rossi is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Say Anything, from Plain View Press, and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Don’t Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review. Individual poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, Poetry Northwest, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poet Lore. He has published reviews in, among others, Poetry Flash, The Los Angeles Review, Rain Taxi, and Pedestal. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a Contributing Editor at Poetry Flash. He is currently Poetry Moderator at Portside.org.
More information about Lee can be found on his website: www.leerossisez.com.
