Zealous acolytes of twisted right angles. Bright-eyed

Young Republicans in brown-shirt fashion, disavowing

xenophobic motivation while marching side by side

with white nationalists and Oath Keepers into the booths.

Vacant young app addicts, doddering octogenarians, and that

uncle you thought you knew. Maybe your spouse, your child.

Three Percenters with one finger on a trigger and another

selecting a name that sounds like hump, dump, bump stock,

Rumpelstiltskin. End time eschatologists with full magazines.

Quick-change artists like Chris Christie and Nikki Haley.

Professional polluters, paramilitary police, Pompeo, Pruitt.

Obtuse advocates of abstinence, incel advocates of sexual assault,

nativist advocates for twelve million deportations.

Michael the Black Man and other candidates for radical

lobotomy. Chickens and foxes in the same damned barnyard.

Kanye, I suppose. And Cheney. And David Duke.

Judeo-Christian Zionists, evangelical Southern Baptists, and

initiates of the New Appalachian Cult of Resurrected Coal.

Heirs of McCarthy and Wallace and Thurmond,

ghosts of my father and his last Jim Crow generation.

Family men with cunt on their lips at the country club

every Sunday afternoon, looking for a bitch to trump.

(Did you know that forty-one percent of them—

cited in one poll, anyway—said they would support

bombing Agrabah, fictional home of Disney’s darkish Aladdin?)

All 62,984,828 of them casting their voices into the void.

 

***

Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), and two chapbooks from Unicorn Press: The Use of the World (2013) and Of Air and Earth (2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and a previous issue of Matter, among other journals and anthologies. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.