The day before the election, and the fear, anxiety has mixed in early November with some celebration….trying to capture that…

November 2016

One bar screen plays captioned news highlights,
how schools shut down in Delhi to keep students
from poison air. So kids play soccer in the streets.
At least they have streets, unlike Aleppo minced
as rubble under a low-flung newsfeed drone.

That’s far away. Here, over micro-brews
a man goes on about Murphy’s law
and election polls while the bartender turns up
the coverage of the seventh largest gathering
of people in human history, five million Cub fans.

Women in heels kick their shoes under the formica tables
to go barefoot, a shuffle to my-mother-would-never-have
-have-believed-this, what the men are saying on TV
about what and when we give away what we do
and what we got with Roe but never seem to keep.

Is a man with license to carry coming in
today? Watch over your shoulder
when you go to vote. You never know
how mean the mean streets get.