ELECTION DAY

Our polling place is nine miles away
on the other side of the second-closest town
and I offer my absentee ballot to Robbin

to vote, to double her voice among the two
hundred and thirty million in the U.S., or
the eighteen million registered in California—

half of which won’t vote. We’re inland,
the rural West, a shrinking minority. But
she still believes, reads and studies

the propositions, has an opinion I respect.
I’ll be glad when it’s over, perhaps forget
that this country doesn’t want to work

together anymore, when each of the elected vie
for an invite to every shindig on Easy Street
where it pays to do nothing. What an ego-trip

it must be to have arrived, play the angles
to pay all the contributors back twofold
the old way. Our polling place, nine miles away,

Sacramento two hundred and fifty, and no one
in Washington knows Lemon Cove exists—
our distance much greater than time and space.