Voting Booth Blues
Christopher Fraga
I am glad to be twenty because now all the poetry I write
is not automatically bad because it is teenage poetry.
It is now automatically bad because it is cynical,
disenfranchised twenty-something poetry.
I will keep that in mind next election.
Apparently voting and disenfranchisement are mutually exclusive.
Whoever assigned polling stations had it in for me
and placed the Jewish Community Center a block away
from my first-floor condo.
Without the excuse of laziness,
there is no way I can’t vote.
It’s a strange location for a JCC.
I don’t even know any Jews who live in my neighborhood.
Apparently there’s a large migratory population of Jews
that haphazardly drive or walk or fly to within a block of my house
at random and unpredictable intervals to do whatever
Jews do in a JCC.
Personally, I haven’t a clue.
The only experience I’ve ever had with a JCC
has been directly related to voting.
Well, that and I was once friends with a devout, born again Christian
who was given the old pool table
from said JCC a block from my house by another friend,
who was a Jew, who attended said JCC, and didn’t live in my neighborhood.
I would have liked to have seen him go pick up the pool table.
He would have had to check Jesus at the door
like some inexpensive and poorly lined coat and
received in Jesus’ place a voucher that
he could trade in at the end of the night for his savior.
I am sure if he asked nicely, Jesus wouldn’t have minded
being hung up in a closet next to all the other messiahs.
But, having spoken to my friend lately,
I think he should have just kept the voucher.
