Election Day Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Great despotic emperors,
My parents are back home again
And knocking upstairs;
I’d thought they’d been dead for
Seventeen years:
I try to reassure myself by looking
In mirrors.
My jaw unhinges, I try to make
Wishes,
Bloody Mary comes and gives me
Bloody kisses:
While then, all the while, she’s been
Down on the grotto toting the bottle,
Passing herself around amidst the boys,
They un-tuck and start out on her,
She becomes for them quite an adventure,
But where it is they find themselves on her,
I don’t know;
For I am left under the briars,
Under the snow, the cabins are rotting,
The rivers slow; she goes away on a bright
Strung bow,
And I hang around with nothing to say
For myself, while my parents rattle through
The dusking sky: They wish they remembered
How to cry.