nat raum

election day
A love letter to American zillennials

before we were old enough to strap
on our most comfortable shoes and stand
in line at the polls, we were old enough
to cut george bush’s face out
 
of our scholastic readers and color
all over it with school-issued crayolas,
to tape it to the corner of our desks
and sit down on it—kiss my ass.
 
we were old enough for recess debates
and rallies, all spouting ideologies
our parents had regurgitated from theirs.
we were not old enough to picture
 
the churn of two more decades, ushered
in by barack obama’s platform of hope,
slowly disintegrating in the face
of committing even more war crimes.
 
we could not fathom the night
of november the eighth, two thousand
sixteen, when all the women i know
started crying the later in the evening
 
(read: the closer to inevitable) it got.
we could not imagine what it felt like
to watch our parents vote for anyone
but hillary. we watched the slow decline
 
of viable candidates on the left, before
the left took one look at the democrats,
slightly right of center, and left the building.
when we were four, we voted between
 
bush and gore with clothespins clasped
to cardboard. at twenty-four, we vote
for biden because god, have you considered
the alternative? now we’re here—trans
 
people begging the cis majority for basic
healthcare protections. black and brown
people still looking behind them, even
after 2020’s supposed reckoning
 
with police violence. eggs cost seven
dollars a dozen. rapists in every cabinet
seat. seventy-five years and two hundred
and twenty days into a state-sanctioned
 
genocide in palestine. nickelodeon once played
commercials with rock anthems penned
to teach kids about voting. now we know
better than that—capitalism is the real winner
 
of every election. no one ascends into office
by the grace of their good deeds—we need
help from chick-fil-a, lockheed martin,
the kind of rich assholes who put their money
 
exactly where their political opinion is.
what we need is an actual reckoning—
the kind of revolution that makes nancy
pelosi not just clutch her pearls but choke
 
on them. a banding together of our generation,
who saw it all go from sort of shining
to steeped in shit. jay sean was onto something
immortal when he penned the words honestly
 
i’m down like the economy. and don’t you think
it’s funny how casual ageism tells society
that a man mitch mcconnell’s age is unfit
to do anything, and yet men his age
 
(not to mention complexion) are still
running the country? we could say
we’re waiting until the raisins die out,
but what of the peers that have listened,
 
rapt with the idea that they too could
have the potential to become a billionaire
when the odds are higher they’ll end up
the person they step over and glare at
 
on the street? besides, we’re assuming now
that each of us will one day become
an octogenarian despite the statistics
shaking their head at our optimism. not
 
if you’re brown or queer, the research says.
meanwhile, fox news spews fictions as fact,
recruiting new members to a cult of willful
ignorance. i think it’s time to follow the advice
 
scrawled on a pole by my office: give
trans women machine guns. it’s time to quit
holding our tongues in the rooms that uphold
settler colonialism, systemic prejudice,
 
and capitalism no matter the cost.
we read it on twitter (before elon)
and the more we claw, the more we come
to find it’s true: the world we were raised
 
to survive in does not exist. we are ready
to eat the rich as hors d’oeuvres
before we feast on the bloated corpses
of what some once called democracy.