A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Kryssa Schemmerling
Coming of Age
Flashback: California, 1980.
I’m in the car with my mother
who’s running late to cast a ballot
for Carter. We turn on the radio—
he’s already conceding.
This is the moment I learn
that the bad guy can win
and keep on winning,
that a B-movie actor who named names
and unleashed the National Guard
on student demonstrations
was the beginning
of an end where a reality TV star
ascends to the White House, not once
but twice. I grew up trying
to rewrite this script with
my feet. March, knock on doors.
Call politicians who don’t
pick up their phones. Wring, wring, wring
my hands. Still, the plot
unfolds against our will. The protestors
got old, People’s Park has fallen
but Grover Norquist
is alive. We are living
his dream: government gutted,
democracy drowned
like an unwanted animal
in a bathtub.
Kryssa Schemmerling is the author of the poetry collection Iris In (Broadstone Books, 2016). Her poems have been appeared in The Cortland Review, Mudlark, 2River, Glint, and Silver Birch Press, among other journals. A 2022 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow in Screenwriting, Schemmerling holds an MFA in film from Columbia University and teaches screenwriting at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema in Brooklyn and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. A California native, she lives in Brooklyn.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
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