Ed Madden
At the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Columbia, SC, October 31, 2020
Across the parking lot, a man with a mic
is calling out drop, pop, and roll, and two
women just in front of us in line dance
along. It’s getting a little festive, a little
restless as we get closer to the door,
where they let in six or seven at a time.
One woman shuffles the heel-toe in fluffy
pink house shoes. They name the moves,
call out a few they don’t think quite right.
A golf cart bumps by with boxes of popcorn.
A church offers bottled waters at a table
where the line curls along the back fence.
It’s been a two-hour wait. We got here early
enough, but the line was already around
the building. Everyone is wearing masks except
a middle-aged white couple in black and
sunglasses, taking occasional deep pulls
on their electric cigarettes. Most of us look
at our cellphones as we wait, another
kind of social distance. The line wraps
around the building then coils around
an adjacent parking lot. An old woman
leaves crying because the county isn’t
providing provisional ballots for early voting
sites. I don’t know why. Once inside
we line up on the thick strips of gray
tape that mark off the floor. A poll worker
behind a plastic shield stares at my license
a bit—I can’t tell if she’s comparing
signatures or if it’s just the COVID hair. Finally,
she hands me a slip of paper, a cotton swab,
points me toward the wall of voting machines.
I use the cotton swab to touch the screen.
I get an “I Voted” sticker when I leave.
—Submitted on 11/02/2020
Ed Madden is the author of Ark (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), Nest (Salmon Poetry, 2014), Prodigal: Variations (Lethe Press, 2011), and Signals (University of South Carolina Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Los Angeles Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Forward Book of Poetry 2021 (Faber & Faber, 2020), among other journals and anthologies.
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