What Rough Beast | Poem for November 6, 2018

Gregg Murray
VOTING SIGN

This guy slides the narrow rods
into the dirt, cocks his head.

He backs up startled, does he worry
someone will see him, someone

who disapproves of his message.
Once it’s in, he backs up a few steps,

looks it up & down like an ex
with whom he’s fucked things up

& now she looks good, feet
firmly in the ground. The red & blue

sign reeks of home job. His beard’s
a home job, dead sagebrush & red

& too full in the neck. Trucker hat,
home job taped along the bill.

STIHL, it says, lawn care equipment,
and she always made him eat

shit about his lawn job, made
him scrub out the grass smell before

he could touch her. She was often
too tired for his hands. Putting

make-up on strangers, she’d say,
the compliments you’ve got to give!

What do you say to make a gal buy
orange eyeshadow? But she could

sell shit to a shithead, a Wednesday
matinee for Schindler’s List.

Wendy Stevenson. He stopped
in his tracks about ten yards from

where he’d put the sign.
She was a goddam Republican

whose old man was a prick.
And it just wasn’t right. All the sign

says is VOTE but still, that woman’s
pops wouldn’t wander dead

into this neighborhood
and she don’t live here either.



Gregg Murray is associate professor of English at Georgia State University, editor-in-chief of Muse/A Journal, and executive editor of Real Pants. He has recent work in Pank, DIAGRAM, New South, Birmingham Poetry Review, Carolina Quarterly Review, and Pleiades. Gregg is a regular contributor to Huffington Post and Fanzine. He is the author of “Ceviche”.
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