Birthday, birthday, hurray, hurray
The 19th Amendment was ratified today

Drum rolls, piano rolls, trumpets bray
The 19th Amendment was ratified today

Left hand bounces, right hand strays
Maestro Joplin is leading the parade

Syncopated hashtags, polyrhythmic goose-steps
Ladies march to Pennsylvania Avenue!

Celebrate, ululate, caterwaul, praise
Women’s suffrage is all the rage

Sisters! Mothers! Throw off your bustles
Pedal your pushers to the voting booth

Pram it, waltz it, Studebaker roadster it
Drive your horseless carriage into the fray

Prime your cymbals, flute your skirts
One-step, two-step, kick-ball-change

Castlewalk, Turkey Trot, Grizzly Bear waltz
Argentine Tango, flirty and hot

Mommies, grannies, young and old biddies
Temperance ladies sip bathtub gin

Unmuzzle your girl dogs, Iowa your demi-hogs
Battle-axe polymaths, gangster moms

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Lucy Burns and Carrie Chapman Catt

Alice Paul, come one, come all! 
Sign the declaration at Seneca Falls!
                                                                                                          
Dada-faced spinsters, war-bond Prufrocks
Lillian Gish, make a silent wish

Debussy Cakewalk, Rachmaninoff rap
Preternatural hair bobs, hamster wheels     

Crescendos, diminuendos, maniacal pianos
Syncopation mad, cut a rug with dad!

Oompa, tuba, majorette girl power
Baton over Spamalot!

Tiny babies, wearing onesies
Raise your bottles, tater-tots!

Accordion nannies, wash-board symphonies
Timpani glissando!
             The Great War is over!

Victory, freedom, justice, reason
Pikachu, sunflowers, pussy hats

Toss up your skull caps, wide brim feathers
Throwing shade on the seraphim

Hide your cell phones, raise your megaphones!
Speak truth to power
                          and vote, vote vote!

WARNING: 

Nitwit legislators, gerrymandering fools
Dimwit commissioners, judicial tools
Toxic senators, unholy congressmen
Halitosis ombudsmen, mayoral tricks
Doom calf demagogues, racketeering mules
Whack-a-mole sheriffs, on the take

Fornicator governators, rakehell collaborators
Tweeter impersonators, racist prigs
Postbellum agitators, hooligan aldermen
Profiteering warmongers, Reconstruction dregs

Better run, rascals     better pray
We’ll vote you out      on judgement day!

Better run, rascals     better pray
We’ll vote you out      on election day!

The dining hall for instance: open roof beams,
open screens, and yard upon yard 

of clean swept hardwood flooring, it
might almost be a family camp.

And likewise in the sleeping room: expanse
of window, paneled wall, and the 

warmth implied by sunwash, only softened
here by half-drawn shades. You know 

the kind?—dark canvas on a roller, in my 
memory the canvas is always green. What I 

couldn’t have guessed, except for the caption:
the logic behind the double row of  well-

made beds. I’d like just once to have seen
his face, the keeper of order who

thought of it first: a prostitute on either side
of each of those women demanding

the vote. And “Negro,” to make the point perfectly
clear: You thought 

your manners and your decent shoes would
keep you safe? He couldn’t have known

how much we’d take the lesson to heart. 
At the workhouse in Virginia they’d started

the feedings with rubber tubes. Not here.
Or not that we’ve been told. The men

all dying in trenches in France. A
single system, just as we’ve been

learning for these hundred years. Empty
of people, the space looks almost benign.

I always took it for granted, the right to vote
She said
And I knew what my mother meant
Her voice constricted tightly by the flu A virus
& a 30-year-relationship 
with Newport 100s
I ain’t no chain smoker
she attempts to silence my concern
only a pack a week. That’s good, you know?

My mother survived a husband she didn’t want 
and an addiction that loved her more 
than any human needs

I sit to write a poem about the 100 year Anniversary
of the 19th Amendment 
& my first thought returns to the womb
& those abortions I did not want at first
but alas

The thirst of an almost anything 
is a gorge always looking to be
until the body is filled with more fibroids 
than possibilities

On the 19th hour of the fourth day in a new decade
I will wake restless from some nightmare
about a bomb & a man with no backbone
on a golf course who clicks closed his Motorola phone
like an exclamation point against his misogynistic stance
He swings the golf club with each chant
Women let me grab
Women like me
Women vote until I say they don’t

In my nightmare he is an infective agent
In the clear of day
he is just the same

Every day he breathes is a threat to this country’s marrow
For Ida & Susan & Lucretia & Elizabeth Cady

& every day he tweets grief  
like a cynical cornball comic’s receipts 
like a red light signaling the end of times

The final night of 2019
& my New Year’s Eve plans involves
anything that will numb the pain
of a world breaking its own heart

My mother & I have already spoken
& her lungs are croaking wet
I just want you to know I don’t feel well
& I pause to pull up my stockings beneath my crumpled smile
On this day I sigh
I just wanted to dance & drink & forget about the 61.7% votes

My silk dress falls to my knees with the same swiftness
defiant as the white feminist who said “I’m your ally”
then voted for the demise of our nation’s most ignored
underpaid, imprisoned & impoverished citizens

Every day there is a telephone near 
I miss my mother
In the waiting room of the OB/GYN
Uptown bound on the dirt orange train seat of the subway
O! How my mother loves the places she can never go
Her bones swaddled with arthritis & smoke
So she relies on my daily bemoans

The train smells like yesterday, Ma
They raise the tolls & fix nothing for the people
My landlord refuses to fix my toilet, my bathroom sink, my refrigerator
The city is annoying like an old boyfriend, always buzzing about nothing 
& in the way of me making it on time to the polls
This woman didn’t say thank you when I held the door
& who does she think she is?

Each time I crack & cap on the everydayness of my day
My mother laughs as if she can see the flimsy MTA card
The yellow cabs that refuse to stop for her daughter
In these moments she can live again 
A whole bodied woman with a full mouth
to speak it plain

I ask my mother what hurts? 
What hurts? 
How can I help from here?

3000 miles away
Alone in a tower between the sea 
& the Mexico borders

My mother sighs a little sigh & says
Nothing
I just wanted to hear your voice

            , because there was yet no lake
 
into many nights we made the lake
             a labor, and its necessary laborings
to find the basin not yet opened
in my body, yet my body—any body
wet or water from the start, to fill a clay
, start being what it ever means, a beginning—
the earth’s first hand on a vision-quest
wildering night’s skin fields, for touch
             like a dark horse made of air
, turned downward in the dusk, opaquing
a hand resembles its ancestors—
the war, or the horse who war made
             , what it means to be made
to be ruined before becoming—rift
             glacial, ablation and breaking
lake-hip sloping, fluvial, then spilled—
  
I unzip the lake, walk into what I am—
             the thermocline, and oxygen
, as is with kills, rivers, seas, the water
             is of our own naming 
I am wet we call it because it is
a happening, is happening now
 
imagined light is light’s imagination
a lake shape of it
             , the obligatory body, its dark burning
reminding us back, memory as filter
desire as lagan, a hydrology—
             The lake is alone, we say in Mojave
 
, every story happens because someone’s mouth,
a nature dependent—life, universe
             Here at the lake, say
, she wanted what she said
             to slip down into it
for which a good lake will rise—Lake
which once meant, sacrifice
which once meant, I am devoted
 
             , Here I am, atmosphere
sensation, pressure
, the lake is beneath me, pleasure bounded
a slip space between touch and not
slip of paper, slip of hand
             slip body turning toward slip trouble
, I am who slipped the moorings
             I am so red with lack
 
to loop-knot
or leave the loop beyond the knot
             we won’t say love because it is
a difference between vertex and vertices—
the number of surfaces we break
enough or many to make the lake
             loosened from the rock
one body’s dearth is another body’s ache
             lay it to the earth
 
, all great lakes are meant to take
             sediment, leg, wrist, wrist, the ear
let down and wet with stars, dock lights
distant but wanted deep,
             to be held in the well of the eye
woven like water, through itself, in
and inside, how to sate a depression
if not with darkness—if darkness is not
             fingers brushing a body, shhhh
, she said, I don’t know what the world is
 
I slip for her, or anything
, like language, new each time
             diffusion—remade and organized
and because nothing is enough, waves—
each an emotional museum of water
 
left light trembles a lake figure on loop    
             a night-loop
, every story is a story of water
             before it is gold and alone
before it is black like a rat snake
I begin at the lake
, clean once, now drained
             I am murk—I am not clean
everything has already happened
always the lake is just up ahead in the poem
, my mouth is the moon, I bring it down
lay it over the lake of her thighs
             warm lamping ax
hewing water’s tender shell
slant slip, entering like light, surrounded
into another skin
             where there was yet no lake  
yet we made it, make it still
to drink and clean ourselves on

eenie meenie minie moe
catch a voter by her toe
if she hollers then you know
got yourself a real jane crow

* * *

one vote is an opinion
with a quiet legal force ::
a barely audible beep
in the local traffic, & just
a plashless drop of mercury
in the national thermometer.
but a collectivity of votes
/a flock of votes, a pride of votes,
a murder of votes/ can really
make some noise.

* * *

one vote begets another
if you make a habit of it.
my mother started taking me
to the polls with her when i
was seven :: small, thrilled
to step in the booth, pull
the drab curtain hush-shut
behind us, & flip the levers
beside each name she pointed
to, the Xs clicking into view.
there, she called the shots.

* * *

rich gal, poor gal
hired girl, thief
teacher, journalist
vote your grief

* * *

one vote’s as good as another
:: still, in 1913, illinois’s gentle
suffragists, hearing southern
women would resent spotting
mrs. ida b. wells-barnett amidst
whites marchers, gently kicked
their sister to the curb. but when
the march kicked off, ida got
right into formation, as planned.
the tribune’s photo showed
her present & accounted for.

* * *

one vote can be hard to keep
an eye on :: but several /a
colony of votes/ can’t scuttle
away unnoticed so easily. my
mother, veteran registrar for
our majority black election
district, once found—after
much searching—two bags
of ballots /a litter of votes/
stuffed in a janitorial closet.

* * *

one-mississippi
two-mississippis

* * *

one vote was all fannie lou
hamer wanted. in 1962, when
her constitutional right was
over forty years old, she tried
to register. all she got for her
trouble was literacy tested, poll
taxed, fired, evicted, & shot
at. a year of grassroots activism
nearly planted her mississippi
freedom democratic party
in the national convention.

* * *

one vote per eligible voter
was all stacey abrams needed.
she nearly won the georgia
governor’s race in 2018 :: lost by
50,000 /an unkindness of votes/
to the man whose job was purg
maintaining the voter rolls.
days later, she rolled out plans
for getting voters a fair fight.
it’s been two years—& counting.

           [Elvira H. D., 1924–2019]

You love a red lip. The dimples are
extra currency, though you take care to keep
powder from caking those charmed valleys.
Mascara: check. Blush? Oh, yes.
And a hat is never wrong
except evenings in the clubs: there
a deeper ruby and smoldering eye
will do the trick, with tiny embellishments—
a ribbon or jewel, perhaps a flower—
if one is feeling especially flirty or sad.

Until Rosie fired up her rivets, flaunting
was a male prerogative; now, you and your girls
have lacquered up and pinned on your tailfeathers,
fit to sally forth and trample each plopped heart
quivering at the tips of your patent-leather
Mary Janes. This is the only power you hold onto,
ripped from the dreams none of you believe
are worth the telling. Instead of mumbling,
why not decorate? Even in dim light
how you glister, sloe-eyed, your smile in flames.

1 
The century speeds along
Sound & dust & color & light

Clouds speed over ballgames & wars
Nerves hanging off them      Women watch 

early election results      Stressed-out women
in hats & choirs     Women sitting under

suburban stars      Women with husbands 
or wives      Housed or unhoused women

with herbs or guns      Women with 
friends & cats       who are always tired   

New medium or old       to the world order      
Who pull their masks tightly after the fires

2
Over 52,000,000 minutes... ...since the 19th 
Amendment,,,,,,  Over 26,000,000 women voted
after that ;;;;;;  mostly only white women because 
of the poll tax...  Now let’s just think about that... 

There are 53 minutes in a micro-century:::    
We place extra dots as eyes for extra vision: : : 
There are two periods in the 19th Amendment      
i place them here .   . for women 

who want to be women or don’t     
We were dodging the little zeroes between mystery 
& meaning.,. history & hope      We were walking or
driving   i was flying left till my left wing broke

3
Some women vote with armed guards      Some 
have their forearms stamped      The branches

of the oak are breaking off      The particle 
spirits are being used up      There are two

men in amendment   There is gerry in gerrymander
There are eyeless vans from Amazon outside  

like hearses carrying the corpse of profit
Some women do not like to vote    They think

the revolution will come faster       The land
is blighted Muriel      Is weather better if you 

order on line      Is earth’s orbit polyethelene        
i thought of not voting but there isn’t time 

4
The great dead teach the living not to hate or   
to try to love imperfectly      At what point

did voting really begin      Wyoming (oddly) 
was the first state      Some practiced law 

but couldn’t vote      Seneca Falls 1848
Lucy Stone abolitionist could not vote

Impossible to reconcile    what you want 
with what you are …… i’m voting extra 

with my shoe ✔✔✔  Applying text corrupter
here for how long justice takes   1̸̡̛͍̫̝͚̍̒͊̂2̴̨̙̱͚̀̽̒͘͠ͅ3̷̻̪̥̗̥̈́̽̎̓͗1̸̡̛͍̫̝͚̍̒͊̂2̴̨̙̱͚̀̽̒͘͠ͅ3̷̻̪̥̗̥̈́̽̎̓͗ 

We leafleted in 1968     Come out of your 
house & stand now      You count too

5
The right of citizens to vote,,,’’’ shall not (she’ll not) 
be denied      or abridged  /// ;;; ;;; 

(i’m adding 46 marks of punctuation for 46 
years till 1966 Voting Rights Act)

by the U******nited States or by any State 
.…..>>>>>> & the names will survive

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,,,,,, Hallie 
Quinn Brown .     .  Mary Church Terrell      

& Congress shall not remove cage kill & undo 
citizens because of age ability gender race 

etc.   Some vote despite perfectionism 
Messy marks     in tiny tiny hollow squares 

6
i voted first in 1972      tear gas    My Lai      Weather 
Underground       mostly voted against things then 

Agent Orange      the draft      had gone 
to the trailer park with leaflets      We were new to 

the Pill     nice sex or terrible      with skinny stoned boys
Smog in LA      We stayed in the dorm      burning incense

Can’t remember who i voted for      ankles showing
under the curtain    Metal bar on top 

like you were taking a shower      Mostly always voted      
Just had the habit      Once wrote in my friend    

The land is blighted Adrienne     Absentee ballot 
i tear the numbered stub then i mail it in

7
Seatmate on the plane      speaks first
older woman      taking care of herself      dental

assistant from Virginia     i suspect she voted for t
Friendly over-60s whiteness is our commons      

Our legs stick to fake leather      flying over some
cleaned up rivers    still adding carbon to the air

Her $12 cheese plate dwindles      We talk     We both
love our jobs    She puts small instruments in patients’   

mouths    i use small instruments with patience      
She’s going to Las Vegas to play black jack Laughs

Our story sails along      inside oblivion     
Our electrons     speed inside oblivion

8
The yellow minutes of our coasts
The saturation of our voices

Centuries of women sick on a ship
Decades of women sick at the office 

Women in tents in a marketplace  
where the orange canary sings beside

the masterpiece they made      At times i hear 
the queen of ants      At times i feel the great     

dead choose for us to keep unreasonable 
joy       & revolution in the craft we made  
   
We fed refusal to the storm      to live
in the dream      in revolt      in realism

          _{for Adrienne Rich & Muriel Rukeyser
            for my granddaughters
            for JB, AH, ER, JR}

Palm-sized and fledgling, a beak
protruding from the sleeve, I
have kept my birds muted
for so long, I fear they’ve grown
accustom to a grim quietude.
What chaos could ensue
should a wing get loose?
Come overdue burst, come
flock, swarm, talon, and claw.
Scatter the coop’s roost, free
the cygnet and its shadow. Crack
and scratch at the state’s cage,
cut through cloud and branch,
no matter the dumb hourglass’s
white sand yawning grain by grain.
What cannot be contained
cannot be contained.

            ^{After reading a letter from his mother, Harry T. Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution}

My parents are from countries
where mangoes grow wild and bold
and eagles cry the sky in arcs and dips.
America loved this bird too and made

it clutch olives and arrows. Some think
if an eaglet falls, the mother will swoop
down to catch it. It won’t. The eagle must fly
on its own accord by first testing the air-slide

over each pinfeather. Even in a letter of wind,
a mother holds so much power. After the pipping
of the egg, after the branching—an eagle is on
its own. Must make the choice on its own

no matter what its been taught. Some forget
that pound for pound, eagle feathers are stronger
than an airplane wing. And even one letter, one
vote can make the difference for every bright thing.