by Lauren Parker
Election Day
In the dark of pre-dawn light, I rushed to the bathroom
where my blood-filled Diva cup fell into the toilet,
a vote for cleaning house, my uterus fed up, my hormones
gripping my quads like a firing squad – rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat –
the militia of my womb emptying blanks.
It seemed the world wanted red,
or to rid itself of that? The toilet flushed its crimson mess.
Alone in the kitchen, I brewed bitter,
I microwaved oatmeal, I boiled my Diva cup sterile.
The clock above our door insisted on its march forward,
one step at a time, uniform in my ears until I no longer heard
the violence of time but acted it. I woke
the children up, I woke my husband up, I opened
curtains to let the dawn of a new box in the grid light up.
It felt like pandora’s box had already shipped from Amazon,
to be dropped at the door a day from now.
All the angry men tussled inside their cardboard enclosure,
could not wait to Valkyrie on arrival.
The women in my neighborhood group chat commented
on a cute picture of puppies at the polling location
by the fire station. Pet a puppy when you vote!
Was I the only one who feared the puppies would be slaughtered?
I inserted a clean Diva cup to collect myself.
Katie Kemple’s poems have appeared in Frontier, Ploughshares, and North American Review. She is the author of Big Man (Chestnut Review Chapbooks, 2025). More of her work can be found at katiekemplepoetry.com. Bsk: @katiekemple IG: @katiekemplepoet @kemplekatie
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Lauren Parker is a fourth generation female breadwinner descended from male charlatans, and thus has grown up to become a very educated liar. She is a writer, zine maker, and visual artist and has written for the Toast, Strange Horizons, The Racket, Xtra Magazine, Catapult, and Autostraddle. Her work focuses on the intersection of class, queerness, and the occult. She’s the author of the poetry collection We Are Now the Thing in the Woods (Bottlecap Press, 2023), Dark Way Down (Animal Heart Press, 2025), and Spells for Success (Simon Element, 2025). She has a newsletter, Do You Want to Do Some Witchcraft?.