April 18: I want a president

[Martha]

I want a president
Zoe Leonard

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no airconditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and layed off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.

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Primarily a visual artist, Zoe Leonard wrote this in the early 1990s. You can see the original here and a cool out-of-print book version here.

More prose poems.

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2021: Cindy Comes To Hear Me Read, Jill McDonough
2020: from This Magic Moment, David Kirby
2019: Poem In Which I Become Wolverine, José Olivarez
2018: In the Beginning God Said Light, Mary Szybist
2017: from Contradictions: Tracking Poems, Adrienne Rich
2016: I Said Yes but I Meant No, Dean Young
2015: Cardinal Cardinal, Stephen Dunn
2014: Ezra Pound’s Proposition, Robert Hass
2013: Wistful sounds like a brand of air freshener, Bob Hicok
2012: Not Getting Closer, Jack Gilbert
2011: Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, Dan Pagis
2010: The Moss of His Skin, Anne Sexton
2009: It’s This Way, Nazim Hikmet
2008: The Problem With Skin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil
2007: Serenade, Terrance Hayes
2006: The Old Liberators, Robert Hedin
2005: Morning Song, Sylvia Plath

+ Today's poem: I want a president, Zoe Leonard