Dorianne Laux

Mine Own Rachel Maddow

I have a Rachel Maddow pin, a small round button
I wear on my vest, just above my right breast, All
it reveals is Rachel’s eyes and forehead, her signature
glasses and eyelashes, her close cropped nest of hair.

Yet someone always recognizes her, the girl at the bagel shop
Oh I LOVE Rachel, the dignified supermarket checker who
lifts her plucked eyebrows and says Well, well, well, if it
isn’t my old friend Rach. My neighbor when I walk out

to collect the mail, Did you see her last night?? My god
that woman should have been a lawyer! We are a cult,
sunk deep in the dungeons of our beds or couches,
blinds closed, porch lights out, waiting for her take

on the breaking news, putting the kibosh on a suspect
political theorist, parsing the rigmarole and legalese,
What happened? Is this happening? How did this happen?
We are comforted by her 20 dollar blazer, disquieted

by the bad omen of her pencil eraser tapping on the desk.
She seems to wear a Trump repellent. No matter what she
says he never calls her out. She’s the star of her own movie,
The Ten Thousand Foot Woman, her sword roughing up

the tree tops, smashing Watergates and Trump Hotels
underfoot, clouds like laurels wreathed around her head.
We can’t go to sleep without her, she revs us up then knocks
us out, her voice a lullaby, her hands thrown up into the air

like startled doves.

Pronouns: She/Her

1 Poem

Mine Own Rachel Maddow

Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux’s (she/her) most recent collection is Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected (W.W. Norton). She is also author of The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. She teaches poetry at North Carolina State and Pacific University. In 2020, Laux was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.