From Palm Beach Florida
- From Palm Beach Florida
One morning Theresa LaPore, an obscure election official, sat at her office computer
upping the font size of names on the butterfly ballot. She wanted her county’s elderly to
see more clearly who they were voting for, only she misaligned font with punch-out hole
and Al Gore’s votes went to Pat Buchanan. She thought she knew what she was doing,
her unintended consequences spiraling out of control. So it often goes...
A moment of inattention or ignorance, of thoughtlessness or imprecision,
and countless small determinates begin amassing in this tensile, capricious, connected
world. How we stagger about half-blindly, we warmhearted unassuming humans,
blunders of unknown consequence always elbow-near; the havoc that goodness causes
directly or indirectly, is nonetheless havoc. [End Page 113]
Gray Jacobik lives in Deep River, Connecticut. Her collections include Brave Disguises (AWP Poetry Prize, Pittsburgh University Press, 2002), The Surface of Last Scattering (X. J. Kennedy Prize, Texas Review Press, 1999) and The Double Task (Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). A memoir in verse, Little Boy Blue, is forthcoming from CavanKerry. [End Page 114]
