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      January 29, 2019American Sonnet in Which the Senate Floor Becomes a Silent DiscoBailey Cohen

      after Wanda Coleman

      You’d never believe me if I told you. Old men
      With their hips swinging to old soul songs on the floor
      Of the Senate. & it wasn’t the genre of their tunes
      Or the way their wives blushed & hand-swatted, or the way
      That the tongues of singers knotted
       
      if another man tried to listen to another man’s
      Song. Everything was embarrassing. The women senators
      Were no help because they hadn’t been invited to dance.
      OK. Maybe that part you can believe. Back to the music.
      With their backs
       
      to the wall & making somehow comfortable
      Eye contact, their bodies moved adorably. They were all listening
      To a song that had made them weep before. All the old men
      were weeping together.

      from Poets Respond

      Bailey Cohen

      “With so much happening relating to the government shutdown these past couple weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the image of the Congressperson, and how more established members react when someone in a position of power subverts that image (see: freshmen Democratic congresswomen). I also started thinking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter lessons to other members of congress, how she told them not to try to act like something they weren’t, but to be true to themselves online (“If you like to garden, tweet about gardening,” on the Colbert Show). This made me start imagining a possibility in which lawmakers were allowed to put their politics aside, and be vulnerable with each other. I’m very interested in this vulnerability.”

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