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      March 30, 2025Tonya LaileyExecutive Orders

      Who, in a back room, prepares the folders? The ones
      that look like menus from ’80s family restaurants.
      In the office, there’s always a person, let’s be honest,
      a woman, who procures the staff birthday cards
      then devises a way to circulate them—in a binder, a folder,
      within a pad of paper—for discreet signing by fellow
      workers. Does the executive-order-folder-preparing-
      woman take care of the White House birthday cards
      too? I wonder. May I take your order? Does she
      say that before whisking the folders off
      to the Office of the Federal Register to be given
      a sequential number?
       
      In today’s New York Times photo, just one folder lies
      open on the high gloss of the Resolute Desk. Oak
      rests below the thick polish. Timbers taken from the British
      ship that shares the desk’s name. Earlier NYT photos
      showed folders in stacks, like at a hostess station
      where families wait to be taken to a table. I remember
      those months too, when there were so many birthday
      cards to sign at work that eventually I just signed
      my name without much thought for whom it was for
      or what anyone else wrote. I’d grab a juicy, inky
      marker, like a Sharpie, and use my time to form every
      letter in my name, as if that were the gesture, as if
      that were the work. I learned recently of an English
      ancestor on my dad’s side, who mastered his art of making
      wooden bowls. That’s what he learned to do in life,
      so that’s what he did. He turned wooden bowls
      with a pole lathe. Elm mostly. I read he didn’t concern
      himself much with what happened to them
      after he’d made them. I once found a photo of him
      in his work shed in an archive online. He and his lathe
      in a murky light. Behind him, tower after teetering tower
      of empty wooden bowls.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Tonya Lailey

      “The photos of President Trump at the Resolute Desk signing executive orders are piling up. For whatever reason, the March 26th one hit me in a new way. Maybe it’s the Sharpie and seeing the name Donald being fully written out in big thick ink. I had been noticing how repetition renders ordinary the story of relentless executive orders. I wanted to explore the ordinary, the simplicity in the act of singing in an office, be it the oval one or otherwise, the familiarity in the office work involved, the movements of people and papers. It is curious to me how such reckless and deadly expressions of power nonetheless adhere to certain codes of conduct, certain rituals. My ancestor’s empty bowls flew in while I was writing. I feel they belong here.”