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      August 18, 2020Kamala Harris: U.S. SenatorAlejandro Escudé

      My divorce mitigator
      had an office across the street
      from a Bed Bath & Beyond;
      it was a huge store, and I thought of going there
      the way one thinks of going
      somewhere one happens to pass by
      and never does because I needed to park
      underneath a twenty story building
      to meet my ex wife and this other woman
      who we hired to file the divorce paperwork
      and to suggest how we might split
      amicably—and I remember, quite distinctly,
      the way one remembers something
      that was part curiosity and part pain,
      my ex-wife pointing out the sign on the office
      next door to the mitigator: Kamala Harris,
      US Senator. It was such a plain
      looking door, brown, as the floor was brown,
      brown my feeling as my ex-wife noticed this.
      I remember thinking how interesting
      it was that she pointed it out, both of us
      starstruck by a stupid brown door
      with a name on it, the name of the woman
      who had just faced down Joe Biden,
      a woman who rented an office
      on the seventh floor of this nondescript building
      on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles
      where I was meeting with a mitigator
      and the woman I was married to
      for seventeen years, who I had
      two kids with, and who was now divorcing me
      while simultaneously pointing out
      the name on a door: Kamala Harris,
      and the electric blue Tarantino sky
      behind it all, and the bathroom
      that was across the same hallway
      for which you needed to ask for the key
      and how I asked once and went in
      and felt a tightness in my chest,
      I thought I was having a heart attack
      though I wasn’t, it was more an existential thing,
      as in where am I and what is happening?
      I needed to take a break from negotiating
      the way politicians negotiate,
      the way they bicker on bright stages
      that are just stages and nothing more.

      from Poets Respond

      Alejandro Escudé

      “Life is surreal. There are these moments of divine yet absolutely useless premonition. Harris showed up in the tapestry of my life the way the poem describes. I’m cynical, so I think it means nothing. Will she become Vice President? I don’t know. But I do know that this incident occurred, and I remembered it when Biden chose Harris as his running mate.”