Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
Exit Poll
Cautiously, I slid the curtain back on the silver rod
as I would when stepping out from a shower, soaked,
and yet I felt no cleaner for having done it, within
myself, following my moment of privacy, especially
not after that sweet sister working the polls presented
me with the sticker—I VOTED—which is really all
I can admit about what happened in there. I’m drawing
a blank now, or I left certain lines blank on the ballot,
or I’ve imagined the whole sordid ordeal and America
with it. When I went to sleep the other night, I swore
we finally had a black man helming this ship that once
ferried slaves; I awoke, over a decade past my alarm,
alarmed to realize that I’d lost my voice completely
despite a good and lengthy rest—or because of it.
Cortney Lamar Charleston
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of three full-length poetry collections and one chapbook: Telepathologies (Saturnalia Books, 2017), selected by D. A. Powell for the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize; Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021), named a best book of the year by the New York Public Library and The Boston Globe; It’s Important I Remember (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2026); and A Republic, If (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2027), winner of the 2026 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, he has also been awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and fellowships from Cave Canem and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, AGNI, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Charleston serves on the Haymarket Books Poetry Advisory Board. (updated 9/2026)