Joanna Fuhrman

The Last Phone Booth in the World Runs for Office but No One Knows Which One

Vote for me and I will resurrect
your childhood, not the real one 

with its afternoon soap operas,
but the butter-lemon-cloud one, 

the one invented to follow you
like a poodle. If I win, all our 

rubber chickens will lay gold
(not golden) eggs. The sleeveless 

gown that slips down when you
try to jive will sprout iron-clad 

spaghetti straps. All the bombed-out
history books will grow lips willing 

not only to slurp up the past but
to tongue-kiss you when the future 

isn’t looking. Vote for me and I will
bring back the color green, 

houseboat music, recreational
hazmat suits and mild habaneros. 

You will feel pride in parts of
your body that don’t even exist.

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Joanna Fuhrman is the author of seven poetry books, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press 2024). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, The Slowdown podcast and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry 2023 and 2025 anthologies. An Assistant Teaching Professor in creative writing at Rutgers University, she first published in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.