Politics 2025: I Take My Marbles and Go Home

It dawns on me that every game/is not itself but the sum of all past games

illustration by Beck Seamons

Don’t know why I bought marbles in the first place—
only someone said, when I came here, that marbles
mattered, that playing mattered, that one could win,
given a warm day in late spring, a spread of concrete
with a chalk circle, a face on the other side eager
with hope. Don’t look at that face, they said. Just 
shoot.

And so there was shooting. And there was
squatting and aiming and planning and moving around
the circle. And there was standing and fetching
what rolled under your uncle’s car into the oil smear,
what rolled into the grass. Shooting, and
the being shot at, and no one brought popsicles.

I simply found myself here. I found that marbles 
was the agenda of the day. Who can blame me 
for anteing up? The face across the circle from me,
and my own face across the circle from you,
and the warm spring, and the shooting.

And the cries of “not fair,” and the subtle elbow 
bump. And the appeal to the crowd and the jostle
of opinion. It dawns on me that every game
is not itself but the sum of all past games, every
shot heavy with all shots that came before, and
all opinions on those shots, the alliances, 
the fallout. 

The sun lolls towards the horizon and a breeze
kicks up and I look around to realize I don’t
like this game, never enjoyed it. Years—or hours—
whatever—have passed, the world
of circles and angles is not the world, not even
much at all of it. Give them here; I’m going home
for today. Maybe we can circle up again tomorrow,
if the weather’s fair.