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# Lottery
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/lottery/
- Published: 2025-09-02T00:04:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-18T20:57:58.000Z
- Description: For once, I throw my lot in with the rest. At the bleak store that sells tobacco and liquor, two bucks buys me this slip that feels sinful and foolish in my hands...
- Author: Andy
- Tags: America on the Brink, Be The Change, poetry, America, Politics, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

For once, I throw in my lot with the rest.  
At the bleak store that sells tobacco and liquor,  
two bucks buys me this slip that feels sinful and  
foolish in my hands. What if it isn’t money I want,  
but connection? This is what passes for community,  
at least, the whole of us on our screens, pinning  
our hopes on a machine that does not care what  
banal, what charitable things we are dreaming of.

Tonight, the machine hands down its prophecy  
like an Oracle that requires no Pythia,  
no Castalian Spring, no priests, for who is not  
an expert now, truth at his beck and call?  
*You are fated to lose*, it says; we sigh, smirk, or cry,  
aware the pot has grown larger, the odds  
still laughable. How many will try again?

I think of America’s boundless wealth, ill-gotten  
or hard-earned, locked in a handful of vaults,  
how the safe-doors buckle but never bend.  
In 2025, what is more democratic than the lottery,  
its prize the sum of our bets on the future?  
What is more lonely and heartbreaking?