Rachel Custer sat in Lutheran Hospital of Fort Wayne Indiana as chemotherapy dripped into her daughter’s arm. It was October 2016, the week of her daughter’s sixth birthday, and the little girl had just been hospitalized with a neutropenic fever. Suddenly, Custer’s phone lit up with a flurry of emails and Facebook alerts. But they were not messages of support. They were attacks—because her poem, “How I Am Like Donald Trump” had gone live on the online poetry magazine Rattle. “Comment after comment calling me racist and a white nationalist. Claims my daughter’s cancer was fake. It was like they hadn’t even read the poem,” Custer says now in an interview.
Two years later, Custer is still dealing with backlash from the poem. “It’s kind of like dressing yourself in raw meat and jumping into piranha-infested waters,” she says of writing poems in our current political climate. Recently, she published the poem “To the Woman in a Plague Mask Outside the Living Room Window” in the Journal Mag, a literary magazine run by the Ohio State University’s Department of English. The poem was not online long before members of the online poetry community went to the magazine’s editors and complained about them publishing Custer.
