When I told my friend, the composer Laura Kaminsky, in the midst of the pandemic, “there’s an opera taking place in my post office,” I never imagined that a year later we would be collaborating on an actual opera, based on this seed of an idea, and that this idea would bear fruit. At her insistence (and with her ongoing encouragement) I drafted the early poems that would become the libretto for The Post Office, the story of an operatic conflict taking place between two friends and co-workers: the postmaster who is Black and straight, a postal worker who is white and gay. While these are fictional characters, embroiled in a bitter dispute over gay marriage and the right to free expression in the workplace, their escalating dispute parallels real life conflicts taking place among friends, families, and communities everywhere.

Kaminsky is known for addressing social injustice in her operas. Her first, As One, a coming-of-age story of a transgender woman, is the most performed contemporary opera in North America, with over sixty-five productions, worldwide, to date. She has been a remarkable and generous guide and mentor, as we navigate the thicket of the opera world, all new to me, in this, my first libretto.

What could be more ordinary and extraordinary than a present-day one-room post office in America for the role it plays in federally-protected correspondence and, most critically, as a means for how many in this country have found a reliable way to vote? The threat to the daily mail, something we take for granted, is real, as is the certainty of what constitutes an actual postmark. As of the last day of 2025 our mail is no longer postmarked on the day it is posted, but a date somewhere along the amorphous corridors of sorting, a time and date nearly impossible to ascertain. In 2025 the U.S. Postal Service employed over 640,000 people, the largest government employer in this country outside of the Department of Defense. I learned from The Guardian—having turned increasingly to the UK for news of my own country—that “Black people, in particular, make up 29% of its staff,” and “Trump’s agenda for the USPS could threaten the agency’s rich legacy of Black employment, from which generations of Black families have secured wealth and benefits through service.”

The Post Office itself is a character in this opera, made up of and sung by all the characters, who enter the drama on a note of hope:

You enter me the way one enters

a promise. I am the tongue

under the stamp, and the stamp

canceller. I am the envelope….

Another character, apart from the living human beings, is the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, this country’s first Postmaster General (1775), who steps into the drama and bears witness to what’s become of his legacy. When I learned from a friend, the writer Christopher Bram, that Benjamin Franklin was “gay-friendly” and never married his common-law wife, I did a deeper dive into Franklin’s life. What I found was an astonishing, compelling, and flawed individual, and by including him as a character I also found a way to expand the theme of marriage equality to include the larger subject of democracy in one of this country’s most democratic institutions. Franklin secularized the Declaration of Independence (1776), striking a line through the original word, “sacred,” replacing it with “self-evident” (as in “We hold these truths to be self-evident”). He played a crucial role in democratizing the U.S. Postal Service, expanding it from the original role of delivering letters to soldiers in the theatre of this country’s battle for independence. In The Post Office, Franklin is understandably distraught, 250 years later, to find the state this country is in, and addresses the public, as well as those on stage with:

Democracy 

Now dead, still beautiful?

the post office–––civility, decency,

equality, respect. All dead.

Still beautiful?

This near-perfect union,

a marriage of choices, of independence,

an agreement….

all these truths should be

self-evident, but clearly are not.

This experiment… this invention….

democracy… still beautiful,

now dead?

Anything I say to put this chamber opera in poems in the context of our contemporary social-political landscape will certainly change, possibly beyond recognition, by the time the book, The Post Office: An Opera in Poems (Grid Books, 2026) is in print and this opera makes its debut, including the ongoing dismantling of institutions like the United States Postal Service. More people in this country (the United States) will have been unlawfully abducted, detained, and wrongfully deported, injured, or killed for protesting and attempting to protect themselves and the rights of others. More of those who are lawfully in this country will have lost their jobs, left their posts in protest, and have been vilified for taking a stand for truth and justice. I write this in the wake of the murder of poet and activist, mother, wife, and gay woman, Renée Good, and the outright execution of peaceful protester, Alex Pretti, a V.A. nurse, in the act of helping a woman being victimized, both killed by masked ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis. The rule of law we have previously taken for granted is being shredded daily. The ability for friends, neighbors, and co-workers to find some common ground, some common good, despite differences, is strained. What passes for this country’s leadership today would barely be recognized by the Founding Fathers. They, though far from perfect, sought a way to ensure our rights, values that seemed to them to be “self-evident.”

Four Poems from The Post Office: An Opera in Poems

In the Name of Love

Frank, the main character, a postal worker, defends his engagement to Ben, the postmaster, who objects to any public display of this same-sex marriage, and the marriage, itself, on religious grounds.

FRANK
In the name of love, God and I are just fine.
In the name of justice, God
and I are just fine. In the name of passion,
in the name of joy, in the name of
family, in the name of sickness,
and health and till death do us part,
in the name of fidelity, in the name of truth,
in the name of the face of the man I love
next to this picture of the woman you love,
in the name of equality, in the name of marriage,
in the name of love…God and I are just fine.

Personified

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
I contain multitudes.
I am the post.
I am the post office.
I am an open door.

FRANK
You enter me the way one enters
a promise. I am the tongue
under the stamp, and the stamp
canceller. I am the envelope.

EMILY
I am Walt Whitman and Mississippi,
Harriet Tubman and Miami,
Boston and Emma Lazarus. I am
Benjamin Franklin, the first post-
master general.

ANNA
I am the truck,
and the driver. I am your letter
and carrier. I am the jet plane.

BEN
I am your confidant, your bishop,
your rabbi, imam. I am the knock
on the door. I will deliver,
in sickness and health, in a deep freeze
and withering heat.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Even as the earth’s axis shifts like a frisbee, the mail
will get where it is expected to go,
I am your right to privacy.
Listen to me, listen to yourselves.

The Heart Explained

FRANK
The most beautiful thing about the mail is
reception, and the most beautiful thing
about reception is truth, and truth is
justice is honesty, personified, and honesty is
the heart explained, and words
explain reason, and reason matters, is
particular, is personal, as is what we post and sort
and deliver, and delivery is story is voice is
song, and song is country is search is pride.

The Post Office of my Childhood 

BEN
The post office of my childhood was a blonde
brick building with stone steps, and a grand
entrance, heavy doors,
dark

FRANK
Mine was a general store in a farm town,
a single red gas pump in front,
and a woman, we called,
an old maid, a spinster
in charge

EMILY
Mine was a block of iron and glass between
brownstones, a Nathan’s hotdog sign, yellow & green,
in New York. A dyke sorted the mail
and barked instructions.
We all stayed in line.

ANNA
Mine is here, my home
town, this one room I share with
the two of you. I stuff the boxes of neighbors,
and give out the codes, one turn to the right, one
turn to the left.

Words Mattered to You

Listen to Blythe Gaissert, Mezzo-Soprano singing the role of the customer, Emily, addressing the ghost of Benjamin Franklin, the first U.S. Postmaster General in the poem “Words Mattered to You.”

Recorded live on March 22, 2026