Mark from High School said his suite mates
drove home and got it our Freshman year,
this absolute unit of an American flag
grand enough to communicate
Something/Everything Was Wrong
at that exact moment in time &
I don’t think this timeline of Amerika will ever recover from it, really, but
this flag spanned the outside wall, five floors up,
hung between the suitemate’s window & his
weighted with beer cans at the bottom corners
working overtime as shiny, yeasty wind chimes,
beating themselves on the brick in a breeze
a Just Married! announcement
of future wars & pestilence.
I still don’t know how the four of them
hung it between the two windows,
Mark’s suite mates
plus Mark
plus his Palestinian roommate;
the same roommate
the University sent home
with all the other Middle Eastern exchange students
later that semester <i>for their safety</i> but you know
& I know that was a half-truth reason.
Everything was so Wrong
that housing let Old Glory wave
for roughly a week,
ending with a gentle
pat on the wrist &
we-have-to-make-you-take-it-down,
it’s-a-fire-hazard, so sorry,
& not a word was uttered
about the beer cans, either.
Heidi Taylor (@AquariusRevival) is a poet & philosopher + developer of the Mattel Aquarius. A native Kentuckian, she is a team reader for Taco Bell Quarterly (@TBQuarterly), proudly serves an IT Technician in Niagara Falls, NY, & holds an MFA of Poetry from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing (@SpaldingWriting).
