IX.

When Rush tweaked the antenna bolted
above his ear, his thoughts grew ubiquitous
as oxygen and snapped, flag sharp, over
the neighborhood. Kids ran to their rooms,

locked doors. Stars and stripes shot
out like fireworks. The neighbor’s grins
stay knotted like a stack of green hoses.
Walking down Thrasymacus Avenue, he carried two

gutter spillways as tableaus. A neighbor ducked
below a window and asked, “Is this the cost of nations:
so a supernova may land among whirligigs?”

Rush conjured the Kittyhawk’s aft and children
across the state grabbed for their throats,
suddenly feeling beleaguered by a new light.

X.

When the flag fell from the clothesline
and landed in freshly cut fescue piled
in gradiating green on the ground, an
actress entered the scene, apron and all,

bent down, and gave Old Glory a reverent
shaking. She repined it on the hyphenated line
running across the property, and hummed
a strange rhyme. The cinderblock shelter,

which swayed behind, balanced like a building
on taut black plastic. “Should we take it one more time
from the top?” she asked her neighbor,

who stopped raking. “I should be reproached
for my politics,” he said, and heaved
together another pile of humus and stars.


XI.

Two men stroll down a medina’s avenue
painting red sickles on empty building sides.
They carry a stencil with worn lines
which drips a dark hue by their feet.

Cylinders in hand, they recollect historic
surges of spite and their father, a refined
doctor who sought to staple the world’s shadows
together. “Remember when he combined

the shades of a man and a tree?” one asks.
“What a rough beast it made!” the other adds.
They chuckle and lift cans toward brick.

“No one lives there,” a passerby ventures to say.
“We know,” they reply, irritated, and
continue to fill the negative space red.

XII.

Revolt is a period piece-- black
buckles, lamplight, brown teeth jettisoned
in cockney sounds. Soldiers
lean bayonets against a log cabin’s wall,

then visit with face painted men. Because
my lines push imperial goods into water,
I am the dead pilgrim in an eighth grader’s
desk. Sam Adams sits captured on page two,

surrounded by calendars and brown
bottles. His portrait hangs in the capital,
amid the dusty blossoms of Bastille Day.

Rings of pine become textbooks,
or a booking room’s primrose glass.
True patriotism looks treasonous.