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Each morning before breakfast my grandfather walked to the edge of the yard to raise the flag,
to fly its colors near the heavens. My job was to hold the hard pack of its complications,
the precise triangle of its folds across my small arms, its blue-cornered canton of vigilance
* * * * * * * * * *
wrapped around its red and white stripes of liberty. Never let the flag touch the ground,
my grandfather said. Half mast only on the order of the commander in chief. Back when some things
were said to be better than other things, when wearing the flag or printing it on a napkin to wipe
* * * * * * * * * *
a mouth at a July 4th barbecue was practically a crime. Twice I heard my grandfather say the N-word
when he thought I couldn’t hear. But also, in front of me, he said, Cheese Crackers All Moldy. Stone
of a Peach. His carefully minced oaths, avoiding Jesus, the Christ, the Almighty, the Son of a Bitch.
* * * * * * * * * *
Even then I understood some people fabricated themselves to matter more than other people.
At the edge of the yard, I let the flag’s rough fabric turn end to end in my hands,
separate but equal histories unfurling, as my grandfather hooked the grommets to the halyard.
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Karen Elizabeth Sharpe is from Rutland, Massachusetts, where she lives with her partner and two pandemic rescue dogs. Karen is the author of Prayer Can Be Anything, (Finishing Line Press) and This Late Afternoon (Dunn & Co.) a member of the National Baseball Poetry Festival executive committee and poetry editor of The Worcester Review. Her poems have or will soon appear in SWWIM, Whale Road Review, The MacGuffin, The Comstock Review, Split Rock Review, Mom Egg Review, and Halfway Down the Stairs, among others.