Ina Roy-Faderman
In Case of False Flags: Instructions
Find a flag of many colors.
Watch the blue leach
into the earth.
Indigo is toxic
or is beautiful.
The human eye
can’t tell the difference.
We have made a world of patches,
mottled like a skin horse.
Avoid the twice-mended uniforms:
they can’t be quilted into a comforting whole.
From a distance, check the stitches—
white and waxy
like dental floss—
are they embedded in the collar
or into the flesh beneath?
This is not a question you should answer:
what is humped under that flag?
The rain burns
and over time can
fade the bands of blood
into the color of bone.
All that’s left is
a white scrap of silk
drooping from a stick,
surrendering to soot
and wind and
sand and sunlight.
You can’t break glass
for this emergency.
Instead:
Stand in front of a classroom.
Tell the children that primary colors
have been known to bleed
into one another.
Ina Roy-Faderman’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Right Hand Pointing, If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017), Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2017), and elsewhere. Recent honors include Outstanding Poem (Richmond Anthology of Poetry) and a 2018 Pushcart Prize nomination. A native Nebraskan of Bengali heritage, Ina teaches bioethics for Oregon State University, is a fiction editor for Rivet Journal, and is the librarian at a school for gifted children. Further information can be found at inafelltoearth.com.
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