the fireworks are booming, whose freedom are they celebrating because not everyone is free? police brutality is still happening, kids are still dying in cages, black and brown people are

he bellows from the pulpit about sodomites hell bent on destroying the Christian world through homosexuality. i sit quietly in the backrow eating an apple i stole from a small

We the people willingly wrote ourselves into a constitutional corner— a colossal conundrum of corrupted consummation, a Cain-enabled Original Sin of biblical proportion. The Virginia Compromise left us compromised, incomplete—

We are cautious around flag wavers their eyes shine like dead stars their stripes turn black and white for me their pledge of allegiance a grievance unanswered cautiously I mumble