Through the nation's perilously divided plight, our flag is still there and steeped in meaning

== I ==

Third grade. Mrs. Lovitt's class. She tells us to stand and face the flag. The principal's voice comes over the intercom, I pledge allegiance...

== II ==

Draped over my grandpa's casket. "He was in the service," my mother whispers, "During the war." I will never see a war like the war he survived, nor understand that kind of sacrifice. Years later, my mother passed her father's flag to me. She showed me the spent casings in the folds. I rattle them in my hand like change.

== III ==

My hometown, in the 1980s, there was an unspoken competition over whose flag was bigger, the Toyota dealerships or Perkins. Perkins had a spotlight on their roof that backlit the blue sky and white stars.

== IV ==

United States of America written on the miniature Space Shuttle Challenger that Christa McCauliffe holds in a photo. Then Christa McCauliffe raises her right arm to wave, the one with the flag patch on the shoulder, as she boards the real Challenger. My teacher screams. Someone rolls the AV cart from the room.

== V ==

September 11, 2001. Three firefighters, covered in ash and dust, standing in a valley of destruction, raise a found American flag up a bent silver flagpole from what would eventually be called Ground Zero.

== VI ==

The soft thunder of horses' hooves. My husband stands and removes his hat. His father stands next to him. The posture of a soldier so quickly returns. This same posture is echoed in the officer who, a year later, presents my husband's flag and says, "He made his country proud."

== VII ==

I sew a flag patch to a Quilt of Valor I made for a Marine who served three tours in Afghanistan. He once said, "It would be easier for me to kill a man than a deer. I am thus programmed." Inside the quilt, I have sewn a stanza from his favorite poem, "He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all."

== VIII ==

Fourth of July weekend. Payette National Forest. My partner and I set up camp and then go for a walk. It's dusk, and the tips of trees are bathed in gold. "Seriously?" my partner says, and I follow his eyes to the top of an old and tall Lodgepole Pine. There, someone has tethered an American flag. Beneath it is a MAGA flag. Both are wind-worn, tattered, entangled in the tree limbs. Later, a U.S. Forest Service forester and his wife will spend their day off climbing the pine, cutting the ties.

== IX ==

We continued to walk, picking up the pieces of both flags. I bend to untangle a string from the brush and think of Kelly, a Picuris elder whom I met at Nambe Feast Days. We sat beside each other as dancers in traditional regalia brought in the American flag. After he put his Native Veteran cap back on, he pointed to the flag and said, "I may be only one thin string in the flag, but I am one string." A breeze pulled the flag to attention, and Kelly nudged me with his elbow and said, "Definitely a red one."

== X ==

Don, a former Marine and Vietnam veteran, replaces the flag on his house before a months-long trip. He then replaces both floodlights. Says they will turn on at dusk. Says that if anything happens to the flag, I should call his friend, another Marine. In the afternoon light, as the colors unfurl above his cement driveway, Don raises his right hand to his forehead.

== XI ==

In a Fourth of July Facebook post from Utah's Black Lives Matter Chapter: "When we Black Americans see this flag we know the person flying it is not safe to be around," the post reads. "When we see this flag we know the person flying it is a racist. When we see this flag we know that the person flying it lives in a different America than we do. When we see this flag, we question your intelligence. We know to avoid you. It is a symbol of hatred."

== XII ==

Mickey is 8 and a Native Idahoan. From the passenger seat in his dad's car, he flips off anyone who flies a distorted version of the American flag.

== XIII ==

My friend Sara and I stare at the idling truck, then watch as it pulls away. The tattered and wind-whipped American flag lifts from its rest as an old dog might to loyally follow his master. We have been talking about a divided nation and state politics. We have been talking about what it means to us to be an American. We were in town to teach hope. She thumps her chest with her forefinger, "Goddamn it," she says, her pounding like a distant thunder. "It's my flag, too." ♦

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of the collection of poems, Camped Beneath the Dam, and co-editor of two anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. Fuhrman is the associate director of the graduate program in creative writing at Western Colorado University. She resides in West Central Idaho.

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CMarie Fuhrman

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). She has forthcoming or published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Platform...