She's An Apparition

Plastic American flags in front of a Dollar Store. 

Everyone wanted to say she was younger than she was, as if she’d been using anti-aging face cream, and doing pilates every week.

Politicians and frat boys loved to claim her as their own, wearing specific colors in even more specific styles and…things, stuff: flags, socks, t-shirts made in far flung countries. Condoms. She never wore anything with primary colors in the before-times. They also liked to claim that she didn’t align with certain groups of people or religions. Men created rules and regulations about how she was allowed to express herself — her body, her mind, her history. What she was allowed to think, feel, and wear.

They claimed she was dirty and faithless and yet, they had no shame when digging into her. The soil from her body on their hands and her blood dried into their fingernails. They did not feel conflicted or hypocritical as they kept assaulting her for two hundred and fifty years… two hundred and fifty years, plus years and years.

This isn’t a birthday as much as it is a milestone. A milestone she, and all of us, are being forced to witness and acknowledge. It’s not a “happy birthday”. It’s “this is a milestone.”

She’s an amalgamation of everything they love to love and hate.

She’s an apparition.