Flag Bag

by Carol Masters, WAMM

October, 2001: San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's staff is distributing15,000 posters featuring an American flag with shopping-bag handles. Consumption is cast as “fighting the good fight.”

Well, it is:
Not a parody, burlesque
Queen of America
hitting the malls
accessorized.
Shop.

Trailing a rag of Old Glory,
the vet comes to the peace vigil
insistent that we must
reclaim her.
We stare at the flag
the way you want not to
look and yet see the exact scars
when someone you love
has been disfigured

They put handles on her
like the tassels on teats
of a stripper—
the President makes her
available.
Fill ‘er up.

Stuff it eat it shoot it
Grab it nab it fill your veins
Take it make it drill it

Does your interest flag?
She's always been a soldier’s
final blanket, glorious crown
for a casket, so fill it
with the dead, fill the bag.
No, fill it with the real dead
inglorious

children, sanctioned
starvation, sanctioned
disease, blood
it all counts

Flag someone down
any passerby, good
Samaritan, Arab, say—

We're dying here
of surfeit of grief
this green ball, jewel
we hold in our hands
pulsates, breath failing
like a dying sparrow.

2.
A woman looks down at her clothes
sees during the liturgy,

sung intercessories, ash—
She says it is like a blessing,

the heroes, the dead, the papers’
billion bits, singed, singing America

the Beautiful, of course it is
holy, a holy place.

Are these, too: Craters,
what they leave

of houses, fragments, holes,
leukemias, fallout, Iraqi

children’s pupils deep
as death, as unreachable

as a caress,
of ordnance,

their sleek chill sides,
what they will carry?