To the Anti-American Teacher…We Knew You Were Pro-World

A clause in your contract slated your signature for patriotism.
You never signed, they never checked, but you took down your flag
after that.
They  didn’t check that either.
So, you stripped and tacked and taped and striped all the flags
from all the world to the walls.

On the east, sat Uraguay, and Paraguay, and Peru.
On the west, we went to Austria, and Hungary, and Bangladesh
for good measure.
But the north wall was your northern star – the shining one
among the rest.
The Chinese stars of social class contrasted against the five-pointed red one, the
one next to the ending of a Tsar in a February Revolution, a marking point found – not in our textbooks – but in all the places you have been.

Oh, the places you’ll go, you began.

In Israel, you had gone in your college years, and you learned of bamboo
tattoos in Thailand, but Korean was a class you completed in
France of all places, and I never had the chance to see the locations of
the south wall.

You were fired.

Over night, they tore you from the walls, lone of which, they left the
tape tacked up in four corners, a collection in each place of a flag
we once saw before us. In my desk, you slipped a map inside.

Oh, the places you’ll go, you wrote.

Such a sorrowful tune.