My United States

The American flag, reimagined from inside the dream of a country that finally kept its promise. The stripes are built from flowers and tunnel backward into an endless mirror, receding into infinity, a thousand versions of the nation stacked behind each other, each glowing a little further into a future we weren't sure we'd reach.

The colors refuse to behave. Not the red-white-and-blue of the ballgame, but neon saturated past respectability: the palette of a dance floor at 2 a.m., a Pride march, a drag queen's eyeshadow catching the light. Someone took the most policed symbol in America and dipped it in blacklight until it confessed what it always contained, us.

A flower is a soft thing to build a nation from. Flowers are what we lay on graves and throw at weddings, grief and celebration in a single gesture, the whole queer inheritance in one bloom. My United States, the title insists, not the. Mine. A claim and a correction at once: I was told this belonged to someone else, and I am taking it back one glowing petal at a time.