Fourth of July
By Diane Raptosh
Using your words may be a problem today,
says a voice behind my head, so I will try
to play a song. To speak a summer croon
against the night and toward the desert
softness leaning on the elbows of the room.
The muse is tired but the house can hum:
That lurid, slow collapse puts in for calm;
its moon invites up circumspection’s bones.
The fireworks break out to write the hook—
the state so adrift in its trauma response
the sonnet grows impatient with its book.
The state is wayward but the truth is calm.
Despite the rockets’ red groan and hot noise-bleed,
the song conscious it is done because it has to be.
Author Bio: Diane Raptosh’s collection “American Amnesiac: (Etruscan Press) was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award (poetry). She is the recipient of three literature fellowships (Idaho Arts Commission) as well as an Alexa Rose Foundation Grant. The winner of Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence (2018), she was Boise’s Poet Laureate (2013) and Idaho’s Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). Her ninth collection, “I Eric America,” was published in 2024 (Etruscan Press). A highly active ambassador for poetry, she teaches literature and creative writing as well as courses for the criminology program at the College of Idaho.