The General
Fort Riley Community Pool
Big Red One
The drunken lover says
Why I Feel the Way I Do
The Clock
Memorial at Big Bend
Prada Marfa
And If There Is a Day of Remembrance
Uncle Jeremy's Lakehouse, 2005
I Am the General's Daughter
Pearls
Daughter with her sorrow, not ten, finds her father’s guns in the basement. All lined in a row, vertical in their split wood case, they’re as tall as her.
At night he polishes them, sits on a short stool, dips a cloth into a black tin, coos into the barrel of each gun.
He buys her a pistol when she turns twenty-four, as if it were a rite of passage, as if she wanted one. She finds out later he got it for free.
At a range near Fort Belvoir, daughter in her sorrow, she’s buried in eye and ear protection. Her father arranges her fingers around the pistol, yells fire. The target is straight ahead. She shoots the floor.
The girls down the street tell me the unspoken but understood rule—girls can’t wear bikinis to the officer’s club pool. I am 11, my breasts are just buds, I don’t even have pubic hair to shave. I got a two piece the week before, turquoise and floral and perfect. No way anyone could convince me to wear my wrinkled pink one piece. All this is to say—single soldiers sit on pool chairs, sunglasses secured, tattoos glazed in suntan lotion. Some play basketball in the pool. When their arms stretch up to the net, I catch a glimpse of tufts of armpit hair—dark and coarse. Between each play, I feel their eyes move over me. Or maybe they don’t, and I am just self-centered the way my grandmother implored my mother was in her youth. Their eyes are shielded, my body is not. As I take off my shirt and slip in the pool, I swim to a deeper level so my little breasts can’t peak above. The blue of my top blends with the water, maybe I am naked, maybe they see me from under their shades, maybe I am naked, maybe I am exposed. Maybe I’m afraid of my own body.
Get in, bitch, we’re heading to the graveyard. Around the corner from that sun sticky cottage they say is haunted. Who are the ghosts in this place—I’d love to see Colonel Custer, ask him a few questions, maybe. We can stop at the parade field on the way, climb aboard a historic cannon, lay back, sunbathe along its phallic barrel, yell fuck off to any off-duty officer who stares from behind their Swiss Eye Raptors. And when we finally make it to the gates, we’ll pay special tribute to John E. Clancy, medal of honor recipient, for how bravely he irradicated the people of the Flint Hills. Put the bulldozer in the backseat, we’ll need it.
how can you say you / feel unsafe with me / don’t you know I would never / physically hurt you wow / the stars / are so beautiful tonight I can’t believe / we’re here my sister is in / the tent next to us but / let’s have sex anyway i’m not / even that drunk / when you don’t kiss / me / it makes me want / to jump off a cliff you / talk too much about yourself / you really / do you really / do you do / no / I don’t want to talk / about this tomorrow I want / I want / I deserve / more / than what you / give me /
It has to do with my organs, sore from squeezing into pants that don’t fit, with the voice in my head—for the love of god, buy a bigger size. It has to do with the gum bubble that popped too soon, I couldn’t feel it on my tongue. It has to do with the cantonments, the armistice, the mechanized destruction of my father’s brain. It has to do with the mantel not nailed to the dining room wall, the looming threat of the fall. It has to do with my first memory, a dream. I am in my grandfather’s lap, a forest green crayon in my hand, as big as a hot dog. It has to do with how he held my belly, all protruding with organs like any other toddler. Or how we sat on the chair in my nursery, which was also the living room, a large white wall in front of us. It has to do with how I asked without words if I could draw on the wall, him shaking his head. I drew on the wall anyway, he pretended to be mad, but couldn’t be—him in his Brave’s cap, his handlebar mustache curling above his lips. It has to do with his underbite, never fixed. It has to do with the reminder that this was a dream, not a memory—that either way, my organs are my organs, and they exist in both.
Father, let me see you,
if only to tell you
I don’t like the way you listen.
Every story you offer me—sifted
over and over to this point:
a fine, translucent, powder.
Listen to me when I tell you
I touched the wood burning stove’s surface
just to see a blister erupt from skin.
That this was my doing.
That no one has touched me.
That the clock you wind each night
is just a reminder of your own father,
nothing more.
We marched up hills made of sand,
scorpions tracking our steps
to spread my grandfather’s ashes
over an engraved wooden bench.
To any passerby, our family
must have looked lost, if not
for our loss, then for the company
we never kept
tied together by a thread of ash.
Scorpions burrowed
to survive in the high desert heat, yearned
for some sense of relief.
In Marfa, Texas, a fully stocked Prada store
stands resolute in her claim of authenticity.
Built to melt down to dirt and dust,
the heat of a dazed sun, she swallows the impact
of desert roses as they roll down Route 90 like tumbleweeds.
She laughs at the conspiracies—that she is a trap
set by aliens to attract materialistic abductees
who just want a bottomless bag.
Who are they to question her intentions anyway?
She’s seen vandalism and her own innards stolen
on the very night her creators finished,
and yet she still stands—
with hundreds of business cards weighed down
by small rocks at her feet.
And If There Is a Day of Remembrance,
then on that day let our house on the street crumble,
cracked and battered, the claw foot bathtub left
to graze rubble and ash, and the remaining firewood,
cut carefully in the backyard with a steel axe,
stokes the flames enough to engulf the photos
of granny as a young girl in England, faded faces
of brothers and aunties on cloudy gravel shores.
But, let my great-grandmother’s book of poems survive the fiery day.
Let her voice speak the true grief of escaping
one war just to end up in another, how even the Queen Mary
cannot bring us to peaceful waters, or protect
our family’s women from men who will always carry the fire iron.
Let her sing in our memory so that our house
will be remembered for how it stood slant.
As we sat amid bagpipes played by a Scotsman near the lake,
an uncle or maybe a cousin, brought four puppies to the house,
all black and brown and tan, all wiggling and jumping
into the still blue pool through the heavy summer.
The pipes screeched and the dogs peed in the pool without anyone knowing,
and my grandfather wielded an axe, cut wood in the corner of the yard
in preparation for winter to come in four months’ time
“Greensleeves” spread through the North Carolina humidity,
and my cousins drank their beer and loudly proclaimed
their disillusionment with family while their family listened
across the pool over the drone of a mournful song.
My father attempted to keep his temper in check when Peter and Paul wrestled
near the edge, when one dog jumped out and bit Paul’s ass.
The small house stood teetering on wooden legs
with just enough space for everyone to sleep,
except for our great grandmother, who slept in the guest house
down the gravel path, who died that night in her sleep and wasn’t found
until we wondered where she was at breakfast,
who everyone granted the closing line —
at least she died in peace and quiet.
the girl
inspecting military tanks, a gun
white knuckle gripped in my hand. My shorts
necessitate stares as if each eye,
its own turret—aim, point, fire, fire.
I am the one you see in landlocked states,
trudging through limestone to find my mother, a headlight
strapped to my head.
I am in the house
where everything is silenced upon entry,
no reason to turn back now, only blank space
ahead. The grandfather clock still ticking, always
ticking along to the beat of a love bomb hangover.
I am traveling through nightmares, hair raising
as I swim to the corner of a muted family parlor,
stand on water and stare the grandfather down.
I am taking shape in trembling darkness, alive
in a formal living room, a turret, white knuckle punch,
a tank plundering down silences in my wake.
I can smell the spice of Basil Hayden
collect in his throat, almost like a candle
lit— smoke seethes through his teeth.
How perfect they are, the smile of a saint,
they all say to my mother and me—
but up close we can see
the cracks, the chips, the black plaque
built up from years of whiskey and chew,
and even more years spent away from home.
They think him lucky
for never needing dental. The film
he allows to frame the mouth.
He can’t even be bothered to floss.
Susan Muth is a Pushcart-nominated queer writer from Virginia. She is an MFA candidate at George Mason University with a focus in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Rejection Letters, The Northern Virginia Review, The Lindenwood Review, and others. She is the poetry editor for phoebe and immediately looks up the IMDB page of any film she is watching.
