Susan Muth

Daughter Bugle

The winter can only be so cold.
The tampering of snow, a sun waits
to peak through from behind her mother’s legs.

January in Kansas, prairies sparse or charred,
where have the bison gone?

The Flint Hills shrink each year.

When I speak of Kansas winds I mean
a gust so strong it toppled me.
Adolescent body splayed across pavement,
so shaken I missed my bus.

When I speak of my mother’s tilted state
I mean she wasn’t always this way.

Once, she stayed up the whole night
to sew my Halloween costume.
From my quilted bed, I heard the lull
of machine, the laugh track of an old sitcom.

I mean that now, I cannot answer her calls after five.

Near the gold vault, veterans filtered out of the Class 6,
gripped their bourbon by handle, jerked off their inhibition
through brown paper bag.

A hops farm made business past the cement factory,
along a creek always grey even in blazing summer.

Ticks fell from sky like rain.

We stayed in Fort Knox two years.
Tanks put on display like décor.

One August night, I straddled the nearest tank,
barrel between my thighs, and the sky
turned cotton candy in front of my eyes.

The mechanism between my two hands,
my forehead down against the barrel’s wide hole,
sat there embracing a lover before parting.

When I let go, rust glittered on my flushed skin,
I could not let go completely.

Iron and gunpowder will never leave my hands.

My mother held my hand as we visited
a grief-stricken spouse.
She only let go to hold the spouse’s baby
as she crumpled to the floor

with the news my mother brought.

This is what it means to be wife of a soldier.

Asked to tell another mother that her husband is lost
to distant desert, to prepare arms for another’s child.

I learned from her how to serve country without firearm,
a skill this daughter has wasted.

Picture a young girl crouching, a young girl
purple in the face from yelling
her own name, the church filled
with cartilage and pews, a town

built in memory of a war she only knows
from her father’s night terrors.

My first everything begins and ends
in bugle call, a stand at attention
when a man speaks.

And what of the trumpet, firing into the night?
A cacophony of mourning, a putrid lullaby.

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Susan Muth is a Pushcart-nominated queer writer from Virginia. She is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Pinch, West Trade Review, Breakwater Review, Chaotic Merge Magazine, Ucity Review, Rejection Letters, The Northern Virginia Review and others. She is the poetry editor for Phoebe and immediately looks up the IMDB page of any film she is watching.