Rosanna Young Oh
Weekend with Brother in Quantico, Virginia
A good tourist, I keep track of the time.
The Breitling on your wrist, a graduation gift
from our father, warns Family
lunch in an hour. But
for now: Shoot the gun.
The jacked man beside me attends
like a valet. I play along,
I shoot the gun——
and you are a boy, arguing
that it was rain that had wet the bed.
I shoot again——and our father, a boy
playing with Grandmother,
the one we never met.
Shoot again——
and I’m younger, studying
each National Geographic as though learning
could save me from the future:
Ingram’s artillery shells ticking
like watches, the Radium Girls glowing
in the dark until they expired.
Today was designed for us to be together again.
When Mother’s turn comes,
the soldier Ma’ams her, this small
Asian woman. (It would be
the other way around at the store at home.)
She fires, et cetera.
If you asked what I remember
of Quantico, I’d point back to the range——
the field, unchanged,
heirloomed by the sun.
*
My poem refers to the Radium Girls that appear in Nicolette Polek's essay; the author's observation about “a story of sacrifice” cut me through with its irony. I came across a 2009 article in which the American Clock Museum’s executive director, Donald Muller, describes World War II artillery shells as “small cheaply made wristwatches” that clockmakers-turned-weaponsmiths designed to explode after a certain number of seconds. (The U.S. government had shut down clock manufacturing to support the war effort.)
Rosanna Young Oh is the author of The Corrected Version, which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award. She has received support and residencies from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society in Flushing, New York, where she was an artist-in-residence.