Kablooey is the Sound You'll Hear by Debra Marquart

Kablooey is the Sound You'll Hear

then plaster falling and the billow of gypsum

after your sister blows a hole in the ceiling

of your brother’s bedroom with the shotgun

he left loaded and resting on his dresser.

It’s Saturday, and the men are in the fields.

You and your sister are cleaning house

with your mother.  Maybe your sister hates

cleaning that much, or maybe she’s just that

thorough, but somehow she has lifted the gun

to dust it or dust under it (you are busy mopping

the stairs) and from the top of the landing

where you stand, you turn toward the sound

to see your sister cradling the smoking gun

in her surprised arms, like a beauty queen

clutching a bouquet of long-stemmed roses

after being pronounced the official winner.

Then the smell of burnt gunpowder

reaches you, dirty orange and sulfurous,

like spent fireworks, and through the veil

of smoke you see the hole smoldering

in the ceiling, the drywall blown clean

through insulation to the naked joists,

a halo of perforations around the hole

just above her head, that dark constellation

where the buckshot spread.  The look

on your sister’s face is pure shitfaced shock,

you’d like to stop and memorize it for later

family stories, but now you must focus

on the face of your mother, frozen there

downstairs at the base of the steps

where she has rushed from vacuuming

or waxing, her frantic eyes searching

your face for some clue about the extent

of the catastrophe.  But it’s like that heavy

quicksand dream where you can’t move

or speak, so your mother scrambles up

the stairs on all fours, past you, to the room

where your sister has just found her voice,

already screaming—it just went off!

it just went off! —as if a shotgun

left to rest on safety would rise

and fire itself.  All this will be hashed

and re-hashed around the dinner table,

but what stays with you all these years later,

what you cannot forget, is that moment

when your mother waited at the bottom

of the steps for a word from you, one word,

and all you could offer her was silence.

---

Debra Marquart directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Marquart is the author of five books including The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a traveling road musician, and three poetry collections—Everything’s a Verb, From Sweetness, and Small Buried Things. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was awarded the Elle Lettres Award from Elle Magazine and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Her work has received many awards including a Pushcart Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice Commendation, the Shelby Foote Nonfiction Prize from the Faulkner Society, and a National Endowment for the Arts Prose Fellowship. She’s currently at work on a music memoir, Schizophonia: Notes on Life in Music, An Acoustic Ecology.

wilkristin / Foter / CC BY