It's Like
It’s like three of the four safety mechanisms failing on one of those bombs.
It’s like finding out that your grandpa worked for Wernher von Braun, after Wernher became a Nazi rocket scientist import to the United States. Maybe it’s more specifically like your grandpa’s boss’s boss was Wernher von Braun. It’s like your grandpa enjoying a cup of instant coffee and saying a polite good morning to Wernher von Braun, a thing that almost certainly happened, a thing that is not far-fetched at all. It’s like the Tom Lehrer song being your first association with Wernher von Braun:
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun.
It’s like a B-52 crashing in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1961, dropping two thermonuclear bombs on United States soil. It’s like three of the four safety mechanisms failing on one of those bombs. It’s like another B-52 crash in Thule, Greenland in 1968, and how the plane had been carrying four nuclear weapons, but only three of the four were ever found. It’s like it’s always three out of four, like some sort of sacred ratio.
It’s like your grandfather’s ashes in the basement. It’s like when the ashes arrived in a cardboard box that was, in turn, wrapped in an American flag. It’s like how those ashes have stayed that way for seven years, stored next to your father’s apocalypse-prepper glass jars full of dried beans and lockboxes full of silver.
It’s like how your father’s belt used to be his father’s belt. “It’s like … a way of reclaiming it, you know? It’s like he doesn’t remember anything he did with that belt.”
It’s like when they say “he was an electrical engineer” and what they actually mean is “he designed and built missiles with his own two hands.” It’s like when you find out the Korean War had a death count of approximately one fifth of the entire population of North Korea.
It’s like your grandpa writing to your grandmother from Florida, promising her that the weather down there at the naval base is just divine, but he can't wait to be home with her in Michigan.
It’s like when a seventeen-year-old boy goes to his father’s retirement party after a long career at the offices of Consumers Energy, and grows jealous of his father’s coworkers and of the person his father becomes around them: who is this witty, charming man who actually likes to talk to people? I don’t know him. I’ve never known him. He’s never been like this around us.
It’s like the mid-century cliche of the husband who plops himself behind a newspaper every evening.
It’s a little like that, is what I’m saying.
Melanie Goulish is a writer and academic librarian based in southeastern Michigan. She writes the most about the Midwest and Appalachia, and about queer girls figuring out how to be queer women. Her poetry has been previously featured in Pangyrus and TIMBER.
