"Cemetery Clips" by Victor Smykal

Cemetery Clips

Victor Smykal, Point Park University

Artist Statement: "Cemetery Clips," like many of my other pieces, interrogates the images of masculinity and violence homogenized and broadcast across our culture. Through the virtues of divorce and an inordinate number of male cousins in my generation, the members of my extended family are predominantly male. "Cemetery Clips" uses the familial figure of the "cousin" to examine the many masculine roles valued in modern American society, contrasting them with a funeral setting. With grief. 

I come from a union household, but don't have a union card. I come from a suburb of a dead city in the Rust Belt. All my extended family and parents can enter an American Legion, but I cannot. The speakers of my poems can only comment on what they see, operating in this transitory space between insider and outsider. 

As both a member of this younger familial generation of men, and as one who struggles (or fears) to claim allegiance with them, I hope that this poem doesn’t come across as overbearingly testosteronic. 

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You’re thinking you’ll pull up to the next psyop cloaked in chainmail, 

each link a bullet casing 

from grandpa’s twenty-one-gun salute. 

Since cousin Ron in Texas now dries jerky and prays

over each kill, hawking 

his wares at county fairs. 

And cousin Tony helivacs troops in Afghanistan, 

gathering limbs, and injured reserves, and 

pink mist, just to tear 

bicep tendons picking up a golf ball

off a par four in Oil City 

Country Club. 

And cousin Ed in Duluth works from home 

with a son in Coke-bottle glasses 

who can’t hold a Wiimote straight, 

and cousin Connor pours wine in hotels,

the rent of his condo rising 

with tropical smoke.

And the cousin who bartends sober, the cousin who scouts Detroit 

Pistons, the cousin who’s published in Catholic mags 

for his courtside faith, the cousin 

who doesn’t talk no more, the cousin who fell 

into a funeral ditch all gotta 

pallbear with you, moonwalking the casket back up the aisle 

to the sound of taps, because you can't 

make a three-point turn.