There were jokes.
When I put my clarinet reed 
in my mouth (fourteen 
and C-cupped) I was told 
I had a cute sucking face. 
But Band Camp was clean.
Mostly Mormon kids. 
Mostly nerds. Almost half
never-been-kissed-kids.
Not literally clean. 
Across from the football
field the college dorms
we slept in stank.
Boys’ apartments north 
of the parking lot. 
Girls’ south. Four 
to a room two 
to a bed. We braided 
each girl’s hair into 
increasingly complex 
patterns. We sweated.
The baby hairs curled 
against our foreheads. 
Volunteer parents cooked
family reunion meals 
in the parking lot where 
our two genders met and filled 
paper plates. We ate 
along the lot’s edges. 
We perched on concrete 
curbs. I played the clarinet. 
I marched. Then 
I played the tenor 
saxophone and marched. 
I liked being the only 
girl carrying a sax. 
I carried the reed
with just my bottom lip
and a little teeth. At fourteen
I liked being called girl. 
I liked sleeping by a girl 
in the dorm of girls. 
I offered to turn her hair 
into a chestnut crown. 
I did not like playing 
the clarinet or the sax.
I liked being in it. 
I worked to keep 
my small piece 
of wood wet 
play some notes right.
My job was to not
disappoint.
I liked marching. 
I liked being a point 
of the straight line. 
I could almost step
without sound. 
I knew where to 
stand and I knew 
where I was.

---

Author’s Note: I attended my younger sister’s viola recital early this summer. While listening to her perform, I thought about the role music played in my life when I was younger and jotted down the start of this poem. When I was a teenager in marching band, my relationship to music was simultaneously quotidian and erotic, a chore and a gift. For me, the marching band’s body-heavy work revolved around a week-long summer band camp, where we communally ate, slept, practiced, played, sweated, marched.

Millie Tullis (she/her) is a writer, teacher, folklorist, and researcher. Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Millie is EIC of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal. Raised in northern Utah, she lives in upstate South Carolina.