The black helicopter’s sonic booms are classified information and officially do not exist, but when they happened, everyone would come down off their porches and stand looking up. They would say, “Air Force base,” and point west. When the swarms of black helicopters would pass over us in moments of bad consciousness I would remember the voice in the well saying, “Empathy. Child. All we kill is ourselves.” I would look to the farmers saying, “Air Force,” pointing their calloused fingers west and feel the wars which are endless and meant to be endless ripping open my guts with their flapping blades and I would know I was dead too. And I would know for a moment that it wasn’t only me painting my eyes so black and my skin so pale. It wasn’t something autonomous inside me making me need to look so dead. Dead as the kids dropping hands like bricks, and the carcasses of children God promised to spread around vain altars. Dead as the elite Republican Guard. Dead as Iraqi insurgents and people just trying to drive their cars home to dinner on the only road home that is awfully near a pipeline. Dead as oil and sand. Dead as the conscientiousness of this country that grew me up in vast cornfields jabbering with upside-down silver Jesus teeth at brokenegg-gone-bad sunsets that spill and spill and spill, as if there’s nothing to lose, ever. You could find me wagging my crotch and scars at the warplanes that do not exist deafeningly in vast cornfields at sunset. Trench. Coat. Dread. Locks. Bowler.
Do not take the sky for granted. It falls all the time somewhere. And now there are kids wagging there at drones, wagging their fucked-up trash at no one, at video screens below the cracking sky spilling out orange paths for strange jets and helicopters. So many insects. Mosquitoes and fruit flies. If you want to do it right, let them suck on you. Don’t smack anything painful away. The country itches. It eats you and burns. Always be prepared for the apocalypse. Or rather, be willing to see the apocalypse that is happening around you. Even when it is silent as glass and you can see nothing for miles except the miles stretching out to more miles. Know that it is out there, bred by where you are and so always present to you exploding the silence in silence.
Run through the fields in boots or barefooted in pressed suits and never comb your hair for any reason unless it is to be a dandy. Run through the fields to the woods and collect all the dead things. Curse all manifestations of monotheistic nation God. Masturbate to ghosts by the haunted creek and let your cumming flow long as time that stretches out and lasts so long in this place where people build things like scarecrows and pits and mud is a verb. Hang dolls in trees and let them blow in the wind. Return daily to watch their decay. Cut blood out of yourself and feed it in droplets to the creek like little boats the creek is always hungry for. Let the boats go to be devoured at the mouth or the bend. Let the boats go on like dead crows on the water of endless time that will rot to fertilize a more elaborate nothing of this land of dust and imbecilic violence concealed below the scent of earth, fresh cut wheat, and bleach for their fresh starched linens that glow on clotheslines at twilight like spectral flags. This is where you belong. There is much to be done.
Brooklyn-based writer CHAVISA WOODS is the author of The Albino Album (Seven Stories Press, 2013) and Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind (Fly by Night Press, 2009). Woods was the recipient of the 2014 Cobalt Prize for fiction and was a finalist in 2009 and 2014 for the Lambda Literary Award for fiction. She has appeared as a featured author at the Whitney Museum of American Art, City Lights Bookstore, Seattle Town Hall, the Brecht Forum, the Cervantes Institute, and the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.
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