The Helicopter on Fire by Ron Riekki

My V. A. counselor tells me I should write
about the helicopter on fire. He tells me
I need to empty myself of the helicopter
on fire, that I need to set fire to the hell
of remembering, but I tell him I have
written about it, but he says I need to write
about it where I destroy it and I ask him
what he means and he tells me to not think
but to just write over and over and over
the same thing, the exact same helicopter
caught in the same wires with the same
October night where I was raped by flame
and the bodies melted so easily, the chaos
of metal and the crickets silenced so that
the power outage collapsed a thrift store
in my chest, my lungs smoked, hardwood
night where the helicopter on fire owned
me, the helicopter on fire that I see when
I turn off my bedroom light and tell my
girlfriend I can’t sleep with the lights off
or I can see the onyx night with Halloween
so near and the error of the pilot and error
of viewing what was before me, the error
of now, I worry that this is only making
me more neurotic so that I can’t even sit
near a table with an edge, worried I’ll trip
and fall, my eye impaled by table, horror
of the mind, and the worry that this poem
is just repeating what shouldn’t be repeated
but he insists I do this, that I only have to
write this poem ten thousand more times
and then finally the helicopter will melt
from my mind and I’ll be left with peace

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Ron Riekki wrote U.P.: a novel (Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017)

photo: Chris Rhoads