Loop

Goddamn those whippoorwills, we wanted

to shoot them, our history teacher said. 

–

He’d lived in the woodsiest neck of our district 

since childhood. Of course we’d heard them 

–

too: In the silentest part of the night,

their mating calls and fighting words

bobbing up on loop. Wit-to-woo, wit-to-woo.

—

The whippoorwills called wildest that summer 

I was sixteen. I slept in a shack in the woods

–

alongside a pack of boys: my boyfriend, 

his brother, his cousins, a friend or two. 

–

They’d built the shack a stone’s throw from 

the house, dragged in some old mattresses;

and until October rose in frigid breath-clouds,

—

we camped any night we could. Lax parents. 

Boyfriend and I would kick the others out.

–

Go roam the woods. Go walk to Sevs in the dark.

Season of fever and fireflies. They’d come back

–

and we’d sleep in the earth-smelling night till two,

when the whippoorwill got wound up. And we’d awake, 

we two, as if we were alone, and begin it all again. 

—

No one tells you: after twenty more summers, 

you become whippoorwills. 

–

Mating calls and fighting words rise late at night, 

when children sprawl sleeping. It’s all right. 

–

Mate and fight as if you invented it. Be the call itself, 

old things bobbing up to be sung again. Neither damn

nor shoot a whippoorwill. Hear the beauty of a loop. 

June Gervais is the author of the illustrated novel Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair (Penguin Books), the coming-of-age story of a young queer woman apprenticing as a tattoo artist in the 1980s. June’s poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Sojourners, The Missouri Review, RHINO, Cream City Review, Big Fiction, The Common, The Pinch, Cordella, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

“A flock of birds flying against a backdrop of white clouds in a blue sky.” by Dicky Jiang free to use from Pexels.