There is a war going on outside my window. It is no longer simply a war between sounds, the sucking, screaming storm drains, a billion exhales at once, the sound of the wind picking up recycled oxygen and patting it into the grainy cement, but this is a war between the birds and me.

In the mist left over from a violent, malevolent thunderstorm in the infantile morning of July 17th, I took a carving knife to my torso and pulled my stomach out. It had been giving me trouble lately. I wrapped my hands around the mass, wet and with tough walls, like snakeskin without the scales. My flesh was velvety as I pushed it aside, little ribbons now dangling in a gaping space left in my manipulated body. I journeyed my dripping organ across the linoleum, up to the window coated with jewel drops, and I left my stomach to sleep out on the windowsill indefinitely. I turned the notched knob on the stereo up and my stomach could nag me no longer with its tingling, then burning feelings that made the rest of me itch with the conviction that I could stay stationary no longer. I could dream of shrinking to the size of dew drops and tumbling with diamonds without my stomach’s insistent swells. I could dream of grass blades morphing into feathers, bathing in a sea of irises, becoming ensnared in woven gold off the coast of the Mediterranean… I could dream without inspiration.

The only challenge that remained was to ward off the birds. When the glistening crows first arrived, I contemplated whether I wanted the preservation of my organ, whether I wanted to just let them feast, I don’t need it any longer. I fended them off with screeches.

Every night that summer I left myself lying on the ground. I drifted down the block to alleyways and bathed my limbs in chocolaty mud, lathering adulterated particles dispensed from 15th story windows and passed away, kneeling on the grey surface with a mouth open, void of screams.
On August 28th, I danced and jaywalked patterned white lines on a quest to where you rested. I’d left my stereo on inside my home to bludgeon the birds outdoors with violas and trumpets, my battle inevitable to be won. I floated across the floorboards and laid myself down at your feet. I gasped and grasped at the missing bits of me, the sunset shattering the windows and roaring, pouring itself into me.
You watched me leave myself behind and with the initiating, linear orbs of autumn, the FM waves shut off for the last time. The radio stations paused for hours as shivering lightning electrified the Earth, gave the inanimate movement. The crows descended from the shades of ebony and devoured my insides, stole away my disposed strikes of inspiration. I rolled my eyes down the storm drain and laid down on the rattling curb and just let the ribbons in my torso burn. The radio waves couldn’t course through my disconnected stomach anymore, and as orange painted the inside of my skull acrylic, a white cloth blanketed the Blue Ridge Mountains and draped the Badlands in forfeit.