Boom Chicka Boom

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The following poem engages with an ad for woodcraft tools, as originally placed in the 1939 Camp Fire Outfitters catalog. The listing describes “A lightweight axe for girls,” forged “in one piece so that head can never come loose.” The ad also notes that “the shiny head is often used as a camp mirror,” and the axe comes complete with a genuine leather carrying case.1

an ad for woodcraft tools, as originally placed in the 1939 Camp Fire Outfitters catalog. The listing describes “A lightweight axe for girls,” forged “in one piece so that head can never come loose.” The ad also notes that “the shiny head is often used as a camp mirror,” and the axe comes complete with a genuine leather carrying case.

We desperately need an educated workforce that can create, can innovate design: and we need to tap into that large, untapped resource of girls in America.2

– Sylvia Acevedo, Girl Scouts of America/NASA/Apple

Their self-discovery through that hands-on learning is going to be an important part of their growth . . . When you’re sitting in that seat, when you’re grabbing that tool and you’re actually using it, that’s when the lightbulbs go on.3

– Rebecca Rhoads, Raytheon CIO

Love, drone bomb me.4

– ANOHNI

I want the democracy-to-come5
but they’re getting the mirror-axe girls
to unmake the world

If a tool is an archive of past need,6 what
kind of tool was the atomic bomb?

Ever since, need has been busiest
burgeoning with needs

There are mirrors everywhere and in the mirror
that the tool sometimes is there is also
an imprint of future violence

I am become death

isn’t that what, what Narcissus said?
isn’t that a girl, a tree-downer,
polishing her visage
to gleam?

The drone bombette
remembers Jeannette
Marks: she knew!

“The camera is one of the best guns for the wilderness.”7

O, official campfire axe
O, aperture, pool in which to look her best

Mirror-axe, forged so the head can never come loose

so that the body remains
in so many ways
the head

and heads will be had,
be beautiful

bew, byou, bewbew!

O, prim accumulation.
O, hacksaw!
O, genuine leather to make the case

when being genuine is having
been placed on the knee
of the father

Father, as in fatherland,
frontier-making machine,

As in, kneel, and you too shall
believe! Again, as the great girl Marks said,

“A girl who has learned to camp will not only have her own pleasures
greatly increased, but she will also add to those of her friends, becoming
a better companion for her chums, her father, her brother.”8

Anyway, here we are, back with the thing that empire is:
a pack of Pascalian dogs around the bonny fires, now
set by, yes! set by girls

visual culterati, eyes in the sky!
resource-ful and ready to hack

“I break problems into little pieces,”9
they’re singing,

saying boom, chick
a boom

Notes

  1. See Susan A. Miller’s Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in American (Rutgers UP, 2007) for further commentary on girl scouting origins, and the cultivation of the girl scout as a tool-wielding, ‘nature’-loving consumer citizen.
  2. Raytheon Girl Scouts Campaign ad, Vimeo video, 2:38, August 10, 2018. http://vimeo.com/284418385.
  3. Ibid.
  4. ANOHNI, “Drone Bomb Me,” Hopelessness, Rough Trade/Secretly Canadian, 2016.
  5. Here, I am gesturing to the discussion Achille Mbembe coordinates around planetary democracy and “being-in-common,” the political horizon of which is obstructed by both the ‘mirrors’ and ‘axes’ of our world. Mbembe writes, “the democracy-to-come will rely on a clear-cut distinction between the ‘universal’ and the ‘in-common.’ The universal implies inclusion in some already constituted thing or entity, where the in-common presupposes a relation of co-belonging and sharing—the idea of a world that is the only one we have and that, to be sustainable, must be shared by all those with rights to it, all species taken together. For this sharing to become possible and for planetary democracy to come to pass the democracy of species, the demand for justice and reparation is inescapable.” See Necropolitics, trans. Steven Corcoran(Duke UP, 2019), 40.
  6. Here, I am paraphrasing Jane Bennet’s characterization of Bernard Stiegler’s study of tool-use. See Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things (Duke UP, 2010), 31.
  7. Miller, 149. See also Jeannette Marks, Vacation Camping for Girls (D. Appleton, 1913).
  8. Ibid., 139.
  9. Raytheon Ad.
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Knar Gavin

Knar Gavin is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania and holds graduate degrees from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Syracuse University. Their research attends to representations of environmental crisis in late 20th- and 21st-century poetry and poetics, and they are especially drawn toward engaging the prefigurative political possibilities that emerge in works of docu- and eco-poetry to contend with US imperial power. Knar is a co-creator of the covidXclimate project (https://ppeh.sas.upenn.edu/experiments/covid-x-climate) at the Penn Program for Environmental Humanities, and their 2019 poetry chapbook Vela. is available through the Operating System. You can find their recent essay on the idiom of “climate grief” in Annulet: A Journal of Poetics.

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