Make Me a Knife

and ignore all its warnings: “It is not designed to be a hammer, screwdriver, or pry bar and should not be used as such.” Use it however you’d like, though remember it’s intended to sliver through the skin of unknown animals, to reveal the white layer of fat under flayed flesh. Bask in this stowed energy, this shield from the encompassing cold of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Make me a knife out of 01760-6 high carbon chrome vanadium steel: all science and alloy, strengthened in accumulation. Heat treat this metal, achieve HRC-levels on the Rockwell Scale of Hardness. Give me tremendous edge retention. Enable the Alpha Cut, the As-Seen-On-TV-filing-through-a-sledgehammer shit that none of us require, though we secretly covet.

Make me a knife with a drop point blade—admire its teardrop silhouette with all of its implications.

Make it with a burnished stag handle, sawed and lathed out of deer and elk antler. Incorporate the burls of Amboyna, Buckeye, Cocobolo into the custom-fitted grip: veneer sophistication over whatever this constitutes. Complete the hilt with finely polished leather that stays soft on the hands while helping to wed both blade and sheath.

Make it like the badass daggers you buy at Renaissance Faires: ones with deep jags down the side, scabbards embossed with dragons breathing fire. Make it for show, completely unusable. Only buy weapons that require signed writs accepting all liability for accidental injury and/or death.

Make it like the three known knifeworks within miles of home; try to understand why world-class hunting knives are integral to your origin. Consider your town’s extension into all animal-centric death: recall the fishing lure shop run by your friend’s father and its resounding acclaim; remember the world’s largest manufacturer of pet caskets down the street and wonder what significance exists in the deaths of the domesticated and the feral.

Make it with a jackknife switch—a means of concealment and the swish of its magic.

Make me a knife with those callused fingers, long since wrecked under the constant abuse of pressing flat, hot metal to the catastrophic RPMs of a bench grinder. I need the hardness of your burnished flesh. I need the feel of your skin that no longer bleeds.

Make it to race through the gaps between outstretched fingers, like the game I’d play with pens in a high school French class—the ink of the needlepoint tip still reposed under the surface. Let me remember that profound disconnect between language and meaning, between signifier and signified: let me abuse myself in every imperfection.

Make me a knife that can cut and run; can cut off your nose to spite your face; can cut the mustard, cut to the chase. Cut it out.