ROTC // Bob Hicok
A bugle wakes the sky as boys hold hands over their hearts and aim their eyes at a flag giving wind the only stars it will ever touch.
When they twirl their wooden rifles, I see twelve planes trying to take off made of human flesh and crewcuts.
My new envelopes taste of peppermint. I will write and ask their mothers to send the blankeys their sons went to bed with and held soft to their faces. They will find in their attics the photo albums and baby shoes which are the beginning of pacifism.
On weekends, the cadets wear clothes like the rest of us wear and drink too much with the rest of us and scream from the back of moving cars like everyone I know is screaming and the Museum of Fire is burning down and when they march on Monday, I think we’re being attacked by leather shoes and hangovers.
The Museum of Ashes opens next week.
In their fatigues, the practice generals look like shrubbery moving around campus and I’ve painted my face over my face so hiding is what I do naturally.
When one of the cadets turns out not to be alive anymore in Iraq because of how rude bullets are, they lower the flag half way and speak of avenging blood, a name is chiseled into stone, which is how the stone is moving to the other side of town, piece by piece by name.
Little shadows live inside the names. I’ve been trying to think of something more intimate than the grave, possibly getting in there with the body or carrying it around on my shoulders and stinking of a perfume I like to call “What’s Our Hurry?”
