Jehanne Dubrow

He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon, dark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets, milk chocolate tomahawks, a bonbon like a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets. He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine descending in a chocolate sea, a drone unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline. He brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown to bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat. Or if perhaps we've fought, he brings a box of truffles home, missiles of semisweet dissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks and chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane, a bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane.

We dreamed of glowing children, their throats alive and cancerous, their eyes like lightning in the dark. We were uneasy in our skins, sixth grade, a year for blowing up, for learning that nothing contains that heat which comes from growing, the way our parents seemed at once both tall as cooling towers and crushed beneath the pressure of small things— family dinners, the evening news, the dead voice of the dial tone. Even the ground was ticking. The parts that grew grew poison. Whatever we ate became a stone. Whatever we said was love became plutonium, became a spark of panic in the buried world.

My copy of The Fireside Book of Verse is as the seller promised—the stapled spine, the paper aged to Army tan—no worse for wear, given the cost of its design, six cents to make and printed on a press once used for magazines and pulp. This book was never meant to last a war much less three quarters of a century. I look for evidence of all the men who scanned these lines, crouched down in holes or lying in their racks. I read the poems secondhand. Someone has creased the page. Did he begin then stop to sleep? to clean his gun perhaps? to listen to the bugler playing taps?