Bob Hicok

AT THE RECEPTION

Everyone else had gone to dance around a man and woman lifted on chairs, into the sky of the future of their love, when he pushed away his plate, rolled up his white sleeve, showed me the number on his arm and rubbed it as if asking it to grant himthree wishes. I imagine he would have been tempted in the camp to mourn all of the ashes the wind carried on its shoulders across Poland, not knowing which were his mother, father, sister, had he not been so busy dying of hunger. I wanted to listen to the locomotive of his heart, to go to sleep on the pillow of his breath, and should have kissed him on the lips like a lover of life, or at least pulled a rose out of my ear to show him the magic of his survival had endured. But I think he would have said it wasn’t magic, it was luck, that evil was so busy back then it couldn’t get around to all the Jews, no matter how hard it tried. As I watched him shuffle away, I wonderedwhat normal was for him, for anyone who’d seen human beings become bored with cruelty in that factory of death. Later I saw him dancing with his canesince he couldn’t dance with the ashes of his wife. He’d shown me her picture. She looked the way most people look in photos. Plain. Happy. Alive. —from Rattle #84, Summer 2024

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Bob Hicok: “I like starting poems. After I start a poem, I like getting to the middle, and after the middle, an end seems a good thing to reach. When the end is reached, I like doing everything that isn’t writing poems, until the next day, when my desk is exactly where I left it, though I am a slightly different person than the last time we met.”

Related* “Lovely Day” by Bob Hicok * “Things Rich and Multiple and Alone” by Bob Hicok * “Show and Tell” by Bob Hicok