A few students in the back rows snicker,

pull at their eyes in mockery. Rats in the trenches

of desks. My eyes narrowed like a sniper squinting
and cleanly taking the shots upon their little bones,

scattering their formation through the study hall.

The ringleader tapped his pen like morse code 
for the others to assemble. I dismantle the rattle

by lobbing a flashbang to shatter

their puny games. Troublemakers ask for a break. 
“Sure,” I say, and release the trapdoor of sharpened

bamboo stakes. Their hostile eyes once gleamed

like a gun under a merciless sun, but now faint
as a distant shore in the shattered sea, as if to say

there will be no mutiny. Outside, autumn she-oaks

were bare as refugees, with nothing but the hulls 
of leaves, ruined. Clouds row past the window

like sailing boats in an ocean-blue sky, bruised enough

for discipline, shallow enough for drowning.