Straight No Chaser

Cigarettes

"I. So Bad

Fourth on the list of things I like,
and shouldn't: the power and lift
of polluted air, gray velvet fibers
gripping pillows of oxygen. To watch
your poisonous drags would be an
otherworldly pleasure. Childlike, I'd
grab for the strands, watch them
weave and dodge through wondering fingers.
I like an airburst with a secret,
the caught and dizzying smell of surrounded.
I choose neither atmospheric extreme,
but the spin of a secondhand high.

II. Strange Fruit

I hid them inside rotted coconuts
and waited, ever prepared to exclaim over
your find. Cylindrical seedlings, odd,
and what flowers they'd grow! Charred and silvery blossoms,
926 in a rim around our island where, instead,
I watched your addiction wane like a noon tide.

III. Maxim

My first love was a murderer.
He smoked the long-stemmed variety,
dripping the black ends on his
own unsuspecting azaleas.
They skimmed his lips like lies,
inside and out (beautiful, simple);
evidence, sublimated, floated away.

After Eugenides but before Smith
we will deconstruct Dumaurier.
We will collage our own Manderley
in misty vignettes, slate-gray
till springtime color bursts through.
You: Rebecca (simple, beautiful),
I will breathe fiery deception.

IV. W

Well. One last prerequisite
(which, in the heat of encouragement, I forgot): I
will not bring them forth till the air is clear.
Wouldn't it be nice to pack the gaps
with cottonball laughter,
winking hazel eyes?
Withdrawal would not last; they
would.

V. Ash

Among artists, grammar is suggested but optional.
'Sended' is, therefore, not explicitly wrong--still shaming,
but you've caught the cracks in my crystalline vocabulary;
the fissures don't shock you anymore.

Anyway, forgiving my ignorance, you hold tight and wait;
we wait, you with cigarette in hand,
each patient draw an attempt to summon her artistry.
Your offshoots and hers share a name, an obsidian sparkle,

and, hitting the tearwet floor, cast a husky black spell.
She weeps in liquid words, you console her with ash.
Slick like oil, the ebullient mixture buoys us,
and we ride its height through her endless jag.

(I am expendable to this trinity. She, after all,
is our soft-voiced Messiah, reading mellifluously from a strange book;
you've got the coffeehouse chic and the cigarettes,
which assets, I will later think, account for how well we blent in.)"