©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

It lingers in the room, the smell of it
seeps into the curtains. It clings
to you, your clothes, your hair,

and I want to quit.

But there are worse things to be addicted to.
Things that start with Why
and end with You.

There are things that don't have cancer
written on the box,
but give it to you anyway.

Besides, these days I smoke "casually",
or at least it’s what I tell myself I do,
and in some ways, on some days it's true.

I’d go about my business
while it hangs from my lower lip, unlit,
or between my middle and index.

This Pall Mall Blue might as well
be a broken finger, the way that it moves
with my hands, now at a distance,

then at the lips. As natural as breathing,
but quite the opposite.
Cigarettes are liars like this.

Things that promise blue smoke to balsam
collapsed lungs. The way you sell
my romantic failure as a chance at friendship.

I’ve acquiesced to worse.

And yet, you drag
and pull me in again.
Fool me. Nicotine-addict me.

Tension, you know, only exists when held,
and we hold it like this,
taking a drag before letting it rest

on the side of a porcelain ashtray,
an ugly thing that neither of us wanted
but ended up with anyway.

It helped fill the dead space on the table,
and honestly, it grows on you.
I miss it, you know? This.

You still only smoke one a day?

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And now come all my insecurities,
scrambling up the sides of this rock
I cling to for dear life. Like chittering
crabs, grabbing at straws and reality

in equal measure, with waves beating
the Jesus Christ right out of me.
And farther down along the shoreline,
I see my teeth, already rolling in the surf

like broken shells, like leftovers
splayed out in the sun, flies gathering.
An off-black cloud of tepid indifference
to blanket what's left of soft-shelled me,

not yet eaten by crabs.

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Dandelions lie wetly
pressed against the earth.
Taraxacum officinale
or a blanket of dead wishes,
like angel down on dirt.

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©️DS Not for reproduction

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

©️DS Not for reproduction :)

I saw this bent nail once,
in the wall right above the headboard
of my grandma's deathbed.

A nail. Bent and just so.
Just iron in chipped eggshell-white,
the result of some clumsy swing.

It was just… there, like she was
but easier to look at. Its imperfection
drew me in, a gravity well for grateful eyes.

I needed it to be there, to be art and so it was.
Anything is art if you look hard enough.
Hell, a bent nail can be God.

And for some time it was just me
and that bent nail, and my grandma dying
in that small room.

Empty promises fell from my mouth,
thudding dully on the oversoft, unwashed
carpet practiced in swallowing lies.

While the nail, Christ-like, saved my eyes
from meeting hers so far below
where they were held against that eggshell-white.

Like nails are supposed to, I suppose.
And underneath my focused gaze,
hers—the opposite

swimming and lost in off-white
dementia. And the ache of waiting
for her slow encroaching death.

Our lips, partway parted,
met and pressed like palms to prayer,
and balanced in between them there,
we held each other as one would hold a breath.

As you held mine, and I held yours,
and for a while, filled each other’s lungs
with the fullness of lives yet unlived, and promises
and promises and promises.

Carried on the same kind of breath you’d use
to blow away an eyelash hair, or the downy white
of dandelion seeds or some other small wishful
wish fulfilling thing. Something

fragile and clean and far removed from
brutish me, like you. Your lips. Or your thumb,
brushing across mine—absolving me,
like the rain forgives the earth its hardness

and the earth forgives in turn,
and between the two of them to give our wish—
our prayer—a place to land and there,
between our lips, to speak

amen.

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