A Story about Cigarettes
Joseph Conlon
You know I hate the smell of cigarettes.
My father used to wave them wide and high.
Its smog would creep
into walls, into my room, into my sheets,
under the saggy pores of my cheeks.
I would raise a holler all misty-eyed
and raspy around the
collar, but the smell,
I remember it, like a lucky lighter,
burned into my head like a cig-stabbed carpet.
The smell was a car’s funeral, a sinking of a
grimy vessel, the cremation of an unknown body.
You know the day my father died, as I moved to his casket, my tears swelled up
from the smell of his jacket.