In Tobacco Country
these days I settle for a contact high
off the taste of all the lies I swallowed
standing in the kitchen, listening to the phone ringing
she’ll call me up and we’ll laugh till it hurts about
how it was the goddamn cigarettes, after all
just like the blue-eyed model on the boat
smiling at addiction like it wasn’t a killer
skin like no time elapsed, last smoke
collapsing into the first, a killer’s
indistinguishable from its past. smooth plastic
gas station lighter. burn. snap. smoke sipped
inward, unfurling. the funny thing
about denial is how it tells the future
in reverse. curled shavings dropped like crumbs
on every surface, static cling springing to her
fingers after she slips off the shrink-wrap
on a new pouch of natural tobacco
Those things’ll kill you, she would say
indicating with fingers tipped along the grip
of a hand-rolled cigarette, the slim white
filtered sticks – mentholated or plain –
that I admired inside her magazines, the ones
she never smoked, in chains, but died of lung
cancer anyway, in central Kentucky, in tobacco country.
published in Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Issue 47: September 2023