I don’t smoke, but sometimes
life calls for a cigarette.
Because a war is always on
and my father died of an illness
I will never understand,
I inhale poison on occasion.
Then I blow the smoke out slowly.
Afterwards, I want the taste out of my mouth.
I suck on sweet, hard candy
Life can be sweet
and I try to remember my father
when he was young.
When my sister and I were little,
he told us that he smoked cigarettes once
for a week, when he was fourteen -
And then I realized how stupid I looked
and I never picked up a cigarette again.
I believed him, the way other children believe in Santa Claus.
Years later, my Aunt Millie told me
she was the first one to see the first sign
of his illness: sitting in a corner of her kitchen,
a cigarette perched between his fingers,
she noticed how they trembled.
He hadn’t noticed it yet himself.
The story made me love my father more
than I already did, if that’s possible.
He picked up a cigarette every now and then.
She said it casually, and I imagined my father
in his sister’s kitchen, dreaming of a life for his daughters,
a life that never called for a cigarette.
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