Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Quitting Smoking  
Christine DeSimone

Dry-lipped, almost middle age,
you are a gnarled tree of memory:
Tenth grade, when Jodie Kassowitz told you
your mom wouldn’t smell menthols.
You used to know many languages,
used to have a stronger

face.  Now you are just a ridiculous person
exhaling in the cold, not sure when to stop.
You were born two teenagers ago
and now you count the decades left—
you use your fingers to estimate them,
wonder how they’ll land.  Every day a list

of undoing.  A Marlboro Red is like tasting
your first lover again, the one whose breath
wept through you like river.  You used to have
a ritual: finish the penultimate last one, the last,
wash hands, brush teeth, change blouse.
You haven’t a clue how to live now,

but perhaps it’s like the redwoods
you’ve visited: between the acres of dense,
silent trees, there are sudden patches
of emptiness, and maybe you are alone,
but maybe someone is thinking of you
as they exhale into the cold between the stars.

 

Chistine DeSimone holds J.D. from University of California-Hastings and practices law in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, Zyzzyva, 5AM, Pearl, and Verse Daily, among others.