The small vinyl case like a mouth,
the silver clasp like lips. Always
with her, it spoke all day. Twenty
times or more. Open it up and out came
the word cigarette, which meant
small pleasure, which meant
relief.
We sat in the back of a blue Datsun
as it rolled over the Delaware Bridge,
a mobile capsule fueled by nicotine,
our mother on her way to work or back.
We thought nothing of it, the invisible
tar swaddling, the floating
chemical hug.
When I got older, I hid the case
and gave lectures. Older still and
I snuck to the cold stone basement
to try it, to know what it was like.
It tasted of home, of menthol
and mystery, was a spiny
sea breeze.
Out of eight kids, only two never
took up the habit. The rest of us liked
that glowing, the fire in our mouths.
And so we became smoke, the smell of it
everywhere in our clothes and in the walls.
We ate it, bathed in it, took it everywhere
with us.
Mom had her first one in nursing school.
It showed she was a modern girl, helped
with her nerves. She had an ashtray
I loved—half of a huge mollusk shell. Now
it’s mine, though we all quit years ago,
except for Mom, even after the cancer,
the crumbling jaw.
The ashtray sits on my dresser, insides
no longer sooty, but pearly as heaven. It
served her well, holding twenty-thousand
days and nights, life measured
in crushed Salems, their pink lipstick tips
proof of minutes burned
clean through.
I take off the fused glass ring—sky blue—
embedded with swirls of remains, place it
in the shell for safe keeping. Half
the beauty and half the sorrow
of the world rest in that sea creature,
which lit each place we lived,
the homes where
she took care of ten people or tried.
No doubt she’d be annoyed by this storage
arrangement, maybe even notice the anger in it,
then slowly smile, slowly nod because it’s funny
after all, how our hapless bodies end: ashes
to ashes, bone to glorious
bone.
