by Dorian Kotsiopoulos

My mother steals away to her back stairs
for a quiet smoke. I find her,
wiggle in close. The wooden step sighs.
She exhales hard, tosses her cigarette
in the ashtray of the yard, slips inside.

The bent butt is a broken bird,
the lipstick-stained filter a red wing tipped with ash,
or a folded crane made from burnt paper.

I pick up the still-lit butt, inhale
the flavor of exhaust, grind it out
on my bare foot. A warm red sore,
the start of infection, a secret tattoo,
that calls to me with every step.

The pile of butts a campfire,
abandoned, a thin line of smoke
dissipates from its center, then reappears
in the shape of something familiar,
a pigeon, or a dove.

Someone mentions Lucky Strikes years later,
and I remember how I swore
I’d never smoke, or shadow people
with my clingy, sticky love.
That’s not true. I do both,
sometimes at the same time.

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Dorian Kotsiopoulos's work has appeared in various literary and medical journals, including Poet Lore, Salamander, New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, On the Seawall, Smartish Pace, and Third Wednesday as well as in the anthology, All Poems Are Ghosts (Tiny Wren Lit). She is a reviewer for the Bellevue Literary Review. In addition, she’s recently began serving as a co-director of a reading series in Boston called Chapter & Verse.