George Bilgere
poetry & readings
Matchbook
When the last smoker
has smoked
the last cigarette
I’m going to miss
that deft,
back-handed,
loose-wristed wave,
the two or three
quick snaps
whereby
they put out their match.
How it flared and died
into a smoky elegy.
Because
the young woman
over there,
lighting up,
just did that
magician’s trick
to conjure my father
from fifty years away.
He takes a deep,
glorious drag, then
looks back down
at his newspaper
and vanishes
into whatever it is
the dead
are reading about these days.
—from the Rattle Chapbook Prize winner, Cheap Motels of My Youth
“The matchbook, that essential feature of old-style film noir movies, is nearly gone. The newspaper is nearly gone. And my father is long gone. But the gestures, the ancient physical vocabulary of smoking (something to do with your hands!) lives on, just barely, and now and then flares up, igniting a host of memories. Like this one.”