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