Stop smoking / we love you / and we don’t want you to die.
I’m not gonna end up a nervous wreck: I told you I’d stop tracing the thin avenues to nowhere
except a scrap of flesh above my heart, the veins running like highways slick with thunderstorm
in the tunnels of my wrists. When I told you to stop smoking, this was the compromise that I made.
You were a martyr: hollowed to a body, all meaning thinned and sucked like fat from a cow
under a butcher’s knife, decapitated. Hello, my mother is calling me to ask if I’m still supple, eating
well and fruitful, asking if I’m writing between swigs of lukewarm beer and I love you! Mother,
in this world, I know people who are nervous wrecks. Mother, you remind me of cashmere,
the same elderberry jam that your mother made when you were young, unmarred and stuck
in the antiquated summers of South Carolina. This is not what all my idols, bronzed and airbrushed
like monsters, told me college would be like: where my mother is begging me for a last resort,
not crying for a reason, but for an ultimatum: we don’t want you to die. Because, she didn’t want a
world where my being was a cigarette burn: an empty, cavernous wound, festering with decay, scarred
over and never healed. Stop smoking. I told you, you know, I’m not gonna end up a nervous wreck
like the people I know who are nervous wrecks. Like my mother and her aversion to elderberries.
Or you, the face on the milk carton, the lingering lipstick stain on the cracked edge of a glass,
the squalid humidity in South Carolina, thick and teeming; something missing,
something fleeting, something gone. I was begging you to stop smoking because you and I, under this
butcher’s knife like slaughter: I, cracking like the martyr’s shell, you, pressing hot cigarettes
into my fingers individually in a campus dive bar at two in the morning, until I screamed and the
glass cracked and the only thing left of us was sheer silence. And then the guitar sounded from
the jukebox at closing time, the funeral knoll of the night, and with ruddy sores on my knuckles
like that of a child’s skinned knee that I toted like a doll, and you, a cigarette between your lips,
young human, nervous wreck, I said we don’t want you to die like my mother demanded of me;
or, I said to the boy who didn’t stop; I’m pretending to know a lot more about you than I actually do.
Audrey Lee is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and attends Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she is earning her B.A. in creative writing and American studies. Her first chapbook Probably, Angels (Maverick Duck Press) is forthcoming in early 2020. Her work has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Sierra Nevada Review, DIALOGIST, The Indiana Review, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, and Teen Vogue. She has completed a residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts. You can find her at www.audreymorganlee.com.
