Elegy for Smoking
by Patrick Phillips

It’s not the drug I miss but all those minutes we used to steal outside the library, under restaurant awnings, out on porches, by the quiet fields. And how kind it used to make us when we’d laugh and throw our heads back and watch the dragon’s breath float from our mouths, all ravenous and doomed. Which is why I quit, of course, like almost everyone, and stay inside these days staring at my phone, chewing toothpicks and figuring the bill, while out the window the smokers gather in their same old constellations, like memories of ourselves. Or like the remnants of some decimated tribe, come down out of the hills to tell their stories in the lightly falling rain — to be, for a moment, simply there and nowhere else, faces glowing each time they lift to their lips the little flame. --- This could not be any more accurate! I wish I had written this poem. I LOVE it. ~Ally