Laura Ruggeri

UP IN SMOKE - A poem about war and exile

Ash on my sleeve,

Lingering smell of trail-blazing and bridge-burning 

Acrid promises made among the ruins of cities choking on smoke.

You, torch carriers, beware sudden gusts and changing winds

Scattered embers that burn holes and turn cold. 

I should know.

​

I guard my cigarette with a cupped hand

As the day slowly sinks shapeless under my feet.

A smoker for 40 years, my only constant among life’s variables

Threadbare identities cling to coats I refused to turn

I was Larissa and Vlatko’s son

I was a student

The citizen of a country of smoke vanished from maps.

Inhale. Exhale.

Inhale the present (small impotent drag)

Exhale the past (without coughing)

Bony back against this metal fence

Desiccated fingers play with a plastic lighter.

I never walk and smoke

Walking takes you somewhere, smoking makes you endure

The place you are in.

​

For hours/ days/ months I knelt on sand bags like a penitent

Drinking words brewed from my ancestors’ bones.

Bullet-scarred buildings seen through the scope of a precision rifle

Urine stench in my nostrils, chipped cup on the sill.

If you miss the target, you become one.

Inhale. Aim. Shoot. Exhale.

My heart, that battle drum, missed a beat

Voices in my head yelled run

If you look back you turn into stone, ahead freezes your face.
The dead were living and the living were dead.

Eyes on the ground I crossed borders, old and new,

Till it was safe to lift my eyes and curse gods I never prayed to.

​

Here the skin of the sky looks pallid and sick

Pierced by concrete, reinforced bars, vain hopes.

Give me a sky that laughs and cries

With geese, storks, cranes and loons,

Cornflower blue or grey like a wet mop.

Return to me the undivided sky that stretches from the Mediterranean to the steppes.

​

I am an ex- (you fill the rest)

I have no masculine energy left to explain

Who I was or what I have become.

A cloud of smoke expelled in a coughing fit.
Democratically excommunicated by radiant guardians of truth

Who protect graves, buttress watchtowers, scrub coffers clean, banish doubt, march to the tune.

​

 I washed up on many shores

Spitting water with my foreign tongue, chewing words marinated in misunderstandings

I traded declension for tones.

Here I blend in diesel fumes, don’t pretend to notice me

I stink less than a Kowloon bus.

I - a fleeting reflection on glass and stainless steel

Address unknown, for a little or a longer while

Non-being, just a has-been

Vibrating with love and hatred.

​

Someone will be sent for me - but when and who?

His intentions I know

They keep me company 

Like the bare-chested delivery man pulling out a pack from his trousers

Where a dragon curls its tail.

 He lights up and takes a puff crushing the filter with his teeth

Adding particulate matter to the air.

On this cracked pavement

We huddle around a dirty bin, food wrappers whirl in the wind.

Where have all the crystal ashtrays gone?

Who took the gold-plated lighters?

​

Inhale. Exhale. Throw the empty pack away.

​

2019 © Laura Ruggeri, in "Coming To Our Senses", ISBN 978-988-16859-3-3