DENNIS J. BERNSTEIN - Up in Smoke

blue, found a use for orange, a smudge of fuchsia, but I’ve never mastered

canvas and color. Years ago, I had friends who painted the shells of box turtles, signed their names

upon their backs, the flair of gods in training. Now, I know the damage they can do.

Only a master can bestow their name like this, hues of green and yellow and red, a shield against every violence.

Prather - 186

Dennis J. Bernstein

Up in Smoke

mother has to take the cigarette out of her mouth to kiss me.

sometimes she lets me take it out

myself and fake a puff or two. she teaches me 2 + 2 and 4 x 5

with a couple packs of Menthol Lights. it’s more fun than counting on your fingers: smoke rings are added to the equation. *

smoke is always her main course. at meals, she inhales while she is eating. tonight it mingles with a steamy bowl of lentil soup: smoke pressed through her lips as the exhaust fumes of mastication.

Bernstein - 187

The larger Equations Come Later: at 3 packs a day, how many cartons does mommy smoke a year? in 3 years? how many years before mommy starts hacking up blood and losing her hair? *

after a while, she spends more time coughing than breathing. sometimes she just skips the matches and lights the next cigarette on the last one. sometimes she lights the cigarette but she’s coughing too hard to inhale. *

her cough is a gun going off in the middle of the night a rorschach splash on the pillow case. I fear cancer is contagious I take cover in spider’s quarters, underneath the basement stairs.

Bernstein - 188

I tally up the day’s misfortunes on the abacus of a daddy long legs. *

saturday mornings and wednesday nights she goes for “atomic therapy.” at first, I fear they will blow her up, and I sit tensed in the waiting room listening for the explosion and my mother’s screams. After a half-dozen or so treatments, her hair is getting thin as sewing thread. She’s so nauseous after chemo she dreads the smell of good home cooking. I spin circles on the counter stool inside the hospital cafe. I order a deluxe cheeseburger with fries. Every time I go to the hospital I squeeze-shut my eyes and begin a series of three-sixties: I spin towards a country where cancer isn’t calling the shots.

Bernstein - 189

In the last months, her hair starts to fall out in clumps; I find her unraveling everywhere. Today it’s a C for cancer floating in my corn chowder, a strand is the moon, rising on the sofa. I collect it late at night, gather as much as I can of a mother’s vanishing life. I stash it in a small oak box

where I used to keep my marbles.

Bernstein – 190