Laura Kasischke __________ Cigarettes Back then, we smoked them. In every family photo, someone’s smoking. Such ashes, such sarcasm, the jokes that once made loved ones who are dead now laugh and laugh. Cigarette in hand. Standing glamorously at the mantel. The fire glowing ahead and behind and all the little glasses and the snow outside filling up the birdbaths, the open graves, the eyes. And the orchestras in gymnasiums! That mismanagement of sound. The wonderful smoke afterward in parking lots, in lungs. How homeliness was always followed by extravagance back then. Like hearing lovemaking in another room or passing suffering on the side of the road without even slowing down: So it is to remember such times and to see them again so vividly in the mind. Like a mysterious child traveling toward us on a moonless night holding a jar containing a light.