—after “Smoking”, a collage by Devon Balwit

I was flirting into the telephone, the wire twisted

in my fingers. I was just a mouth and nose. Vogue

cutouts on my wall. Smoking a cigarette naked,

resembling a fine art nude, or a girl flattened by fashion.

It was a rainy afternoon or a smudgy dusk,

and at sixteen I was a thin column of ash

streaming into a mermaid pool. Fingernail gloss

amid fists and elbows replicating. Red lips and I

was wrestling inside myself. Trying to hold his

attention. My voice, soporific. Men in red ties

and suspenders folded their arms and multiplied,

marched away from my words. Maybe they were

bored of having to lecture me, bored of being

my boyfriends. My life was a billboard—

brown pasted onto city concrete. Smoke

in the eye making it weep.

Jessica Purdy is a poet from Exeter, New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Action, Spectacle, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, Gone Lawn, SoFloPoJo, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Emerson College. She is the author of six books of poetry including Lung Hours, which was chosen by Marsha de la O as a winner of Gunpowder Press’ Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize. Her chapbook The Adorable Knife: Poems based on The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Grey Book Press) received the NH Writers' Project People's Choice Award.