Sarah

She siphons smoke from her cigarette, hand draped like an old spider web over bare knees (summer time means the coat is hidden, like the long johns). She tells me about brawn, a jewel in her crown that turns relations into delicate barriers against war, a threadbare string keeping a pit-bull from its dinner. That’s why it all ends badly, she explains between drags. But I’ve seen her cream-thin hand kneading knots from brows and tired shoulders in her guest bed even been recipient to her chilled hand gathering the blankets affectionately to my chin. She deposits straws in juice cups, drips cheese over nachos,composes meals, assembles late night snacks. Hands dancing to supply. That’s why cigarette intervals puncture post-sunset giving. A time for her gossamer fingers to lay catnapping over the pacifying edge of a cigarette. I sit with her. Sometimes even taking a little smoke offered like her blanket tuckings. But I listen too. She is brawn, but the type that links–strong glue for misapprehension.