When He Quit Smoking

He wouldn’t lecture me.

I could see in his eyes—heavy,
finding sleep in reclining chairs
while his younger grandchildren bounced
from plastic covered couch
to carpet—that he heard, and ignored,
plenty of lectures about what the next cigarette would do.

When the doctor put a tube into his lungs,
drained decades of tar,
we all began to understand
the fragility of our family name.

I relished the act of sneaking a Camel
in the backyard where I didn’t know he saw me
crouched in the grass by the stone Virgin Mary,
forgetting that a year ago
his daughters prepared for a life without a father
while gathering in Christ Hospital
to see his olive skin made darker
by the contrasting hospital gown.

Even in the ICU we laughed
as he flirted with a nurse,
pretended that he had too much life to die,
recalled injuries loading plywood
onto a truck, smashing his fingers into
tree roots, maps of the Mediterranean pressed
on his dark face.

And when he had to take oxygen
we treated it like a quirk,
like an odd affectation.
When he got lost driving,
staying gone two days, we panicked
though some of us were convinced
that this was the way he had to die,
re-mapping the streets and neighborhoods
he knew like the Back of the Yards,
Englewood, Pilsen, Little Village,
Midway, Burbank,
Cicero, Central,
the streets that grew from under him
like the ivy back in Bari.


by Vincent Francone



Vincent Francone is a writer of minor note living in Chicago, working at jobs that would make the average person sick. He writes of his city and the wayward folk therein.