Strangers and Other Ghosts

Mother, it is the smoke in your kitchen that teases these tears from my eyes, this thin smoke, ruinously tinged with old mustard, that you have inhaled daily for so many years, it is the smoke, mother, not the fallow weight of my fattened prose that brings tears, today, to my eyes, as I sit to compose another episode of the unending saga that brings us our daily bread, to drag my characters through another week in their lives, brushed always by deadly fronds of their histories.