Cigarette Factory
By Phil Lane
We live across the street from the cigarette factory. All night long, we listen to the machines snorting and snarling. The rollers make a noise like prison cell doors slamming shut. The smokestacks spatter the sky with sickly clouds. Every so often, a three-eyed rat-thing scampers across the porch.
When the cold rain starts to sputter from the sordid sky, I get this itch to smoke and drink, to cough coal dust from my blackened, granite lungs in little emphysemic bursts. I become a factory of my own: a great gastric millwheel fueled by a surging sea of toxins. The distillery that is my body processes and purifies every last retched ounce.
I get drunk and stare into the factory’s empty eyes with love. Her catarrhal death rattle is a robin singing; her vitriolic breath, a vestal kiss. Her lathes flail and her pipes clang and steam. My stomach bubbles and my veins constrict, my aorta pounds and throbs. We are one choking, churning enterprise. The townspeople look at us askance as though we are terrorists or lepers. They can’t understand this synergy: this gritty, concrete gumption that keeps us grinding our lives out.
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Phil Lane's poems and stories have been appearing online and in print for the past decade. He lives in New Jersey where he teaches English for a tutoring company, daydreams about Bob Dylan, and hangs out with his Boston Terrier.
By Phil Lane
We live across the street from the cigarette factory. All night long, we listen to the machines snorting and snarling. The rollers make a noise like prison cell doors slamming shut. The smokestacks spatter the sky with sickly clouds. Every so often, a three-eyed rat-thing scampers across the porch.
When the cold rain starts to sputter from the sordid sky, I get this itch to smoke and drink, to cough coal dust from my blackened, granite lungs in little emphysemic bursts. I become a factory of my own: a great gastric millwheel fueled by a surging sea of toxins. The distillery that is my body processes and purifies every last retched ounce.
I get drunk and stare into the factory’s empty eyes with love. Her catarrhal death rattle is a robin singing; her vitriolic breath, a vestal kiss. Her lathes flail and her pipes clang and steam. My stomach bubbles and my veins constrict, my aorta pounds and throbs. We are one choking, churning enterprise. The townspeople look at us askance as though we are terrorists or lepers. They can’t understand this synergy: this gritty, concrete gumption that keeps us grinding our lives out.
- - -
Phil Lane's poems and stories have been appearing online and in print for the past decade. He lives in New Jersey where he teaches English for a tutoring company, daydreams about Bob Dylan, and hangs out with his Boston Terrier.
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