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Dorianne LauxSmoke Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat's eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe, smoke slipping out between the sill and the glass, sucked into the night you don't dare enter, its eyes drunk and swimming with stars. Somewhere a dumpster is ratcheted open by the claws of a black machine. All down the block something inside you opens and shuts. Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze, trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties. You don't flip on the TV or the radio, what might muffle the sound of car engines backfiring, and in the silence between, streetlights twitching from green to red, scoff of footsteps, the rasp of breath, your own, growing lighter and lighter as you inhale. There's no music for this scarf of smoke wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers crawling the pale stem of your neck, no song light enough, liquid enough, that climbs high enough, then thins and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes the sidewalk, critches across the man-made cracks, slides on grease into rain-filled gutters, digs its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves. You can hear him weaving his way down the street, sloshed on the last breath he swirled past his teeth before swallowing: breath of the cat kicked to the curb, a woman's sharp gasp, lung-filled wail of the shaken child. You can't put it out, can't stamp out the light and let the night enter you, let it burrow through your smallest passages. So you listen and listen and smoke and give thanks, suck deep with the grace of the living, blowing halos and nooses and zeros and rings, the blue chains linking around your head. Then you pull it in again, the vein-colored smoke and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't see where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold, like the ghost the night will become. "Smoke" read by the author
Author's Statement
My first NEA grant arrived eleven years ago soon after my first book was published. I remember feeling overwhelmed by the check - all those zeros! The money was wonderful and provided me with time to begin work on a second book. What overpowered me more, however, was the thought of the writers on the panel who had placed their confidence in my work, who had faith in my future as a poet. I felt then and feel now a deep responsibility to produce something that will continue to justify this kind of faith. So often I am defined by my job as a teacher, a role I enjoy and appreciate. This NEA support helps me to remember my role as an artist, that I am expected to write poems. I accept the grant in this spirit: a gift presented not so much to me as to the force of art that moves through all of us.
National Endowment for the Arts · an independent federal agency
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20506
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Dorianne Laux was born in 1952 in Augusta, Maine and is of Irish, Acadian French and Micmac Indian heritage. She has worked since she was 18 at jobs as various as sanitorium cook, maid, waitress and gas station manager. A single mother, Laux was supported by scholarships and grants on her return to school at the age of 34. She received her BA degree in English with Creative Writing Emphasis and was graduated with honors from Mills College. Laux is the author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990), introduction by Philip Levine, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize for poetry and a fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts. Laux is an Associate Professor and works at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing.
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