august in Cannes
I used to wake him in the mornings,
before things got wrong;
he would be smoking upright in bed,
tapping cigarette ash right onto the floor
at his funeral; in sacred silence
every one of us, even Peter,
lit up a cigarette and smoked it
the whole way through,
tapping ash right into the open bag
full of fresh croissants
and then in harmony,
as if we had been practicing:
we ate them
Dara Goodale (they/she) is a Romanian-American lesbian poet and university student living in Lausanne, Switzerland. They write about mental health, grief, and identity. You can find their work in Underbelly Press, The B’K, and Pictura Journal later this year.