Plata O Plomo
an excerpt

Even your smoking is an art. You’ve smeared ash on canvas before. But that’s not what I mean – you smoke like you dance, like you paint, like you live. You light a cigarette perched in your mouth, you shield the flame with your free hand, you breathe it, hold it between index and middle fingers. And you inhale your own destruction. You bask in it. You’re like the sun-dried skin of forty-year-old women laid flat on the beaches of Hawaii with tinfoil collars and long, red talons enjoying the onslaught of their next bout of skin cancer. You’d love to be obliterated.

Dead without actually dying.