Quitting
for Clyde
Story goes: he woke one morning, coughed up blood, and threw the last pack in the trash. Must’ve smoked 45 years. This is the kind of man. Now a metal box shaped like a treasure chest full of ashes: lungs, throat, still-yellowed fingers, the orange-sized tumor that got him anyway. I don’t mean to be crass. I dig how in the end he didn’t call or ache to be seen, didn’t take the treatment. Enough is enough.
Autumn McClintock is a freelance writer and editor living in Philadelphia. Her newest chapbook, Dirt Bird, was recently published by Alexandria Quarterly Press, and poems of hers have appeared in The Account, Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She is Poetry Editor of Doubleback Review.
