Valentine’s Day 2024
The only company I had on Valentine’s Day
was a pack of cigarette with a dead baby on it.
The lifeless body lies still, a blotch of blood,
brown, and beige, with black boxes on its
dead eyes and unformed genitals, and big bold
letters above its dead, bulbous baby head.
As if in a crib, it sleeps eternally on its side
of the box not wanting to be waken up,
or else, I would imagine, the screech of a dead baby,
the demand for a dead baby formula, the presence
of a dead mom to check a leaky dead baby diaper,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
No one should be a victim of a dead baby trauma,
I supposed, especially not a frail, wee smoker just
forced to face another brouhaha cynics brand
as a ploy that exploits our need of love, to belong.
If we could buy love, how would that cost us?
An eternity of grief, maybe? A dead baby?
I lit a stick and grew artificial flowers in
my lungs, filling all the holes, then out they
went to the ozone. This I can buy—control.
And tomorrow the dead baby will decompose
so I offered him a smoke. It hesitated at first,
but then it giggled as it coughed its dead baby
lungs off. Gruesome, sardonic. Almost as if real.
Lorhenz Lacsa is a poet and a writer from the Philippines. He considers poetry as an extension of himself, like an amulet you carry for good luck. In his case, it brings constant internal rumblings. He is a cat person.
