Mattress Fire by Penny Harter
This one jumped out at me because I am anti-smoking. I think it’s a very sad poem, but I like that it’s a reminder that smoking almost never only affects the smoker.
Mattress Fire
By Penny Harter
When I was a child, my father
lit a cigarette in the night
and fell back asleep,
his arm dangling over the edge,
his curled fingers holding fire.
My parents dragged the mattress to the bathtub.
Later, they pinned an old blanket, tight
around its sagging middle
where some stuffing had dissolved to soggy lumps.
For years I watched my mother
change the sheets on the burnt mattress,
smoothing them over the old blanket,
the charred hole in the striped ticking.
My mother changed the sheets on that mattress
even when cancer from three packs a day
began to burn my father’s jawbone,
dissolve his soft palate;
even after surgery, when he nestled
into his new life, his body
finding the familiar hollows.
The mattress finally collapsed into itself
twenty years after he stopped smoking.
Somewhere, my father’s mattress still burns,
smouldering in the dumps off the Turnpike
like those underground fires
they can’t put out for years.
