A poem BY ARTHUR SADRIAN

SMOKE STAINS

Sodden shirt, lie loose as you drink their 

discourse of dried sorrow under the candlelight. He comes 

here often, or at least I’ve gotten used to the shadow 

in my pupils: sable leather on ponytail, lips curled 

around a fifth camel. Vietnam vet, beard almost as 

wild as his garblings, he once gave each of us a pound 

sterling, told us that Raymond would be long gone

before our time, told us to kiss those coins, that 

one day we’d be winners. 

Maybe his name was Raymond. Raymond, who 

blew more smoke than bombs on the Bay of Pigs. 

Raymond, who shed cigs like bullets in a rain-

drenched jungle. Tale told, he’d brush the butts

off his coat, stamp out the last embers, and go quiet 

in a plume of ghostly shrapnel. 

Raymond knew he was no winner. He spoke 

to his smokes, gave each a name, dragged until they fell 

away like brothers on the battlefield.

That’s why he gave us the pounds, trailing his past 

through the wisps of afterfires so that we might go 

home smelling of tar and tobacco, tell 

our suspicious parents that it was only 

secondhand, and cling the burnished zeitgeist of 

1955 youth dreams, yet to see the light of judgement. 

metamorphosis

whirl into a cloud of smoke

until you’re spinning into flame

into a dreidel of flailing ash

and now that ash

is whirling again, dissipating into smoke

drifting away from those flames

until we cannot see the flames

nor discern the ash

for what is burnt and what is still smoking

Arthur Sadrian has been an avid writer and novelist since his crayon days. He has written over a dozen novels, novellas, novelettes, and poetry books by his own initiative and is published and forthcoming in literary magazines such as Beltway Quarterly, the Coterie, and Plum Tree Tavern. He has also served as an Editor on Polyphony Lit, Chief Content Officer at a startup, Copy Editor of his school’s yearbook committee, and is an alumnus of the 2022 Session 2 Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.