Banshees and Black Dogs



As the fuel pump display
crawls towards 20.00-
19.89, 19.90-
an ambulance slices
through standing rainwater,
unlit and predatory,
aa
and I am cold and I think
of a woman I stuck to
like an engorged tick-

the first thing she would do
after peeling the cellophane
from a pack of cigarettes

was to take the first one out,
flip it,
and cram it bent
back in

"Why do you do that?" I asked,
and though I didn't really care,
she told me that it was good luck
and she always did it

and she wouldn't use a white lighter
because Jimi Hendrix was dead,
and liquor went bad
if you didn't drink it

and I believed that she believed
those things,

though I wondered if she would believe them
if it made her ugly,

and all the same
her good luck
didn't stop me
from bumming a smoke
while I still had one
in my coat