Cursive Cigarettes

The power of found things

Hello, Notetakers!

A few days ago, I found a discarded grocery list. The moment I picked it up, ideas started exploding inside my skull. Below you will find a haiku comic, a free verse poem, a collage in my notebook, and a short essay, all inspired by this list.

a scrap of paper
either lost or discarded
found by a poet

Below is my narration of, Cursive Cigarettes.

Cursive Cigarettes

I once saw a black-and-white photo
of my grandma and her friends leaning
against a truck in the middle of a
potato field.
Mickey (she was Mickey to her friends,)
Mickey had her left hand on the hood, her hair
was covered with a bandana, and in her right
hand was a cigarette. All of them had cigarettes.
In the moments before Grandma snatched the
photo out of my hands and tucked it in the back of
a different photo album, I noticed
how cool, happy, and young all the women (girls?) were.
They all wore pants, Mickey, great-aunt Velma, and two
others I don’t know were wearing capris.
The girls had just finished gleaning the field.
Mickey was sixteen, Velma was twenty-one.
Velma would die at sixty-two of emphysema.
Mickey would quit smoking when my mom was born.
These girls (women?) held their smokes with
a cool casualness you only see in old movies.
Each cigarette, dangling from the mouths or hands
of these field workers at acute angles. You
can almost see the smoke from the ends, curving and looping
around like a cursive love letter.
Women who picked leftover spuds to survive the Depression
wore pants, tied bandanas over their hair, and smoked—not like men
but like women. These weren’t hard, broken people.
There were free, joyful people—women
with their whole lives in front of them
smoking their cursive cigarettes.

The Joy of Found Things

I saw the scrap of paper underneath a shopping cart. I went and picked it up, not because I’m conscientious about litter (although I deeply desire to be) but because I’m nosy.

It was a glorious grocery list.

The found grocery list before I put it into my notebook.

The first thing I noticed was the word cigarettes written in cursive juxtaposed with the careful printing of the rest of the list. The more I read over the list, the more it felt like a poem. I especially love the rhythm and alliteration of pickles and twelve-pack pop.

I grabbed the note on my way back to the car. By the time I had started the engine, I was turning the phrase cursive cigarettes over in my head. I knew it would make its way into a poem. Halfway home, I remembered the old picture of my grandma and aunt described in the poem above, and I couldn’t shake the image of the women with their cursive cigarettes.

Once I got home, I thought about how much I could tell, and couldn't tell, about the people who made this grocery list. That’s when I began to see the collage I would make with the list in my notebook.

My double-page spread collage

A closer look at the first page

A closer look at the second page

While I don’t think this list is a real true-crime clue, I did feel like a detective gleaning all I could about the listmakers from this single scrap of paper. If one eight-item grocery list can show us this much about someone, imagine how much a notebook could show someone about your work.

Before I wrote Cursive Cigarettes, I wrote this haiku:

black-and-white photo
Mickey and her friends smoking
cursive cigarettes

Whoever wrote that list for smokes, soda, and potato salad fixings will probably never know they inspired me to make so many different things. But all of our lives touch each other in ways we cannot control. All we can do is choose what energy we want to send out.

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason