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The word hangs cigarette-smoke grey,
this habit he’s clutched close, coloured
the near-thirty years of my life,
half his life, half the life he lived
before I arrived with my part-
inheritance his mother’s smile.
She died of it. His father, too.
Growing up all my father’s jokes
were about not outliving them,
seeing fifty-five, retirement.
Last year they cut a tumour out
from beside his heart: and now this.
Can’t change people, or what they do.
My aunt’s voice, my mother’s, bitter
resignation coating their throats.
The sighing familiar tone:
how I love, eating cancerous
into their tolerant tissues.
