The Meadow 17 Ode to a Newport Richard Martin They’re made in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Salem is short for Jerusalem. I was smoking and drinking in line for a haunted house and this Mormon Girl coughed at me. Later in life she marched for We the People down a hall crowned with tobacco leaves that will soon be either demolished like a Confederate baby-killer or called only acanthus leaves, renamed like a highway heading South towards Freedom/Past where the Native Peoples dwell and smoke tobacco as ritual. God, I miss ritual. Probably needing a smoke like never before, feeling the tobacco mixed in my blood like myrrh mixed with the wine Matthew begged Jesus to drink just outside Jerusalem’s tall walls. I too would beg to join them in their circle, sitting on one hand and keeping my white mouth shut so as not to be as some strange snowman piping off sorry… sorry…. over and over wide eyed and scared like the last kitten in the box. I hope I would feel welcome in their ritual in a way that only people with iron hearts can feel and in a haze of everyone’s charcoaled breath and eased constitution was a law they have learned worth teaching by putting fire to leaf and lesson to lips.
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