Marjorie Moorhead
Vape
Watching small birds at the feeder
swooping through a mix of rain and snow
Worrying about my son
still a teenager, and so
visiting home from school;
his first year away.
Left a cartridge on the tv room table
last night. “VGOD” “Iced Mango Bomb”.
Nicotine hovers, like vulture in flight, draping
darkness over a young body so able.
This vaping device invites him to suck poison into lungs
we shared, housed in my womb’s warm burgundy fluids.
Now, he breathes in an icy mist. Mango Bomb.
Didn’t those vape business suits have a Mom?!
What are they thinking? To damage a whole generation!
Leading sheep to slaughter. It boils down to greed.
Shareholders making money, while mothers hearts
of herded teens, addicted now, bleed.
Marjorie Moorhead is the author of Survival: Trees, Tides, Song (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and Survival Part 2: Trees, Birds, Ocean, Bees (Duck Lake Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Rising Phoenix Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, Porter House Review, Tiny Lit Seed, and other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Planet in Peril (Fly on the Wall, 2019), edited by Isabelle Kenyon; From The Ashes (Animal Heart, 2019), Amanda McLeod & Mela Blust; Birchsong: Poetry Centered in VT. Vol. II (The Blueline, 2018), edited by Northshire Poets Alice Wolf Gilborn, Carol Cone, David Mook, Marcia Angermann, Peter Bradley and Monica Stillman; and others. She received an Indolent Books scholarship to attend a summer 2019 workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Moorhead writes from the NH/VT border.
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