The Summer We All Called Cigarettes ‘Snargers’

Dave started it. He said

it was a word folks used for them

in his hometown, which was one of those places

with more horses than people

and more drug dealers than churches.

Dave said a lot of things.

He was the unreliable narrator of our hearts.

Is that where words come from? Places?

I guess I used to think they simply

fell from the sky, and the bad ones

ate away at the public statues

like acid rain, but I was very simple then

and also believed in economics.

We would naturally stand in almost perfect polygons

when we smoked, so a hexagon or octagon

or whatever aspiring towards a circle.

We made tasting notes. We decided the smoke

smelled of pencil shavings and cocoa powder

and garden centre soil and chestnuts

and wet leather and charred barley

and old phonebooks and burnt salt

and attic dust and raisin toast

and static electricity. We used our words.

We learned from each other

like people who were about to become

bad at learning from anyone, learning full stop.

A lot of things that were about to happen

hadn’t happened yet, Dave declared.

There is so much suffering in the world

and so few years to do it in.

Erik Kennedy is the author of Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and a coeditor of No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.