When my wife and I decided we wanted kids, I began to quit smoking, and started writing this poem. Sometimes poems help us imagine futures we need and can then build. Other times poems help us map them so we know how to blow right by them.

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Conor Bracken is the author of the chapbook Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press) and the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center). His first book, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, will be published by Diode Editions in June 2021.