Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2026
Cigarette Angels, poems by David Rigsbee.
The featured poems will appear in an upcoming anthology.
Cigarette Angels
On the factory floor, the men
bolted machines to the hardwood.
They would be the first to tell you
they were shipped from Germany
where people knew things about
the purposes of steel and fire.
My father’s job was to wander
around from behemoth to behemoth,
monitoring the humming gears inside,
keeping an eye on the changing
facial expressions of dials.
Here is the thing. While most
of the paper was bound to scream
headlines and maybe invite poems,
other rolled sheets were sliced again,
and again, in which cured tobacco,
now separated and crushed
was to be inserted a section
of charcoal granules between
the cigarette and the filter, added
for the sake of public health.
That’s where he met my mother,
a pretty girl from a tobacco farm
who came up from the floor below,
having risen from the one below that
as the years doubled, then tripled.
She fed the leaf into the hopper,
then checked the other end to see
that the product was uniform.
Soon after they married, I squirmed out.
Awake at Three
Beyond the window: summer night
stilling the wrens, sparrows, and hawks.
The small dark brook even now
makes its stony way to the Hudson
like someone leaving before
the seventh inning..
That girl from far away
comes back to me in a dream.
Knowing we belong
we sit and hold hands.
The waiter returns and asks
if we would like anything else
and she says no.
God returns as night air
by the forest floor
not disturbing the feathered
and the small beings who couldn’t
close their eyes: replacements all.
Not for the world.
I flick the light on for just
a minute, then turn it off.
A child’s ceiling stars
in random constellations, loop
and align according to their innocence,
as if I was being invited to pause
before their dimming phosphorus.
Cicadas at Dawn
I couldn’t sing. Neither
could I keep the bushes trim:
they kept sending out shoots.
Mr. Hall, the principal, was still coming
down the corridor, brandishing
a copy of Orwell in one hand
and a paddle in the other.
Chipmunks criss-crossed in front of me,
tails at full exclamation point.
The clouds seemed forms willing
to take on any figure to pull away
from the blue behind them.
I had a name for when I was
everywhere truant, but by that measure,
still alive. L. said words
would fence our desires in, but he
was unfortunately in a bad place,
whereof he spoke. The nuns on the hill,
the fathers and brothers billow
as they walk from their cars to Maryknoll.
Having lasted the night,
The cicadas at dawn surge and retreat.
Summer will come to a halt.
You can mark it off with that pencil
I left you by the refrigerator
and do whatever else you need to do,
when the mowers drive their red
machines between our houses, meanwhile.
Second Person
I like the way the wind lifts
the glass twine of the green spiders,
but I save my praise for the switches
to which they are tied, also leaning
into the air. I was thinking of switches
the other day, how you had to go
and select just the right ones
when you had been found guilty
of something shameful, selection itself
being part of the penance and symbol too
of how that might be forgotten
(it never was) in wake of the lashes,
formally laid on to your tiny hide.
And nature is both more devious
and absorbing than you thought
it would be, coming down to breakfast
in your slippers, the little edemas now
peeking out from your ankles, like you,
bleary to no one in particular.
How you hove off into the morning
again, switching your point of view
into the second person, like a sedan
having rounded a curve at the bottom
of a hill. Momentarily the glass
flashes as sunlight meets the windshield
and the oncoming traffic behaves itself.
As I say, the cables lift and hold,
a fine enmeshment easy to look past,
necessary even, in the dappled confusion
of ordinary morning, the grim process
of nothing special. The mind says “let…”
and off you go in your fabulous jalopy.
Even the weeds may be said to mean
you well in their nihilistic way,
as you blow past, half in daydream,
baseball cap reversed, shading those
secret eyes in back of your head.
Along the Palisades
I bring my father with me, and my mother,
who only saw the city once
during the brief misery of my
first marriage. Who else do I bring?
Brother, of course, himself buried
In the stiff basalt lava of Ohio.
Small waves wash ashore, then pull
back into the swollen stream,
glinting as the sun powers down
in the west. There are egrets, of course,
curvature itself mounted on walking scissors,
stalking the marshes, and above,
eagles in slow rotation. Farther out,
jets bound for Newark. The river traffic
hardly moves. My parents likewise slow
as they emerge into time again,
and we walk along the river’s edge,
bounded by cliffs on the far side,
a seaward footpath on this.
Hoeing
You can look out and see glassy threads
waving in the air, butterflies as large as magpies
making chaotic flight over the saplings.
Sunlight moves from one side of a web
to the other. The spider is a sundial
and slowly burning. It’s August,
the leaves everywhere exhausted.
A wasp rises like the Holy Ghost.
The air swallows it. Another drifts
down, more like a parachute
than a winged being. It is well
to have lost our way, lost the time
we were given to thrive. Still,
there is a motion to the whole
of this patch of creation. At the center
sits the spider, its regulator and citizen.
When a cloud comes it feels like a reprieve,
until you watch it cross the sky.
You can feel the breath of the question
like a man hoeing along a field, one
row at a time, alternating between
effort and rest, parting the earth,
then standing straight a moment, wiping
his face with his shirt, wiping his eyes.
The Mouthpiece of My Cornet
Whatever the sun’s might was then,
it was nothing compared to the flag
being lowered, at which point we turned
and set out across the grass.
Someone asked, “When does surf become fact
in the waves?” I felt a slap coming on
and rifled through my rejoinders
until I found a big one.
“How far we have spread,” said another.
A third trilled, “And how little.” The strata
before us extended along the embankment,
before it seemed to fold into a ledger,
one with tall pages and keen blue lines,
next to the symbols for percentages
and dollars, which were a way of policing
the penmanship that we, wags that we were,
were taught. I blew my cornet in front
of the whole school, and I knew
that behind the sun-blinded window squares
my classmates shuffled their supplies
messily or neatly, as the case may be,
as if to say, keep up the good work,
or as a star would say to the gravity
that held it intact, and spiraled off.
The late August days offer choice
in the riot, but I sit here, and you
probably there, as if nothing could ever
matter more. The word brilliant comes
to mind, but not without qualifications.
Or difficulties not of anyone’s making.
Late at night, some birds whereof I
know little, square off. I want
to grow a little wilder, to find things
in range of my elbow. The mouthpiece,
of my cornet lies somewhere good,
I hope, some felt bed that opens
nothing whatever of its distant provenance
and yet points in the direction of songs
we set out to play so long ago.
So much for moon shadow and tales
from the Grand Chartreuse. So much
for the pickers in their denim overalls,
or for that matter the pink-coiffed
church ladies, the cleaners of headstones.
Ants mount the balustrade where
you are, where I am. They pause
at the flat top, feelers waving.
It must be a tower to them.
Gallipoli
While other poets are boring
down into their souls, I’m fixing my pillow
to read about a soldier from Gallipoli
who reported that the bullets
were like a shower of rain
coming down on the sea.
Commanded to advance, they
trudged ashore, trying to keep
their carbines hoisted above their heads.
What else were they to do?
Downstairs, a pot of shamrocks
coiled and dangling, some exhausted,
awaits tending. Next to them
the cold window and snow country,
streetlights like reduced moons.
Nearing sleep myself, I remember
a song I used to dance to,
in which can be heard a sideman
whispering, What key? What key?
That was folded into the song.
Meaning couldn’t get near it.
© David Rigsbee
David Rigsbee is the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a Pushcart Prize, an Award from the Academy of American Poets, and others. In addition to his twelve collections of poems, he has published critical books on the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Carolyn Kizer and coedited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry. His work has appeared in Agni, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Southern Review, and many others. Main Street Rag published his collection of found poems, MAGA Sonnets of Donald Trump in 2021. His translation of Dante’s Paradiso was published by Salmon Poetry in 2023, and Watchman in the Knife Factory: New & Selected Poems was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2024.