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Writer's pictureMarías at Sampaguitas

Poetry by Christina Ciufo

Nicotine Kiss


Grey lips and rosy lips sailing alongside 

as ships against the tempestuous waves 

of the ocean. Alongside Veritas’ stone pillar, 

your back leans, igniting the match’s flame 

of impious noxiousness onto your cigarette. 

Yellow-amber flame kindles your noxious, hollow appetite 

behind your blue eyes, which tranquil waters 

cannot cleanse. Like a doe wandering through

the shallow darken woods, my naïve heart and eyes 

were canopy and vulnerable. Cinder smoke, 

like a cobra’s specter, slithers its’ grey, transparent body 

from your lips, lunges and it poisons me with a nicotine kiss. 

Each time you spoke a word, black tar seeps from your mouth,

streams down its’ thickness onto my lips and down my throat, 

constricting my lungs. My breathing becomes suppressed 

and suffocated. My lips are not ignited by love’s embers,  

but by pernicious tartness, tasting cinder ashes and burnt flesh. 

Grey lips and rosy lips sailing alongside 

as ships, but they become wrecked, capsized and submerged

underneath the tempestuous waves of the blacken ocean.




Christina Ciufo is a passionate writer in poetry, short stories, flash fictions, fables, and completing her first novel. At a very young age, she always had a passion for writing stories and poems, specifically in fairytales, folklore, supernatural, and horror. After graduating Sacred Heart University with a BA in English, she continued to expand her writing abilities at Manhattanville College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and by May 2017, graduated with an MFA degree in Creative Writing. She completed Sacred Heart University's Education Program in December 2018 with a MAT in Teaching in both elementary and secondary. She is currently a Sunday School Teacher at St. Timothy's. She has appeared in Gravitas, Spillwords, Ovunque Siamo, Nymphs, Vamp Cat Magazine, Z Publishing Ohio, Nightingale & Sparrow, Truly Review, Mookychick, Door is a Jar Magazine, Bonnie's Crew, The Poetry Question, Twist in Time Magazine and Moonchild Magazine. https://twitter.com/ChristinaCiufo.

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