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Women Making Cigarettes
Jamie Wendt


Engaged and newly married women left home 
for the workshop just after sunrise, the sky pinkish-golden.
A pocket of rubles, a growing fortune, jiggled
in their tobacco-stained fingers, like a luck charm.
 
The young, shaven, socialist man–the owner 
who spoke Russian instead of Yiddish–
angered over the local learned men who studied 
rather than work. The women listened as he spoke.
 
Not yet mothers, their bodies said.
Their wrists at the long, cold table’s edge, 
stiff and poised. They wore long chain necklaces, 
hair pinned back. Their forced smiles 
 
slid into their smooth, pale cheeks. 
They spent sunlit hours toiling, measuring, spreading
tobacco into papers, rolling them tight, stacking them 
in a pyramid in the center of the worktable.
 
They would still punch dough
late in the dull evenings, though,
their tainted fingers playing
the role of kitchen wife 
 
as a sleepy sister took note from a stepstool.
Out the window, they observed skinny boys 
leaning on hay bales, cigarettes tucked behind their ears,
and wondered what it would be like to have sons.
 
Men walking home parted their lips
for the sharp inhale, the little flame escaping 
rolled paper, ash flicked to the ground, the cigarette 
turning into a woman’s finger.
Picture
Photo from Austrian National Library
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