Sharing a Cigarette with Joan of Arc

"I am not afraid; I was born to do this."

& she says, to be touched by God is to be destined to early fire.

It’s winter. You met her by the emergency exit of some seedy Parisian bar. Told her you liked her hair, she told you she’d cut it herself. Her wine-stained lips ask you if you have a light. She wears her father’s jacket & her brother’s shoes, both a bit too big on her. Sleeves covering up her red-cold hands. Says she doesn’t mind, says she’s used to feeling small. Once an angel speaks to you, you are no longer a girl but a bird. Up to you to figure out how your wings work. She gives you your lighter back.

Joan speaks out the edge of her mouth, hand-rolled cig hanging on her thin white lips. You tell her you can’t roll your own, your hands shake too much, & she takes out her pouch. It’s not the flame I fear, she speaks as her slender fingers pack tobacco on paper, but the ashes. I don’t want them to keep me. As a saint you lose all autonomy, your body is not yours to bury. There’s a field back in Domrémy I used to go to as a child, her voice seems to carry time itself within, you put your lighter in your pocket, save it as a relic, where the flowers could grow unbothered. Once, from the corner of my eye, I saw a small fox chase around a butterfly. I stood very still, held my breath, thought to myself: may I always stay this insignificant, may I always be nothing but part of the landscape. 

None of that matters when God has plans for you. 

I still love him, I just wish he’d leave me alone. 

Nothing but the smell of smoke in the air. The sky empty except for her hands. When they burn her, two sparrows will rise from her charred remains, omens of a future in which her name is constantly lit by candlelight. You know this because you’ve seen it before; over & over, you’ve seen Joan die. In poets’ tongues & in the tip of the artist’s fingers. In the sound a young girl’s hair makes when it falls on her shoulders, in the way a boy creates himself with a pair of kitchen scissors & his parents’ dismissal. Patron saint of non-conformists, angel of the oversized sweater, of the buzzcut & the transsexual. May your cigarette ash linger forever. 

I’m going back inside, she says (boy girl soldier sweet apparition), 

catch you later.