How the Nose Remembers

In response to We Write Poems’ Prompt #73 concerning the sense of smell. I particularly liked this prompt because I’ve always believed that certain scents can act as time machines…

How the Nose Remembers

The kindergarten bathroom
or what my memory rehearses of it
was white, two-stalled.
A wide-hipped woman we called
Grandma Eleanor sat me, schooled me
in wiping, pulling up the bottoms
of my matching outfits.
My favorite boasted big
pink polka-dots.

The sink invariably out of reach,
mirror in which I never appeared,
Grandma Eleanor hoisting me up
so my slivers of fingers
could push down on the soap dispenser,

and out came the rush
of cherry almond,
it burst into existence
clear as a color,
or a touch, disembodied
from name or past.
Transformed into recollection.

Sharpness of fruit caught in my hands,
filling my head with the river
which swirled like years
from the faucet
flooding the white-tiled room,
all the rooms of my childhood.

Penitent

This is inspired by We Write Poems’ Prompt #72, which is about addressing shame. It diverges a bit from the prompt in that it isn’t a personal poem but rather one that is projected from an imagined person.

Penitent

I feel I’ve spent
half my life
behind a screen.
Between points
of light a mouth
does the enumerating,
naming. I count
with fingers
on hard knots
what I find in myself
to hate, what I can’t
speak alone
in daylight or find
in books to blame.
That word I used,
I can’t remember,
it must have been
a blow to my mother´s
heart, the way
I thought about
that girl in the fifth
pew who blossomed
in my head like so
many red vines,
or that time
I pocketed a quarter
at the age of eight,
when I discovered
the sameness
between a truth
and a lie, between
being incomplete
and whole.
The doing and
the undoing could be
the same act, but
I don’t remember
anymore what I’ve
been forgiven for.
I’ve tried water,
memorized lines
which kept me
afloat, but I’ve gone
under each night
with my hands
locked, unable to
drag my head out
of its counting.

New Poem, Born of P&W’s Weekly Prompt

Very rough right now, subject to work and criticism. I don’t even know if I want to keep this title.

Big Top

The trapeze artist on losing his stance,
walks the black plank out
of orbit swooped
into a nest, the kind

you may associate with wicker,
or felt, or ash
stretching the pleats and bones
of the body, rife

with punishment, sometimes pores
grown as blue as figs
after a century,
or merely years of static.

Youth ticking in its speakers.
The siren that never went off,
there is no one to blame
but the birds they call

vultures,
the towers they call lungs.
What is
an exhortation?

A letter, a hymn
to a body left
to its own shadows
blackbirds that knock at the fringe

You fall with so much silence
You never trusted any god
your hands drew circles
that shined red in a wood

which was once a womb
which was once a tree
without synonym.