by Elizabeth A.I. Powell

by Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Be like a flower that gives its fragrance even to the hand that crushed it
Ali ibn Abi Talib

Was what my mother called sweating. We spritz, we don’t sweat.

What about skank? So exotic. Rules for nice girls— Don’t wear nylon

drawers. The smell of white cotton panties, fresh

from the line is best. Go for nuance of honey and cumin. Don’t be catcalled—

catfish. Arousal is a communication the body makes. As a child the smell

of mud and cinnamon soothed my sunburns. Now at night when

tendril musks bloom patchouli, my body does the lindy.

Whatever signal my respiration plus heartbeat plus endocrine

chemicals publicize, I attract strange bedfellows. Even the bees

pollinating roses and jasmine for endnotes know

the olfactory signatures of their own group. We communicate

through scent, we don’t walk blindly toward the plank of love.

Trigger identification, primordial emotion: Big brother knows

how to market that in synthetic pheromone molecules.

Once, I tried smell dating: Wore a T-shirt three days and nights,

then took it off, sent it to Smell Dating Central,

where they cut the shirt in pieces, mailed out to prospective suitors

for them to smell, identify which appealed, see if my choice matched theirs,

voila, ode to our limbic system cha cha cha over a martini or espresso

in a darling bistro where pheromone baits trap gypsy moths.

History shows my ovulation triggered spermatozoa wars.

In the mornings washing with Cashmere Bouquet,

I make it new like a car. In my kimono and red lipstick

I read the papers in bed. But at 9:51 a.m. I go back to the idea:

Perfume is the feeling of flowers, a prayer burning

like brandy down the gullet. Poor flowers,

how shall they avoid their feelings? I read Glück’s “The Wild Iris,”

study their voices. I keep scents I never wear

like “Love’s Baby Fresh” circa 1976. It’s like keeping a specimen

of a lie in a bottle. Forcing yourself to love a perfume

is like forcing yourself to love someone you don’t.

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Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University.