Death smells

 My pants smell like the corpse flower. We climbed to the top of Dartmouth’s Life Science building last night for its bloom. Outside the building smelled like flowers. It seemed intentional, like how McDonald’s fans its smell of hamburgers outside locations to lure patrons. Inside the entire building smelled like death (false advertising). This is what brought me there, the perverse idea of smelling the odor of a dead body, with the added bonus of not having to confront one. This is quite sick, in retrospect, and indicative of a certain voyeurism within me (us)—I’ve never claimed not to be a pervert. The smell grew stronger as we climbed the stairs and overwhelmed as we walked into the sticky hot room, in which it sat in one of its corners, enormous, erect, and apparently sweating, the source of all this putridness. A large fleshy-looking thing stood 6 feet high out of a fertile basket of curling maroon leaves, thick like cabbage on an industrial scale. I stuck my head into it and S wafted the smell into my face. I breathed in deeply. I had thought that maybe it’s stench would trigger some primal revulsion within me, or inspire a profound sadness, but it did nothing upon arrival besides stink and then dissolve into the fabric of the room, becoming like a high temperature of which one remains aware but adapts to all the while. What a bizarre thing to adjust to, and in such a short amount of time. I think about my friend’s grandfather, who was shot and killed by my other friend’s cousin. The murderer was something like 24. The grandfather in his seventies, maybe. Afterward, the boy lived with the dead body for days and invited friends over who complained of a smell. The boy had probably forgotten the smell at that point. It had become a part of the rug on the floor and the couch in the corner, like the grandfather’s life had once been woven into the house.

We remained in the room listening to a scientist answer questions, before a team of them ushered us out to conduct tests and collect data. We walked downstairs and the smell lessened in intensity, but still I feigned freshness. I exited and took deep breaths outside. The engineered wafting of flowers didn’t calm me. I noticed apple blossoms across the street and walked toward them and ripped a small bunch off to keep close to my nose the whole way home. It did nothing to make my senses feel normal again. I started to think about the smell of war, to which this odor must be central. I wonder what a soldier does to a blossoming apple tree, if he chops it down in desperation and drags it home, or coolly turns his back on it, realizing a blossom’s futility in the face of death and its overwhelming fragrance. I wonder about a people under siege and the lengths they go to fumigate their nostrils. Perhaps they plant orchards so they will only ever smell sweetness, or perhaps all come to work in them, seek to own, all in pursuit of addressing the rot embedded deep in the floorboards of their nose. 

Now it is today, I sit at a cafe and smell death on my pants. I notice it more and more as I sit. Nothing rivals it, no freshly baked croissant or roasted coffee. Its subtlety creeps sickeningly until it grows prolific. It, too, settles into the room or perhaps just my psyche like the build-up of plaque on teeth never brushed or black tar in the lungs of smokers, slowly until it is eventually unacceptable and then unbearable, completely untenable. I leave. In the car the smell grows stronger. I roll down the windows. Wind blows through the car and cleanses it of all staleness, though the scent remains throughout the ride and follows me home. I take off the pants and throw them alone into the washer, set it on high heat, press start. This is a thing never adjusted to.

the shake

The cats bring mice to the door. I put a heavy white glass fixture in the middle of our long wooden dining table that looks like the sun. The little bowls around it are like planets orbiting it in the solar system. Humans fly through space. K sends a postcard from India. S sends another to his brother in Berlin from a cocktail bar in Vermont. I read Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory, listen to a Fiona Apple on my stereo, spring melts winter away. I regulated my whole life this winter. I ate the same thing over and over, got up at the same time, exercised my body and good reason and discipline, was depended on. What a world of good it did. There is great freedom in restriction, real power in routine — this is something we know but seldom claim. But this sweet season is apparently gone, and I’m suddenly tired of militancy and want to eat new foods everyday. I will return to legal joblessness in May, live in other people's homes, and read all the while. I’ll conduct experiments and take myself as the subject. I will miss you, winter, but I must let you go. I relinquish all control and surrender to flux. These things just don’t make sense in the new. Spring, summer, take me, swallow me, spit me out. I will enjoy every bit until it's over. I love you, saliva, teeth, tongue. I will love every part of it all, because I want to see what remains by the end of it. What does the melt uncover. What does the shake unearth, what am I made of

flow

 I am again feeling sensitive and on the verge, oh the cycles of life and how it all comes back around. This time last month I was crying to Lorde and in the middle of two boys. Now one feels far away and the other calls me his girlfriend. I don’t quite feel like he’s my boyfriend, and I don’t call him mine nor do I think of myself as having one. But if he wants to he may. He’s the boy I’m seeing, my partner perhaps — often that’s what he feels like (funny, I used to roll my eyes at this word and its pretension, but now I understand it. there is magnanimity in it, downstream of respect. It is true. Partners, because we consider each other). These other words with boys and girls in them, they sound slightly wrong, just a bit of fun, not quite patronizing of me or him, but of perhaps the relationship(?) (Is that what boyfriends and girlfriends have? Relationship is much too heavy a word for these two to carry...). It is more lovely to me to be everything while nothing. And then marriage. Only these two things. Only they make sense. Nothing, and everything. Simple! well Ok, pass through partnership on the way, when you live together and share friends, that is real, but not us... so boy-girl-friendship? well Ok I see yes a bit of fun... He’s reading this, hello boyfriend

This winter is suddenly very long, distended like a sick person’s stomach; everyone feels it, everyone is sick with the same thing and our bellies arch past our hips, navel past knees. My house is cold when the outside is. I have become thinner and here it’s not advantageous. Warming up is a challenge. Food is boring. reading hard. I grey.

But allow me, give me just a moment. Yes, winter gives way to spring. And then summer. And then I will forget how it feels to be cold. I won’t even be able to recall it. And I will miss winter’s austerity and piety. How the frost creeps across my windows in wonderful patterns and snow glitters in the light. Let me soak up its last weeks! Let me rest, and ice skate, and pray. Let me feel cold and crystal. Let me make another soup and read as much as I can. Because I love extremes, I admire them, everything and nothing! and it is so cold outside one can taste its bitterness — real sensation! My hands are like ice packs! When the world begins to thaw and people emerge out into it, the warmth will feel so sweet, we will become lizards who bake in the sun, stick a knife in! we are done! We will forget how bitter cold tastes on our lips, like women forget the pain of childbirth. Winter, I love you. You pass through me like a loved one’s ghost. You leave a chill through my body, goosebumps across my skin, warmth in my heart. Winter I will miss you all of the sudden. You are sugar-coated again. And I am stable

down the drain

 2025 is in the wind! never to be felt again except in dreams and memories. New York was perfect. On the Eve, I had a perfect day. L’s roommate made me kasha and then I went to soho where a and I have made a habit of shopping, and then drank a bottle of pet nat afterward at a place among people who get younger and younger every time I’m there. Soon enough we won’t be able to go there anymore - they will serve milk in bottles and pureed peas. We sat under the American flag, but now it has a peace sign stiched into it, funny ha ha oh the irony. We said goodbye to each other at the movie theater, because I decided to see Marty supreme if there was a showing then and there, and there was (ny<3). The movie was epic, rabid and hypnotic. It reminded me how I love the movies, especially alone, how much it all makes you feel so much. I felt bad for everyone at the end, especially the baby– Marty will bounce in and out of that boy's life just like one of his orange ping pong balls. After that I made my way home in the dark and cold, but I felt warm and light (breezy), full of light (lightbulb). I met an and l and r at a dark wine bar where we sat catching up till the party. Which was in this huge multi-story industrial loft where three small girls live, and it was filled with Bushwick types. We danced and danced, and I felt this wonderful release, like a valve was flung open and every worry, doubt, and reservation plumed out of me like a cloud of steam – I was squeaky clean by the end, my body soft and fluid, rolling thanks to g and her vile. We were simple bodies, fools, heroes, whatever we felt like. And it was wonderful. I slept at a’s, returned to l’s in the morning all locked out. I stood at the door freezing, buzzing knocking cursing. She was out retrieving her phone from the loft, and then she returned to the stoop and couldn't get the door open either. Everyone in the house was drunk and asleep. We sourly went for coffee, parked ourselves at a cafe and stayed there for ages, warming up and getting cold again, growing more and more stupid and delirious which made way for good happy feelings. We laughed at everything, but mostly ourselves. We sank into baths we dreamed in our minds that we filled with vietnamese broths and sat there like children with our heads leaned back. “Do you want mushrooms in yours? Do you have your hair up?” It was exactly what we needed, and I thank God for it. Any tension or strangeness washed away, down the drain. Just love and play between friends. And then I said goodbye, and we said we loved each other and we really meant it, and the hug was long and deep and cherished. And still, I am so happy to be home, back to my life and the things that bring me sanity and clarity and heft. I have had such luck and beauty lately. and I do, I apologize for my effusions— I can’t help them at the moment, and they make for strange writing, so perhaps I’ll stop here

glass

That big empty house - I’m here again. And I’m sick again like I was then, too. I like it here, which isn’t saying much, because it’s very big and new and Designed. Something easy to like, luxury is.

I saw this article about how girls writing is Over, and I’m here to agree. Here’s my pen, or the fingers with which I type. Don’t think of me as a writer. – one of the worst things you can be I think is a diarist – I’m a sleuth. A reporter. A researcher. A smooth-talkin grease ball snake oil salesman. I have an agenda! Someone with a megaphone and thick-rimmed glasses with the horns on the corners. Thick horn-rimmed glasses. Horny thick-rimmed glasses. Rimmed-horn thick glasses. Thick glass-rimmed horns. That’s right. I’m a reporter with thick glass-rimmed horns. I see straight through those crooks, because I don’t need glasses. And I use my horns to interfere with radio signals, glass is one good conductor. Best I’ve ever seen, Choo chooooo. Once someone threw themselves onto the tracks and glass acted so quick, it pulled the levers and the pulleys and redirected the train to the other track just in time to save the guy. Unfortunately there was a nest of these ultra-rare, endangered finches on the other track. It was being preserved by some local organization that had taken a special interest in it, because this finch had laid a nest on one of these folks’ yard and she took it as a sign from God that this here was her purpose, to raise and protect this finch like it was her own human child. And then when she was having a party for the finch’s babies - they were about to leave the nest - an ecological person, some kind of scientist came and said to this woman: What a valiant effort you’ve made, you’re saving the species! And she said: What? These are just my babies. And the scientist said: Ah, so humble, so humble. And the woman let out a kind of giggle, and thought to herself: The species? God, you really did give me purpose. One greater than I could’ve imagined. And the man said: I’m apart of an ecological group with a special interest in birds. Would you mind if we paid you and your little miracles a visit, perhaps next week? And the woman turned to her birds, and they looked just like birds, but she saw in each of them a little sliver of God, and that sliver was bright bright light. And that light shined so beautifully and brightly that she thought, I would be a selfish woman to keep these bright lights, these gifts from God, all to myself. Sure! she said. Come next week. I’ll make a pie. And so the next week they same came and she made a cherry pie which some people said was a tad sweet for their taste but that didn’t matter much because they got to see this rare type of finch! a whole family of them at that. Well they got to talking and a man pointed out how, while such a valiant effort, perhaps the most! this spot was not the most ideal spot for these little hatchlings to be raised. A better spot would be on the other side of town, near the wetlands. A whole debate ensued over whether it was better to move the nest to an area where the birds would be better suited, or to not disturb them at all. The man who had raised the question was a proud and at-the-moment insecure man, having recently been left by his wife, the third to decide she could no longer live with him, unable to cope with his particularities and inability to talk about his feelings. So when most of his peers disagreed with his proposal to move the nest and not disturb the young ones, he was insulted, and grew even further adamant about the righteousness of his proposal. You have no idea what is best for these birds, he shouted. I studied environmental science at U, V, M. He pronounced each letter like a sentence, leaving pauses in-between. We relocated endangered species for breakfast, he spat. But few and fewer people agreed with him, seeing how his temperament had changed and not wanting to reward this kind of nasty behavior so unwelcome in their group. So the decision was made without him and he was left without a reason that satisfied him. That night he tossed and turned in that big bed of his, the one he had shared with wives 2 and 3 — the first wife had been the longest-kept, because they had loved each other in a way that was meant to last a lifetime. When things devolved between the two of them, he burned the bed they had shared for twenty years, it being too painful a memory and something that anchored him too deeply in the past. But yes he tossed and turned, so unhappy with how the day had gone, how the decision had been made, how unheard he felt, how without respect he apparently seemed to be. Three nights he slept like this, which is to say not at all, so that on the third he said, Enough! If it is keeping me up like this, the decision must have been wrong, and it is my duty to these little birds that they are put in a more proper place! So he went to the woman’s yard, where there were still remnants of the party she threw them, these pieces of pink streamer on the lawn, a stray party hat, and a piece of the banner she had made custom that read: Finch me, I must be dreaming! He rustled past all of these to find the birds asleep. Using the tools he brought, he carefully and tenderly extracted the nest from its place, and took it in his arms. He, too, while looking at these lovely little things, seemed to sense some kind of light, like they glowed and the glow came from their sleepy little chests as they moved, up and down. He sat there, still, just looking, and there he might’ve stayed until morning, his eyes a bit wet, thinking about the beauty of these little creatures and basking in their slight glow, but a dog started to bark, a light inside the house turned on, and so he had no choice but to scurry away back into the dull night. He got into his car, drove to the wetlands, and found a tree for the birds. He set them up there, and then drove home, quite satisfied with himself, where he fell into a deep sleep and awoke quite rested, to the sound of rain. The next day it rained all day to various degrees of intensity. At the man’s house, there were steady but light showers. Above the woman, there was a drizzle and a fog settled into her yard. In the wetlands, the showers were quite heavy, so heavy that the nest, which had been placed more precariously than the man realized, and atop the track which the man also hadn’t realized, him being all shaken up and after all half-asleep, well the rain was so heavy that the nest was knocked from its tree onto the tracks below it. So that two days later, glass struck this nest, killing all the finches it contained to avoid the man who threw himself in front of the train, which it conducted. And the man fell into alcoholism because of his guilt, and the woman gave up her faith seeing how it had all been for nothing, and that man who wanted to die became a cashier at his local grocery store.

There’s a loon where I goose

There’s a goose where I work that’s all alone. His flock left him and today he sat at the bottom of the driveway when we pulled up to the house in our pick-up truck. He didn’t move his feet but his neck quivered a bit and we said please mother goose let us pass, and he moved over. We said goodbye on our way out. He has gray hair and moves slow, he might even have a limp. He was peck peckin on the ground, like a loon, that goose. Don’t worry, I’ll say hi for you tomorrow.

little purpose

Right now I'm taking care of a big empty house. It’s only this light, cool blue color, and to walk from one end to the other takes a whole minute. The man who owns this big blue empty house broke his neck awhile ago and had no one to take care of him. Now he’s in Florida to see his elderly mother.

The big blue empty house looks out past a clear-cut meadow onto the West. Today the clouds are lined with red, like a jam-butter seeping out of a pastry fold. Sun shines and dims on sections of land one at a time. The wind is strong, very strong, way stronger than most wind in this area. Because the forest around it was clear-cut, there’s nothing for the wind to bristle against. All it does now is sweep hard and fast. The houses on this road are Designed, especially with the view in mind, and Privacy. They are Large and Spacious, Sturdy. They don’t whistle like houses here tend to. Everything is quiet, most dogs don’t even bark. The only exception is an old brown farmhouse—correction: two, across the road from each other. Cars are everywhere around the two brown farmhouses, old beaters. And their beef cows stand on a mound of dirt. Their dogs are the ones that bark. They've been on this road longer than anyone, digging their heels in. 

This is one of the few places in the area with a view—the land is usually so clouded by trees and dense forest, all closed in on. It feels open in an unusual way out here, like you can breathe. But then the wind makes you all cold and sends a chill up your spine. Go inside.

Marcus A said everything ought to be directed toward a goal—even the smallest things. The goal of rational beings is to follow the rule and law of the most ancient of communities and states. He said the human soul degrades itself when it allows its action and impulse to be without purpose, to be random and disconnected. I got to thinking, maybe marrying the old man who lives here would give me some of that. He broke his neck awhile ago and had no one to take care of him. His children live far away, they're older than me. And he had this house built with all of these double features, a double sink, double garage, lots of seating. maybe I could help these features, see they have no use without someone, we could do each other this favor. The man is nice enough, somewhat boring, apparently Jewish. I could spend the rest of his days here, all peaceful, taking care, in our fortress. Listening to the wind. 

This morning I took the dog out into the meadow. The wind was blowing real strong but the sun was out so I laid down on the grass. First on my back but then I rolled onto my side so the sun didn’t shine so directly into my eyes. I laid there for a while, looking at the grass through a few strands of blonde hair that fell over my eyes. I wove a few blades in between my fingers. I lifted my head up to check on the dog, but I couldn’t see her. I walked over to look across the meadow and then around the whole house. I found her with a bone in her mouth and love in her eyes. I walked with her a bit as she shopped around for a good place to lay it down. It was a slow process, she tends to meander a bit. Finally, with the little bone in her mouth, she dug a little hole at the base of a baby douglas fir in the old man’s garden, real shallow. She let it down into the hole, and then used her nose to push the dirt back over it, all slow and methodical. It took her a few minutes, but when she had finally moved all the dirt in a way she deemed satisfactory she patted it a few times with her paw. I told her that was a very nice place for it and a very good thing she just did, making sure it’s all safe and everything. C’mon now, it’s time to go back inside. She wagged her tail and followed close behind me.