Scent of the Day: Siberian Musk 2 Attar, by Areej le Dore
A lemon-lime twang that almost seems metallic, plus a mineralic crystalline sensation of pine needles pestled between cold stones, unites here to give a feral-yet-sacred feel of being in a conifer forest on a bright morning too early into winter for there to be anything more than patches of snow. This is my first wear. The musk presence is large. The lemon-lime reminds me a lot of Forbidden Flower as well as even Isfarkand Elixir. Like Isfarkand I get a feel, one I can almost taste, of a chilled limey Riesling wine. Musk is the white wine and oud is the red—that has so often become clear to me. First wear—so grain of salt.
*Let's workshop this poem about a man apologizing to the girl he used to pimp out, the phone call becoming a joke for years to come when—after letting him go on and on—she asks if he still has work.
*Reworked whole, especially to make it clear that he is the one calling
Arc of Redemption —for my cousin Randy
He calls to apologize for pimping her out back then (“I was a dumb kid”)—her silence
easy to read, after that choked-up plea, as sacred, as the speechless dawn of healing—
but then she goes “I mean—. Tch. Nigga—real talk though. Still got work for a bitch?”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
