A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Black Gris, by Ensar Oud
Flash notes, first wear»
black gris is a salty sasparilla cousin to Lonestar Memories—more mocha hit with a salty-inky shot of squid-beak iodine than the burnt coffee in a tin of Lonestar/ starts out too stunning to believe: like animalic-briny ambergris burned as an incense. / the opening alone had me wanting to settle into the thought that this is the best Ensar in my collection, rivaling the likes of Pink papua and Kuru kawa and Jungle Kinam, Kam Kyoro, Musc Millesime—notice here that expensiveness need not translated into preferred (although Mystical Lotus is pretty damn good too). It might not be the best, but it is damned close
*There is a deep tradition of bawdy humor in my family—the Istvan-clan, the Last of the Mo’Beacons. Yes, this humor reveals—whatever degrees I might have obtained—my class position. But I honor my grandmother by carrying forward, as my late father did before me, that torch. I do so in a new way, however: not orally, but—like Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales—in literature. Becky, the mother of Arlo in my story “Arlo,” is the subject of this poem. I woke up this morning with the image of a bird at work on a rhinoceros and realized I had no choice but to follow it where it led. So I took some of the imagery surrounding Becky’s use of The Gut Puncher™ and crafted a poem.
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes —for my Grandma, Barbara A. Istvan (1939-2015)*
Straight insanity given her 5ft frame of bird bones but undeniable to anyone who has glimpsed even bikini-blurred evidence of her shameless obsession (snail-footed liver lips that could shadow-puppet the wall, as much tuckable frill as a mall drag queen; a rippled deli-meat number, roast beast of Dr. Seuss technicolor, that would have Georgia O'Queef herself rubberneck—and rubbernose even, can you blame her?— like a botanist before an uncatalogued jungle flower), The Gut Puncher™—that suction-bottomed black fist, silhouette mistakable in the spook-the-shit-out-of-ya shadows for a toppled lawn gnome, cornstarched like an 80s diaper rash and stowed under Becky’s bed quivering elastomer stink with each Amtrak rumble— would leave the brown eye (that one remaining hole whose involuntary grip permitted violation sensation) dilated to such Beldar extremes of sunlimned black in the puckerless plop of full retraction that no time under the Cinderelli-Cinderelli glow of Disney film would be needed to understand the magpie’s chatter at the window of this uncurtained exhibitionism: a plea to come perch upon the strong perineal ledge and pick at intestinal nutrients like the oxpecker, that scavenging symbiont to the Serengeti rhino.
“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)
