Sleep Fissures (ROUND 4)
SCENT OF THE DAY: ZuZu, by Yaaseen
in the same soul tribe as Sayat Nova and Rumi, this attar comes off like a dark-warm gourmand (earthy-humidor tobacco, dry-dusty cocao, bitter-roast coffee, cherry-twig oud, vanilla, and warm spices) balanced by cooling spices (perhaps lemon-eucalyptus cardamom and even licoricey fennel) as well as by the brightness of honey elements (sweet-hay broom and a crotch combo of mentholated-nectar tuberose and sweet-sour civet). The oud varietal is unlisted. I have not asked Moustafa yet what oud he used but I sense primarily a Cambodian style, which gives a lot of what I get here: aged-wine sweetness, rum-rasins, chocolate, tobacco. It could also be, or have blended in, some Laotian oud. But Laoatin oud, which close to Cambodi in earthiness, is typically smokier and more metallic (in the scorched vein of Tauer’s Lao Oud)—automotive impressions I do not get here. The overall effect in my mind is that we land on a tobacco attar that reads—in terms of pipe tobacco—like Cornell & Diehl’s “Haunted Bookshop” (to capture the cocoa and vanilla casing, sweet-earthy depth) mixed with their “Autumn Evening” (to capture the rum-raisin warmth) or—in terms of cigars—like Padrón 1964 Anniversary Maduro (rich dark chocolate, espresso, dried fruit, earth, and warm spice with a smooth, almost vanillic sweetness on the finish).
*Worked on the second half today, particularly honing the anatomical precision of both the tattoo’s placement and of the tattoo itself—now described as “splayed” as opposed to merely “spread.” I think I am at a solid draft now.
Sleep Fissures
1
The mom—amoxicillin bottle four, baffled by what could keep doubling a toddler over
with olive discharge as foamy and fevered as her vomit—guts the home of all culprits:
scented soap, bubble bath; junk foods, synthetic panties too tight—all, save Mr. Malik.
2
Splayed preschool self tatted sternum down (both bald pussies converged, the overlap
plumb as his Gumby butt plug and the polymer that makes it up), now the true big girl
can see—cervix pigging out on every avatar’s whimpering load—the child in the perp.
“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)
