Visiting Elizabeth (ROUND 9)
scent of the day: Paradise Soil, by Areej le Dore
The is into the first minutes of my first wear but the good news is that this is one of my favorite profiles and earthworm jasmine, I call it. The bad news is that Miyaz’s Fleur Tabac 1, which I own, does the same thing but even better: less saffron and more oudy punch. The good news though is that Paradise has a whole bunch of deer musk, musk pods and grains. I am already starting to get some of that now: pine pestled into a mineralic powder that almost make the soil common between the two of them, full of dank life in the Miyaz, seem covered with a bit of frost.
*Let's workshop this poem about a teenaged Beaconite, white trash as all hell, going up to City Hall in Poughkeepsie with his father on a supervised visit to see his estranged stepsister.
*Made some small but potent changes throughout.
Visiting Elizabeth
The last time I saw my stepsister Elizabeth—two decades, more, gone now—was the last my dad, our dad, ever would. It was up in Poughkeepsie, the same bleak building where he had once faced me across the table. That day, and under CPS's same file-cabinet stare, she was the age I had been.
Grandpa drove us there. My dad, nicked and AquaVelvaed, sat half-swallowed by the heft of chronic backseat garbage— me, jittery too, on his lap. The battle against swollen bags shifting and spilling, stink braided with Grandma crotch and yapping yorkie, lent pitiful distraction to our nerves.
My dad said just to drop us at a gas station. “Here’s good,” he pointed. “Need cigarettes.” But that was only half of it. The Mazda idled in its junkyard cough as we left the store. My dad was off beer. And Grandma had those hawk eyes pinned on the brown bag—too short—cradled in my arm.
“Mike!” Grandma shouted as we walked by. “Hey Mike!” But my dad strode onward, muttering. I followed his lead, pretending not to hear. “The stuff—the camera!” I jogged back, Timbs sloshing through slush, for the yellow Kodak and the coloring book with its built-in bootleg crayons.
My dad cracked the King Cobra mid-stride, gulping swigs with chin-dribbling desperation: “Aah” like a commercial. We stopped under an icicle tree. City Hall loomed in fog. We were late and he looked to me for helping sips. “Tch. Nah nigga. Ain’t going up in there all fucked up, stinkin!”
Who could my dad be, his Newport cap new, but himself? He bargained. “Hold it for me, then.” My face the answer, he fought reality. “You got baggy pants, Boy!” But I knew not to roll into City Hall—after metal detectors, guards— fighting, ghetto as hell, to hold up my glugging sweatpants.
The plan’s sandbox absurdity, thoughts of how thigh heat (plus the jostling) would flatten the beer’s pulse—something had him give up. At a park bench he buried it in the snow like a bone. To the double-take of a passing suit—nailed, no doubt, by the malt funk—I said, “Gotta keep it cool.”
Guards frisked us for secrets. My gaze grabbed my dad’s. His broke quick as a twig. Still, I rubbed it in—chuckling. “See what I mean?” A long elevator of eyes, then a hallway whose flicker would wobble anyone, filed us into a room. Elizabeth, clinging to a lady’s hand, edged in along the wall.
A boozy smooch sent her under the table. The caseworker looked me down in my Wu hoodie, my arctic-camo boonie. Her head shook as if over the stink, over the whole job— sighing into her watch. My dad pulled “Liz Bean” to his lap. I snapped photos while she colored, shooting me flirty eyes.
Grandpa, nose-tubed, idled curbside. The park was a “No.” My dad said, eyeing me now, “But I lost my money.” Perhaps hoping to fix what he never could, my dad—rustling trash— changed his tune as we sputtered back to Beacon. “Got it— other pocket.” For the ride he bought them their Win4.
“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)
