Sicily

Perfume poem thirteen, Sicily by D and G.

Originally published in Conscious, the zine, 2018.

Summer smells of Sicily
Soap and sand and soft focus lens
Glimpses of the world through sighing gauze
The languid light of lingering sun
Below the horizon but still kissing the sky
Clinging to the blue with lover's loathing of farewell

And to the air a flower opens
Its swelling sweetness tension in the dusk
A breath of life renewed with day's decline
Too gentle to compete with harshest heat
But counting down the rays till soft can shine

Perfect moment plucked from time
Like ripened fruit still warm to touch 
Awaiting what comes next 
While yet complete within itself
The stillness between two memories
Perhaps the strongest note of all

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From Time

PERFUME NO. 28, NARCISO RODRIGUEZ FOR HER (EDT)

From time to time I like to skip ahead
Into a life I don't yet live
Like picking up my journal
And reading pages bare of ink
Within the blankness there is everything
All possibilities contained therein
The things will be, the things that won't
The paths that I can't even see
Time is, by nature, nonlinear
Our form is all the limits us 
To clarity of hindsight
Some day a man will burn for me
Musk and flowers stoke the flames
I'll wear this then, to feed his fire
Today, to free myself from time
-Elena Nola

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Nirvana Bourbon

Another perfume poem. This one was published in the spring 2020 edition of Thimble Literary Magazine, volume 2.4.

“Nirvana Bourbon”

The smell of the glue I used to repair my shattered self
Isn’t the carcinogenic burn of polymers, but vanilla
Not the pods, but the extract, boozy and opaque
Sharply alcoholic but too thick to be a cocktail
A tarrish smear between broken edges
The scent pervasive because I used a lot of resin
Not from overapplication—there were just so many pieces

The drying fumes were many things to my mosaic soul
Warmth and beauty, the comfort of familiar
The solace of tradition and the escape from memory
Deliciousness, exoticness, expensiveness, permissiveness
I used them all to tether mind to body, heart to chest
For a time I was more glue than woman, more dead than living
The channels of adhesive no substitute for veins
I hovered in the cloud above my curing skin
Taking refuge in vanilla, and hiding in the lie
That if I could still find beauty, then I must be all right
-Elena Nola

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Like Roses in November

I am slowly writing toward a collection of poems about the interplay of the scent, comfort, and beauty of perfume as a sensory anchor for me during some of the hardest years of my life. This poem is one of them. It was published in the "Autumn" 2019 edition of Songs of Eretz.

“Like Roses in November”

There's a certain kind of sadness
To roses in November 
Flowers blooming in a world 
That otherwise is dying
The color more intense 
For its contrast to the brown
The living edged with danger
With winter coming on
For what will freezing nights inflict
On saturated branches?
The beauty melancholy-cast
For it will not last the month
The end of all its glory,
Already past its prime 
But still it dominates the landscape,
All its rivals now outshone
Today it yet is beauty
The future not yet come
-Elena Nola

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