Penning Perfumes Volume 2

Oxford

  21 February 2013, the Albion Beatnik Bookshop.

  Eloise Stonborough, Lucy Ayrton, and Dan Holloway share their poems inspired by Grossmith’s Hasu no Hana.

  All Things Nice

  If only a body could taste its own sweetness,

  then it could cease hunting for another skin

  to gild with its hunger. I have wrapped myself

  in unfamiliar arms, as if they could mark the bounds

  of my flesh. I have hoarded bruises to remember

  the weight of touching. What a peculiar breed of haunting:

  to know your limbs only by what they press against;

  to know yourself invisible beneath your clothes.

  On the allotments, two sticks and a rotting bowler hat

  is enough to keep the circling gulls from roosting.

  A ragged proximate of man, a corpse bulked out by air;

  and yet he seems more human in his vagueness

  than I ever have. I was born illegible: a child

  with pond scum in her hair and dirty nails,

  dragging her dolls up as soldiers. Inside my cheeks,

  I am still as pink as the girl my mother mourns.

  —Eloise Stonborough

  Untitled

  I never really got the hang of that thing

  girls do in paperbacks.

  That thing where you all get ready together

  and you giggle.

  But I loved those times you let me watch you

  pat on powder, slick lipstick,

  it never seemed fake,

  like other mums,

  not warpaint.

  Watercolours.

  Those nights would always mean

  a disregarded bedtime

  and half an inch of wine

  you knew I was pretending to like.

  You always said I was very grown up.

  People stop saying that, don't they?

  People stop saying

  "Look how big you are!"

  It means something different.

  And now I'm an adult

  I'm not very grown up.

  I can't walk in heels,

  I'm not really sure how to put on foundation.

  But a few times a year,

  When I'm home,

  our home,

  and I'm going out,

  I try.

  I take your makeup bag,

  which still feels so naughty,

  and I pat powder, and slick lipstick,

  and I brush my hair.

  Properly.

  Because you're right.

  I never think you're wrong, you know.

  Even when I don't agree.

  —Lucy Ayrton

  Amber

  On Ulica Mariacka

  In love’s October

  Heartbeats stopped in amber clocks

  Point fingers through

  fog, taunting

  Memories of the forgotten

  Of the forgotten

  Of the forgotten

  For their youth.

  Afterglows of touches

  Cooled by rain

  Cooled by rain

  Cooled by rain

  Cooled by the wingbeats of angels

  Dissolving from collective consciousnesses

  Spiral from the street’s glass belly

  Prodding strangers,

  Tracing secrets on skin

  With lips burnt dry

  By the remembrance of their birth,

  Burying mockeries of flesh

  Beneath regret.

  —Dan Holloway

  Oxford Haiku

  The Oxford haiku were inspired by Cacharel’s LouLou.

  Bubbles sheen and glow

  Anna laughing enamel

  head under water

  —Sarah

  Linen sheets: dry, crisp

  Perfumed with possibility

  Of what might happen.

  Student in Paris

  My run down sad apartment

  Tealight, oil, drifting

  —Paul Fitchett

  give me scented words

  warm, sophisticated, close;

  primitive of brain.

  —Judi Sutherland

  The air is full of

  other things: dreams, ghost; and words

  that can never speak.

  —Ted Beausire

  Worlds apart always

  But always my love you’ll be

  Words will not stop us

  —Maryam Goheeri