‘After Making My Own Non-Sew Face Mask I Walk’

through our neighborhood imagining the smell

of heliotrope and privet, puddles of diesel and cologne,

men fixing a roof hemmed with blue tarp

so much like the sea where I once lived

and would run along the beach, breathing in the stink

of dead horseshoe crabs and seaweed, long brown

strands dusted with barnacles, each mouth opening

to filter the air like tiny arias, I would run

down Commercial Street inhaling the smell

of Spiritus pizza, the shirtless men doused

in Banana Boat, I would smell my grandmother’s

boutique bug spray from Avon’s and the light spilled

through her nightgown, cherry taffy

melted into cement, sugared raspberries

and plastic bags of Bazooka Joe,

I would smell my own red vomit in the sand,

at the altar of public toilets, the after-spit

of sex, condoms washed ashore like tiny squids,

the smell of semen humming

as in the opening scene of The Piano Teacher

when Isabelle Huppert scavenges the red-light district

for tissues drenched in cum and I never

understood how pleasure could be that conceptual 

but didn’t I smell myself

on my husband’s beard this morning

and wasn’t it like reading an old diary entry,

like smelling my funk after a run

before jumping into the water

and I still won’t take off my mask that won’t let me

smell the pollen loosening from yellow strands,

won’t let me imagine how the sky smolders

the way after the tornado

it smelled like burning for weeks,

the smoke of fallen trees sawed in half

and I thought I’d never want to smell them again—

forgive me—

now every time I open my mouth

it is to swallow something I never thought to name,

breathing in as if doing a bump on a lover’s wrist,

like I’m sucking down the last blue raspberry slushy

from my childhood, the last good thing

I might ever taste.

Kendra DeColo is the author of My Dinner With Ron Jeremy and Thieves in the Afterlife. Her new collection, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World, is due in April via BOA Editions.