Crisis Center
Let's workshop this poem about the thousand-yard stare of a woman going through some unstated crisis
scent of the day: Gucci Guilty Absolute, by Gucci. More medical-ointment-like than others in its patchouli-leather-vetiver family (Encre Noire A L’Extreme and Francesca Bianchi’s Black Knight), Gucci Guilty Absolute is a dry earthy-woods fragrance (one of my favorites) whose Alaskan cypress (a conifer with a paint-thinner disinfectant quality somewhat reminiscent of the gasoline quality of violet) makes various important contributions to the smell of Band-Aids—indeed, Band-Aids in shoe polish muddied by mineral spirits and scotch—for which this 2017 rare designer gem is infamous: ramping up the smoke of the birch tar, the cedariness of the iso e super (and other cedar raw materials), and (just like it does in Encre Noir) the industrial-antiseptic quality of the inky vetiver
Crisis Center
Her pupils shiver doorward
at the man’s entrance (momentary
distraction, one hopes,
from her chest-heaving distress),
but—with terrible automaticity,
a bad sign—at once
they decouple (back
to a thousand yards, infinity’s blank)
as he flips through the chart.
