Rectal Raiders Volume 3
Let's workshop this poem about how a young child's desire is formed by a stepdad's pornography use in her presence, covered by the moral alibi of a blanket too thin even to muffle the cumshot aromas.
See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
scent of the day: Isfarkand Elixir, by Ormonde Jayne
Isfarkand Elixir (2019, Geza Schoen)—a citrus-woods abstraction whose vetiver and oakmoss are so thoroughly stripped of all mildew-forest insinuation, leaving little more than a stylized minimalism of metaverse transparency (cold and austere and monotonous, like the brutalist architecture of in the “egalitarian utopia” of Soviet Siberia, but as luminously melancholic, as disquietingly beautiful, as a Scandinavian glacier), that it almost seems as if the result of Quentin Bisch’s latex hand putting a hyperfuturistic twist on Ensar’s 1984, stripping down the woody-green-citrus naturalism more than even the Terre d’Hermes’s trigger-minimal blueprint would call for—
opens with sword-glinting citruses (tart-tangy lime, bitter-tea bergamot, airy-sweet mandarin) very similar to—and even better than—what I get in Areej’s Forbidden Flower but here whose science-lab fluorescence (a near-grapefruit aroma that, despite the green-apple static on my tongue telling me the enormity of its empty-volume radius, it is hard not to go anosmic to) makes it seem—unlike with the more embodied Areej—as if designed to be pumped through the verdox-filtered ductwork of a VR office space (as cold, as placid, as the stainless steel imagery of Baudrillard’s Cool Memories) to maintain the everything-is-just-fine morale of avatar suits in their Roblox cubicles,
the vetiver-cedar-moss combo underneath the matrix bytes of citrus-bitter gin stripped of virtually all its rooty-barky-mushroomy-smoky naturalism (although I will say that a thin tether to earthiness whispers in the moss’s impression of pale green fuzz over cold gray stone) and smelling less like the wood of an actual Norwegian spa (a spa whose sauna whisk is primarily juniper branches and whose aromatherapy blend is rich in pink pepper cooled by the invisible hand of iris) than like the smell of that same wood as filtered through an olfactometer (a device that, in our euphemism-necessary clinical-bureaucratic future heralded by this fragrance just as much as by Ganymede and Purpose, will enhance our immersion in the neuromancer voids of William Gibson’s prophesy)—
the overall effect being a synth-centric woody-green aromatic whose radical inoffensiveness (its ultra-white emptiness, its emotional flatness and rectangular monumentality, nailing the late-capitalist cityscape of Norway’s icy-detached-clinical-geometric-steel-reserved-atheist-digital Bodø much more than Iran’s sunbaked-soulful-ornamental-poetic-stone-sensual-religious-analog Isfahan from which the fragrance’s name derives) interestingly folds over (the horseshoe theory in action) into something much more gin-tinged and low-vitamin-D introspective, a side I have grown to appreciate more robustly as my brain learned to hear the dog-whistle pitch of these aromachemicals with further wearings (aromachemicals, blatantly lab-like as they are, that bring a loveliness that has only lasting power in common with the repulsive affronts to perfumery we now smell everywhere, and can experience in most exaggerated form in Gualtierri’s work);
the overall effect being, in other words, a suicide-pod fragrance so hypermodern in its ethereal ambience of antiseptic lyricism, so meditative in its industrial spectrality of iso-e-super gracefulness, that it feels hollowed out (like the emotionally-muted, loneliness-in-4k, voice of a tech billionaire) and even haunted (like a soft melodic synth line, perhaps playing in one of those UFO-looking Nordic suicide pods, whose disconnection from any percussion or bassline evokes unplaceable emotions of loneliness) and yet for that reason, intimidating in its emotionless minimalism, endlessly alluring and nearly perfect for what it is (for reference I would sell Forbidden Flower before I would sell this),
its spooky tundra-silence (sterile light instead of decayed loam, metallic shimmer instead of perineal funk) merging with its hotel-skin genericness (Sysco lotion but in the lovely Ormande Jayne way) movingly enough to make me think (at least when caffeinated) of the contemplative scene in Lost in Translation where Scarlet Johansson’s character (Charlotte, a young and adrift newlywed unsure of her marriage and purpose) stares down at a dawn-gray Tokyo skyline from the ultra-modern luxury of her high-rise hotel room as Squarepusher’s “Tommib” plays (this being a liminal moment, right after the turn of the millennium, just before the scrollable smartphone arrived like an angel to save us from falling into moments of melancholic reflection).
Rectal Raiders Volume 3
Her third dad would put her head
under the sofa blanket, spit
strokes clicking to porn,
and she knew—before
any starlet told her to smack
the balls in her vision—his moans
cursing bread aromas
were too buttery not to swirl herself
to that DVD alone at night.
"Rectal Raiders Volume 3" is a poem about the formation of erotic knowledge through coerced sensory exposure, and about the specific permanence of what is deposited in a child's sensorium before she has the vocabulary to name it. Its nine lines move through three tercets with lyric compression and psychological precision, arriving at a girl alone at night, involuntarily aroused by the smell of semen — a scent permanently rewired into erotic trigger by early proximity she did not choose — cursing the buttery aromas she cannot help but respond to.
The title does substantial work before the first line begins. "Rectal Raiders Volume 3" is a pornographic DVD title — anatomically blunt, serialized as commodity, numbered in a franchise entirely indifferent to who might find these volumes and what might happen to them in an ordinary household. Its bathos is not incidental. The poem insists, through the title, that the object shaping this child's earliest erotic cognition is exactly this object: graceless, mass-produced, one in a series. The comedy of the title and the damage of the poem are not in tension. They are the same argument.
The "third dad" is the poem's most structurally loaded detail. Not a father but a third father — a serial domestic presence, temporary, carrying his habits and carelessness into a household not originally his. His act of putting the girl's head under the sofa blanket while he masturbates to pornography is a concealment that functions entirely as exposure. The blanket blocks the visual; it cannot block the acoustic or the olfactory. What passes through the blanket — "spit strokes clicking," his mounting arousal, and finally the moment of climax — is everything the poem is actually about. The blanket is a moral alibi that the poem does not dignify with refutation. It simply describes what the blanket cannot contain.
The second tercet's syntax is the poem's most precise instrument. "She knew — before / any starlet told her to smack / the balls in her vision — his moans": the dash suspends the sentence at the threshold of what she already knew, before instruction arrived. The starlet's pedagogical function — providing the cultural script for what to do with aroused male bodies — comes after the imprinting, as a belated label for knowledge already lodged. What she knew first was acoustic: the specific sound of his moans. She could identify male arousal before she had the vocabulary for it. This is exactly how erotic imprinting operates under conditions of exposure rather than instruction — the knowledge arrives sensorially and lodges before it can be processed or refused.
The poem's final movement is its most compressed and most devastating. His moans at climax — the same moans she already knew — curse forth the semen smell: the profanity of climax and the release of ejaculate are simultaneous, the cursing and the bread aromas issuing from the same moment. The ellipsis the poem performs here is syntactic daring: moaning, cursing, and ejaculating collapse into a single event, the blanket failing to contain any of it. And what that moment deposits in her is permanent. Later, alone at night, the buttery aromas arrive unbidden in ordinary life and activate the same response — she curses them because they come for her without her consent, because the Pavlovian linkage was written into her sensorium in conditions she did not choose and cannot now undo. That she swirls herself to the DVD alone, privately, reflexively, shows the imprinting fully internalized: the external deposit has become her own involuntary inner life.
The aloneness of the final image is the poem's last and most significant pressure point. The third dad is gone. The blanket is gone. What remains is a girl in the dark, in full possession of a desire that was never fully hers to begin with, cursing a smell that will not stop telling her what she was taught before she was old enough to be taught anything.
Formally, the three tercets enact a causal sequence — adult behavior, child's prior knowledge, child's subsequent solitary life with that knowledge — while the number three recurs structurally as a principle of accumulation: three tercets, three dads, Volume 3. The serialization implied by that number refuses to frame this as singular incident. It is pattern, franchise, the nth installment of something that has been running long before the poem begins.