Tribular (ROUND 2)
Let's workshop this poem about a young man who, although having escaped the extreme poverty of a deindustrialized city, returns occasionally to confront the grotesque living conditions of his people.
scent of the day: L’Heure Exquise, by Bortnikoff
L’Heure Exquise (2018, Dmitri Bortnikoff)—a champaca-oud composition that bridges the boozy-fruit tobacco of Tabac Doré and Sayat Nova with the fermented-chocolate tobacco of Oud Monarch and Lao Oud and the bubblegum vibe of Oud Loukoum,
—opens with a fleeting but forceful burst of christmas-hay Indonesian oud (perfectly captured in Areej’s History of Indonesian Oud) before a flickering radiance of citrus-eucalyptus greenery (Earl-Grey-like bergamot, bitter-honey neroli, lemon-camphor cardamom) alights a bouquet of waxen florals (aprico-cream champaca, honeyed-tea jasmine sambac, musky-green Indian jasmine),
a Juicy-Fruit bouquet—quintessential Bortnikoff, although here the magnolia comes in the form of champaca (a benchmark champaca)—dusted with bittersweet cacao and shrouded in the medicinal haze of tolu-balsam-varnished driftwoods (cedar mainly, but also pine and camphorwood) now charred in an earthen pit along with patchouli-dirt roots and resins (clove-and-camphor-reinforced styrax, fungal-mossy myrrh, briny-mineralic ambergris, and a burnt-rubber trio of smoked-honey Vietnamese oud, smoked-clove Indonesian oud, and smoked-leather cypriol)—
the overall result being a gourmand-leaning floriental fragrance that, perfect for its dusk-and-dawn-hour name, perhaps best out of all my Bortnikoffs balances ethereal immortality and carnal decay (less purely otherworldly than the aqueous spectrality of Santa Sangre and yet not as dankly terrestrial as the compost-laden Lao Oud), a composition that (as many have reported) smells up close more like musty-minty tobacco and at a distance like the juicy-fruit gum of Jubilation XXV (and sometimes even the pink bubblegum we get in ELDO’s Archiv 69 or Lush’s Tank Battle).
Tribular You are still young yet. Your rockets still thrust from that city of downhill-BOCES dropouts and middle-school pregnancies. The poor there, your poor—and let us zoom in only on those few not detracting from downtown hipster renewals twenty-four-seven, shopping carts creaking rust. Their rotten-egg tap water is “good for the skin,” they say, even as they set it afire from the faucet. Their kerosene-vapor heaters sibilant as snakes, their roof water tock-tocking their mold buckets, their utility-grade “value bacon” in white cartons leaving no triage window into their all-fat heart tinted gaslit green—they brag not just about how the water is flammable or how much they steal or how far their lady can piss, but also about how they pay child support: “Shiiit. I pay for my kids.” Those that can read even brag that they can and thereby that even you—university you— are not as above them as they sense you think you are. It never gets old, their faked struggles with the words. “Hi—hick—corey—sm— smock—èd; hick-corey smockèd! That right?” They have an affinity for rice and potatoes and insist the fat is the best part of the steak. Rickets-stricken as kids, no strangers to lead, they dress in wash-worn clothing, as faded as their line-dried towels. Their skin appears all the more worn, their growths and blotches, their obesities and warts, all the more intolerable. Retardation and flu abounds among them, and so the teen diarrheas from diaper to hair throughout the single-wide sinking in the earth. They will bring in friends and family members, though—no matter what. And they let them shit and piss and die under your old comforter. During rare visits—jaw clenched in repulsion from such post-industrial tribalism, and its smell of shit muddied by value bleach—your mom, although a light in the madness, will give you that same blanket without thinking a thing.
“Tribular” is a harsh, self-implicating meditation on class disgust, inherited proximity, and the uneasy boundary between observation and contempt. The poem operates as a portrait of a post-industrial underclass filtered through a speaker who is both of that world and estranged from it. Its power lies not merely in its graphic detail but in the tension between identification and revulsion. The poem does not offer a neutral ethnography; it stages the moral volatility of looking at poverty through the lens of escape.
The opening frames youth as propulsion—“Your rockets still thrust”—suggesting upward mobility fueled by distance from a city marked by vocational school dropouts and teen pregnancies. The phrase “your poor” signals both belonging and disavowal. The speaker claims them while simultaneously distinguishing himself as “university you.” The tension between insider and outsider is central: the poem scrutinizes a community shaped by infrastructural neglect (flammable tap water, kerosene heaters, mold buckets) and economic stagnation, yet the scrutiny is tinged with scorn. The flammable water detail evokes real municipal crises, transforming the landscape into one where environmental degradation is normalized into bragging rights. Survival becomes identity performance.
Throughout the poem, poverty is rendered in sensory overload: creaking shopping carts, sulfurous water, snake-like heaters, all-fat bacon, sagging single-wides. Food, water, and shelter are presented not merely as scarce but as degraded. The repetition of bodily imagery—fat, warts, illness, diarrhea—intensifies the sense of entrapment in corporeality. The community’s habits are depicted as both defensive pride and tragic adaptation: boasting about child support payments, literacy, or theft as markers of dignity in a system that has stripped them of conventional status. Even the staged struggle with pronunciation becomes a paradoxical assertion of agency. They insist on competence precisely where competence is doubted.
Yet the poem is not purely accusatory toward the poor. It also indicts the speaker’s own gaze. The line about “jaw clenched in repulsion” foregrounds self-awareness: the disgust is acknowledged rather than hidden. The mother’s gesture—passing along a comforter used in the unsanitary home without a second thought—collapses distance. The contamination is not just physical; it is genealogical. The speaker cannot fully separate from what he critiques. The blanket becomes a symbol of inescapable inheritance: class is not a costume one removes but a residue that travels through generations.
The title, “Tribular,” suggests both “tribal” and “tribulation.” The community is framed as post-industrial tribalism, bound by kinship networks that persist regardless of dysfunction. They “bring in friends and family members, though—no matter what,” revealing a rough loyalty absent from more atomized, upwardly mobile spaces. That hospitality coexists with decay. The poem refuses sentimental uplift. It dwells in contradiction: communal warmth amid filth, pride amid deprivation, dignity amid dysfunction.
What complicates the poem further is its proximity to ableist and derogatory language. The inclusion of such terms is not neutral; it intensifies the moral discomfort of the piece. Rather than endorsing dehumanization, the poem appears to dramatize how disgust and hierarchy are internalized within class mobility narratives. The speaker’s escape into higher education does not erase the psychic imprint of origin; instead, it sharpens his ambivalence. He is caught between empathy and contempt, between gratitude for survival and shame at association.
Ultimately, “Tribular” reads as a reckoning with class mobility’s cost. The upward trajectory requires not only labor but emotional severance. Yet the severance never fully succeeds. The “rockets” may thrust outward, but gravity remains. The blanket passed from mother to son becomes the final metaphor: material, intimate, impossible to disinfect entirely. The poem forces the reader to confront uncomfortable questions about how we narrate poverty, how disgust operates as a class marker, and how escape can morph into quiet betrayal.
class mobility, post-industrial poverty, generational inheritance, disgust and empathy, social stratification, environmental neglect, economic decline, family loyalty, internalized class shame, rural decay, post-industrial America, identity and escape, communal survival, poetic realism