With Her Jaw Still Wired Shut
Let’s workshop this poem about a mother who, full of a saint's audacious hope that she can break through to the good person inside her teen son (even after he shattered her jaw), is murdered by him
scent of the day: Opus XIV—Royal Tobacco, by Amouage (a liturgical frankincense (but burned outdoors, among the evergreens instead of the Santerían mangroves), its glut of notes (a scorched birch tar, a jammy prune, an anise-reinforced licorice, a maple-syrupy fenugreek, a benzoin-bolstered bourbon vanilla, a charred oud) makes for a thick-spicey concoction that, precisely by preventing the tobacco absolute from taking the limelight, lets the whole cigar box and the whole cigar-sniffing-smoking experience sing so loudly you can feel the ashiness in your mouth—albeit the songs, given the coniferous-pine aura from the resinous trifecta of olibanum and elemi and Peru balsam coupled with the baked-cookies feel from the caramelized trifecta of tonka and vanilla and fenugreek, stay in a rather Christmas-caroling lane)
With Her Jaw Still Wired Shut Mom’s wishful radar pinged a crack in his don’t-fuck-with-me slouch, but a pen pierced her temple as she leaned in for contact she sensed he needed— and if only she had felt that sated-lion warmth inside him, purring, she would have seen how correct she was.
