It starts as a faint whiff of horse sweat and stables. On Spring nights when I walk home from the subway through our compound in Shanghai, I can map where I am in relation to the jasmine vines surging over the rockeries. Under lantern light, these boulders look as though they are capped with snow. From twenty feet away, the scent is seductive – a mix of barely-ripe banana, paperwhites, and pony muzzle. Ten feet away, it’s intoxicating. Especially if …
Tag: Essay
“Dog Shit” * Nonfiction * Ro Miller
I stepped in dog shit right before getting on a Brooklyn-bound Q train and spent the remaining twenty-six minutes considering scent as a social factor. The first thing about dog shit is the feel of the sole of your shoe sliding beneath you. The squish is muted, but immediately there is an odor. Not one that you can smell but rather one that exists as quiet disgust in the back of your throat. A quick glance backward pushes the nausea …
“I Never Labeled My Spices: An Elegy To Olfactory” * Nonfiction * Alice Eakes
I lost my sense of smell. This nasty little virus sweeping the world, killing millions, invaded my home in January 2022 despite vaccinations and other protective protocols. My symptoms were somewhere between mild and life-threatening. I rode it out, and in the end, I discovered I no longer possessed the powerful olfactory sense that has been my lifelong companion. My first-grade teacher is responsible for my ability to identify just about anything from smell. She figured if I would eventually …
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Alley Cat * Creative Nonfiction * Michele Rappoport
The smell of fresh paint always takes me back to my first apartment in Washington, D.C., a three-room efficiency in a squat brick building that hissed like a radiator after a summer rainstorm. Somehow, I’d convinced my parents that living off campus would be cheaper my junior year. Maybe it was. But it was my yearning for a solo shot, a chance to prove my growing independence from them in a way I didn’t feel was possible living in the …
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“Stench No. 7” by Jim Knipfel
*Aromatica Poetica is honored to present Jim Knipfel’s true story of chasing smell as the first in our Blind Writers Project series, made possible by a generous grant from Awesome Foundation Disability* It was around quarter to seven on a bright and warm July morning in 1996. I’d just dragged myself out of the 23rd Street subway station in Manhattan on my way to work, and was waiting to cross Broadway. Thanks to the Associated Blind apartment building down the …