Tag: Poetry

Scented wearables for Other Senses description: Six irregular, finger-sized forms rest on richly embroidered dark fabric. Pale yellow, creamy material clings to and envelops thin, translucent brown flakes, creating surfaces that seem simultaneously waxy, papery, scaly, and crumbly. Beneath them, thick curling embroidery in crimson, orange, and gold gives the whole image a lush, tactile warmth.

Other Senses * Performance & Gathering * September 26, 2026

Other Senses is a seasonal, multisensory performance and gathering in Brooklyn… Hosts/house band: Ivy Meadows – Sound/Music Lauren Race – Touch/Taste Leona Godin – scent/Text Fall guest artists: Alabaster Rhumb – Music/Poetry Samantha Sea Sea – Performance/art Bonita Oliver – Vocals/art Saturday, September 26, Doors: 7pm. Performance: 7:30pm at the Sunview Acropolis 257 Nassau avenue, Brooklyn Free but space is limited! Please RSVP to OtherSensesNYC At gmail.com. You can also email with any access needs. BYOB, my friends! …

Black and white illustration of a woman sitting at a desk looking at her computer screen from a back/side angle. Her hair is in a loose bun on the top of her head and she’s wearing a tank top. Beside her is a window with curtains that are bunched and tied revealing a night sky: a crescent moon and some stars beyond. Glowing light shows a portion of face and arm, but all is mostly black. On the desk is a big computer screen, keyboard, a cup with pencils, some books, and a tissue box. On the screen is a color promo photo of Fille en Aiguilles. The sleek black bottle, skyscraper like, with a rectangular body and cylindrical top is resting in an amber pond surrounded by pine needles. Illustration by Alabaster Rhumb for The Sillage Series. This one about trauma.

Sillage 4: Fille en Aiguilles * Poem + Essay * Jehanne Dubrow

aromatica poetica April 18, 2024

Aromatica Poetica is delighted to present the fourth in the Sillage series by Jehanne Dubrow. She is the author of several books of poetry and prose that dance with our heart’s senses, including Taste: A Book of Small Bites, which we highly recommend! Each of the 12 poems are written in the voice of a specific perfume—this one is Fille en Aiguilles[i]—and were begun during the height of the pandemic. For this Sillage series, the poems are paired with a …

Cabinet of Curiosities colored woodcut features a circular design with a border of small circles. Inside, there are four mythical creatures in different colors (pink, purple, blue, and green) at the cardinal points, connected by a chain that forms a cross in the middle. Behind them is a fiery background with yellow, orange, and red flames. Each creature is part human, part animal: the pink one has a bird's body, the purple a lion, the blue a monkey, and the green a sea serpent. The illustration has a vintage or antique feel, reminiscent of old alchemical or mystical texts.

“Cabinet of Curiosities” * Excerpt from ‘The Museum of Scent’ by Mandy Aftel

aromatica poetica January 7, 2024

Choosing which chapter of Mandy Aftel’s gorgeous The Museum of Scent: Exploring the Curious and Wondrous World of Fragrance to publish here was both pleasurable and painful. The pleasure was in lingering on passages and pictures that I loved, painful because we couldn’t excerpt the whole book! I highly recommend this generously illustrated book to the aromatically wise and naïve alike. The Museum of Scent was published last October and is a natural and cultural history of scent that was …

Safranal molecule (C3H10O) represented in a honeycomb kind of figure, overlaid with a botanical drawing of Saffron (Crocus Sativus), featuring red stigmas and styles (the threads of saffron), purple petals, green skinny leaves, and the corn that is part of the root system.

“Safranal” & Other Poems by Lora Berg

aromatica poetica October 11, 2023

Safranal We happened on a nest of Crocus Sativus, petal, stigma, style, strands of saffron lolling over lilac rims, and slid our hands close to the earth to pluck them, three per bloom. Evocations: * Jeweled rice of Persia * Paella in Andalucia * Amish golden broth * Under the counter, in the old Tunis souk * High up, in Mama’s kitchen cabinet * Curled in Grandpa’s crystal pill box * bittersweet notes reaching back in time * to Minoa, …

The top of a willow tree with four birds sitting in its branches. All is saturated in yellow with a blue, blue sky. From MLJ.

“Willow Tree Poem” & More Plus Recordings by Michael Lee Johnson

aromatica poetica February 16, 2023

I Age (V2) Arthritis and aging make it hard, I walk gingerly, with a cane, and walk slow, bent forward, fear threats, falls, fear denouement─ I turn pages, my family albums become a task. But I can still bake and shake, sugar cookies, sweet potato, lemon meringue pies. Alone, most of my time, but never on Sundays, friends and communion, United Church of Canada. I chug a few down, love my Blonde Canadian Pale Ale, Copenhagen long cut a pinch …

Preparation of Ayahuasca, Province of Pastaza, Ecuador shows a pot of leaves and stems brewing over an open fire. Next to the pot you see a pantleg and a machete hanging from a belt.

“Ayahuasca” & Other Poems by Robert Beveridge

aromatica poetica September 29, 2022

Ayahuasca Twilight sport, ravenous to show in tainted lilies beyond the piano bench. Rain for days, profusion of yellow boxes that beat a tattoo on the roof of your car, the size of golf balls said that ever-happy newscaster. Your server takes a thousand orders a day, urinates in the gazpacho only when instructed by the mariachis dropping the C sharp in the third bar of “Like a Prayer” by two octaves. So far, no complaints, but four queries about …

Photograph of a clothesline strung across buildings as seen from below with lots of sky above. It’s hung with a flourish of colorful billowing garments. From Pexels.

“Final Flourish” and Other Poems by John Muro

aromatica poetica June 28, 2022

Final Flourish May’s final flourish and the lilacs have given up their priestly purple for a crestfallen brown, colors lifted and carried by minstrel winds to beds of irises, allium and meadow sage. With summer’s cruel advance, I imagine the hoarding of their fatigued fragrance in the tangled thrust of roots, abiding a cooler darkness until the earth first warms, breaks apart the frost, and calls upon the miracle of creation so they can once again extend their lazy heave …

Southern scent memory: Mint Julep at the Round Robin Bar 2018 made with raspberry and strawberry infusion and garnished with cherries and a mint stalk, of course, sits on a bar matt with sunlight striking it picturesquely and a blurred out bar in the background. Wikimedia.

Five Scent Poems by Joan Mazza

aromatica poetica June 8, 2022

The Scent of Memory 12 You might think of mint as gum flavoring or what makes Polident tolerable. Sometimes it’s a scent made for savoring— candy canes on Christmas trees, delectable in cookies. Boxes full of peppermints take you back to the deep South’s mint juleps in tall glasses on your honeymoon trip. You imagined yourself with servants, not slaves, a belle in hooped skirts, eloquent and beautiful, your loving so fervent you’d never worry about breath mint. How odd …

A ghostly CT Gourmet Hotdogs stand hovers at the entrance of a Danbury hospital emergency room with an ambulance poised to rush off, its lights flashing.

“Hotdogs” and Other Poems by Anthony DeGregorio

aromatica poetica April 1, 2022

Hotdogs I smell steamed hotdogs on Hospital Avenue in Danbury Where I’ve never in 10 years seen a truck or wagon Selling the classic Americanized delicacy Within miles of the Avenue’s Hospital where I’m headed On my way to Cardiac Rehab, And I suddenly wonder if this is how time ends? The End Times merely a thick pungency, with the Condensation of existence into a smothering of mustard, Sauerkraut, and onions, the source of the apocalyptic vapor Invisible apparently to …

“Timberline” is an animated image of a ring of magical pine trees as seen from below, their branches circling the twilight sky, where firefly-like creatures dance. For “Ember Opens the Door,” by Brook Bhagat.

“Ember Opens the Door” * Poetry * Brook Bhagat

aromatica poetica October 21, 2021

Long past bedtime nighttime mountain winter air sparkles ice inside her nose with the inbreath deep, deep, free, they’re asleep, they’re all asleep. Ember closes the door soft behind her and smells the moon: pines, minty, peppery pines, their outlines blurring green together into black. Off the stoop in nightgown and coat, she shifts the kitty backpack of graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate. Socks, underpants, Jenny doll. Boots crush footprints in hard snow, slow then fast, making for the woods for …