Tag: Subway

A photorealistic image of a white woman’s legs wearing a black skirt and brown tennis shoes steps out of a subway. To her right is a pile of dog shit she is trying to avoid. Credit: Imagine.Art.

“Dog Shit” * Nonfiction * Ro Miller

aromatica poetica May 29, 2024

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 …

An illustration of Ernest Gilman, wearing a red polka-dot bowtie, blue shirt, and brown jacket, sitting on a New York City subway with his fancy briefcase reading. Thanks to his anosmia, he is unaware of the toxic-looking green vapors emanating from the homeless man rummaging in his many bags nearby and traveling right beneath his nose, and therefor remains unperturbed. By Alabaster Rhumb.

Anosmia: My Newly Discovered Disability * Nonfiction * Ernest Gilman

aromatica poetica September 1, 2021

“ Par ma foi !” cries Molière’s would-be bourgeois gentleman M. Jourdain: “For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it”! I had my own Molière moment just recently when I learned that there was actually a name—and a scientific name at that—for my inability to smell: “anosmia.” I myself might otherwise have come up with a name like “olfactory deprivation,” or perhaps “smell blindness” (I know this is controversial), but I wanted to imply a …