Caroline Shea

Baby’s Breath

Certain scents still undo me—
blacktop baking in the juneday sun,
stale hospital scrubs, laundered thin,
the acid ache of blood on a Barbie-pink razor
(though it’s been years since a cut
was anything but accidental). Another way to say:
I’m sentimental. Sticky as an infant.
Daily, I strip and scrub myself pink, peeled
from the shell of sleep.
I dab perfume into my skin
in small circles, pressing my wrists together
as if bound, the way I’ve watched my mother do it
for years. The woman who sold me
the bottle said this suffocates the scent,
crushes it, to instead let
the jasmine and cardamom mingle
slowly with sweat. Even the way I adorn myself
a mistake and an inheritance. When he told me
he liked my perfume, I wore the same scent for
a month. Perfume from the Latin, “per fumus,”
meaning through smoke. Meaning,
I still want to shape the way my lover sees me.
On late, hazy nights, I miss the plume
of his cigarettes, the way I’d wake and find him by the window,
jittery and angelic in the morning sun slanting off the snow.
It’s true, I wanted him to quit. His breath comes easier, now.
But some comforts linger past logic—the itch
of smoke in the back of the throat,
my gilded bottles clustered by the sink, the satisfaction of an injury
that feels earned. The guilt, I think, was always there.
They say Cleopatra soaked her ships’ sails in perfume
so her lovers could smell her
coming. As my mother clears
the attic of her childhood home,
I swallow gardenias. Liz Taylor’s
kohl-rimmed eyes stare from a staticky TV.
In my dreams, I am always the one
who ruins things. Overripe and sugary with rot.
Lately, I can’t decide what I fear most:
To bear a child or to raise one?

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Caroline Shea is the author of Lambflesh (Kelsay Books, 2019) and an assistant editor for Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Crab Fat Magazine, The Pinch and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other publications. Recently, she received The Pinch Literary Award and was a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. She's currently an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU.