Today’s poem was part of a special launch schedule during National Poetry Month from April 1—30, 2024. I posted a new poem daily for 17 days and then got knocked off schedule because…I moved! This challenge restarted on May 1 and continues for the 13 days I missed. The final summary of all poems will be sent to all subscribers on May 24 and otherwise can be viewed for free in the archives here. Thank you for being here!
“DOLLAR STORE”
The label says: "Tom Ford Tuscan Leather" but first whiff and I know: I've been here before. It's the dollar store (sorry, Tom). A nostalgia of whisper delights, maybe the only place possibility is graspable, touchable, shoppable, and just $1 a piece in the good old days, at least, but who wants to call it the "more than a dollar store"? Plug a hole, find what you've been looking for, everything you've been meaning to get to and things your brain conjures up in the instant it takes to fall in love, it's easy to fall in love with something real. My bills and my financial responsibilities can handle this frontier, frankly, it's held up by it, and at night I dream about that tv show about robots pretending to be cowboys. They have no idea the hell they're living in. My lowly knick-knacks have a longer shelf life than the song that never ends: your steadfast commitment to violent games like this one, dressing up the necessary compulsion to buy cheap things and calling it $500-a-pop sexy, play it so hard Drake writes a song about it.
P.S.
I’m on a fragrance-inspired roll. I’ve really been trying to find the authenticity of my voice and writing poetry has really helped with that because I think poetry by nature has a sentimental slant and I tend not to be, apparently, a very sentimental person. I don’t think poetry has to be particularly sentimental to be an honest dive into your feelings. Here’s me calling a $500 perfume the smell of a dollar store. (It’s not bad, that’s just what it reminds me of. Can someone tell me why?)