The Scent of Dusk

I still have a bottle of Old Spice  
and a bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby lotion;  
I don’t know why.  

I have left them on my vanity table  
among my bouquet of perfumes.  

To withhold the last vestige of you from time  
is like keeping a child you have left.  

Do you still use them  
on the skin of your dusk?  

The mixed scent of man and boy  
is the imprint of your paradox:  
shyness and boldness,  
beauty and violence.  

It’s domestic intimacy against time,  
against its force of forgetfulness.  

When I breathe in the scents together,  
I see my long fingers tracing your cheeks.  

Languor intoxicates the grammar of absence  
I have learned  
since you left the vertigo of you here.  

I hope you have forgotten them  
so that I can keep them here  
in my bouquet of scents—  
yours and mine.  

I keep the alphabet of your name  
written on the palimpsest  
of the summer night.

— Stephanie Joori Suh