Spices

Today for Writing Club we wrote to smells. I brought two different spices to the Skybox, one brown, one red, and we were all challenged to come up with four words to describe each spice. Then, we were to write three places, people or things the spice reminded us of. All the while attempting to stray way from "traditional" cooking and baking words. Once the descriptors were all complied we shared them. Brittany reminded us all that smell is the sense most evocative of memories. I think we all found that our pieces were ripe with many different types of memory, both personal and cultural, as well conscious and subconscious. Here are a few samples. The first is by Sumara, Sammi Baig, a freshman at Lake Forest College and the second by myself. More to come.

Sammi's  Spice Piece:

The two women spoke in harsh Arabic.
 “Yalla! Yalla!”
 She tugged my hair, the other tugged harder. One had my fingers; smoothing them, roughing them, buffing them. Clipping out the parts unliked.
 The ceiling light emanated a dusty brown hue from which a ray of light thickened by dirt danced; limited by its thin ballroom. 
 “La, la, khamsa” spits out the one whose hands are cleverly entwined in my hair. Her accomplice picks out the fifth bottle of polish from the shelf; a smoky red, as if the sun was set on fire and all that was left was ash.
 I look over at my sister, who flips through a magazine as her mouth sloshes around gum that has been drained of all its candy sweet taste.

Kaisa Cumming's Spice Piece:

Remember feet held close to the fireplace and how the skin tingles as 
it creeps back to the bone as you creep up the cold stairs to bed.

Remember the quilt made with two hands twenty years ago by a little 
old lady with winter hands or maybe it was a little old lover with
dainty, fairy hands who pricked her winter fingers so many times you 
think you might be able to smell blood in the
fibers--but that's romantic, right?

Remember the warmth of Novemeber sun. You can see ghosts come out 
your mouth in clouds that never last.

And remember the Indian medicine woman holding her crooked bones in 
the crooked door way and the crooked-legged dog  with cloudy eyes and 
the way the song she sang when you had the fever of a fire-warmed 
cabin inside you cracked around the     
edges of her mouth.

Alex Andorfer's Piece

traveled south every summer 
    - ironically, to the state I live in now -
looming over the Sound
a mile's walk above the ocean
our collective society stood seven days of june.
i stayed in the middle room,
in the middle of the house,
the very middle of the Sound.

a ladder took you up there
           to my room (the middle one)
           to my bed
that's when bunks weren't associated with
dorm rooms
cramped living
the inability to get you laid.

the breeze carried my innocence and
Sound
sand
through the society
      the innocence and Sound to everyone's pleasure
      the sand less so

Caravanning neighbors
enthralled with the Sound.

My spice piece (oddly similar to Urrea's talk later that night)

They called our mothers

when we didn’t have a water bottle at school--

rung through telephone wires

the way this clay

feels when the sky refuses to open
we fall

after the water jug they told us to carry

drained eighteen hours ago

and the urine stopped running too

fell into a cyan green

plant our faces in the colony, 
like an animal god that smells after rain.

we ask in the city 
didn’t anyone ever tell us how much
water to bring on a desert walk?

because our bottles hang in holsters on our hips.

we may think we are the suncrowned rooster

but the flint of our every step

ignites and mummifies the cold cut pollo we are:

found

like an newborn artifact

one lime green shoe

still left on