Tailor-Made by Brianna Noll

As with anything, it begins
with a conversation. The perfumer
asks your blood type, your dog’s
name and temperament, the color
of the sky on your fourteenth birthday.
Tell her about the oil-metal scent
of your trumpet’s valves and the action
of its finger buttons, and she will make
you smell of a brass symphony
or Mahler’s composing hut on the Attersee.
The scent is a cloud you live within
and trail behind you, a beacon
calling to your followers. Some want
a bespoke perfume to evoke a memory
or a language, but you’re searching
for the scent of your past life.
You are being forced to reincarnate,
and not on your own terms, and if
you must do this, you find it better
to look backward. What you fear most
is becoming someone for whom
the arrangement of cracks in the sidewalk
means little, the march of ants still less.
If you could think of your last, best faces
and your last, best thoughts, you might
have an iota of control in a process
no longer spiritual, no longer your own.

Brianna Noll is the author of The Era of Discontent, forthcoming from Elixir Press, and The Price of Scarlet, named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. Poetry Editor of The Account, which she helped found, she lives in Los Angeles.