This began with a simple idea: choose one word and, without explanation, each write our own piece. My task was to write a poem. E.A. Escamilla , an essay. The word was Petrichor. Neither of us knew what the other was writing. The condition was simple: don’t define it. Write whatever it evokes in you.
E.A. Escamilla’s essay is linked below the poem.
Petrichor
From a place without time and distance
I was turning back toward love
not with hope, not with mercy,
but like an hourglass forgetting its own body,
my desire like sand leaving,
grain by grain,
pouring down,
each drop touching,
what sees dissolves
in hell-rain.
A silky scent moves between us,
is it your poison running into my veins,
or a god intoxicating,
absorbing my salt,
draining my water,
carrying away my sand,
and burying itself
in the scar I keep closest.
Before death arrives at our door,
I want us to leave a seed in life.
A field of poppies opens inside me,
and I bleed through it without loss,
red not as love
but as fear,
sprouting from sorrow into delightful sin,
do not ask for forgiveness.
Before I plunge into your eyes
like entering a burning forest
without a path,
blood and sweat,
hungry, furious, alive,
not to possess
but to meet the place of your cut in you,
the sword finding its sheath
as if violence grew tired of itself.
The hourglass forgets again,
and I love you gently through it,
through lost moments,
a newly washed morning.
With fiery rain
my evening arrived too early
and pulled you away.
At one touch I flaked apart,
a thousand nights made me pay.
In you
I loved the impossible,
the way it refused to resolve,
the way it stayed burning
without asking for meaning.
Nothing in me moves anymore.
You, my love, the petrichor,
the scent of hell I adore.
E.A. Escamilla essay:
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I did not expect "the scent of hell I adore" to be the line that makes the whole poem land. But it does. You earned that inversion completely. I'm curious whether readers will see the same word the way we each saw it.
Why why why??
Why are you awesome?