Smell by Kendall Snipper

A faint scent lingers in the creases of my palms when you’ve departed

something like ripening, wet coconut and the tinge of oily sweat just 

dripping down the tips of a pronounced brow bone

It smells like pupils just 

grazing over other irises, before the tickle of eyelashes on a cheek

Before the smell is rubbed off by dish soap, hot water, and porcelain scrubbing 

off yours and the day's tender caresses, I anoint myself in the eddy of your cells

Blessing my filtrum with remnants of your heaving laughter,

how the exhaustion of your lungs caused you to sweat until the browns of skin

flipped into mauve

Those bits of your joyousness engrave themselves into 

fortuned lines of my palms when I held your face earlier in the evening

I mirror my hands onto my face hoping the smell might transfer:

Not in my cheekbones but in my recollections, so when I forget what we laughed

So heavily at, I will remember we laughed

I will remember the sloppy whiff of your coconut Vaseline far before I remember 

Any joke we’ve exchanged

Because nothing has stained my memory quite like your smell before.