Sense of Smell, Sense of Time

by Derek Godin

The soap in the changing room smelled
of watermelon bubble gum, an artificial
industrial sweetness engineered to cut
through below-the-belt scents like a keen
mind though bullshit—a carnival of chemicals
clamoring to conceal memories implanted
one chlorine puck at a time; I spent a
long childhood in reverberating rooms
laid in tile, ticklish to the air,
squirming in my shorts, sinuses scorched
and salted, a minnow in all ways; pay
close attention to what's cloaking me,
that musky marshmallow banana that only
refers to itself, an olfactory recursion
built from the ground up to scrub itself
clean, scouring the evidence of life
beyond your own degenerated cells