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Illustration by Cheryl Caesar

Barn animals

My brother’s toy, although I don’t recall
him playing with it. Made, I guess, to teach
us shapes, beyond square peg, round hole.

A barn and livestock, molded each
one of plastic, but different kinds of plastic.
The barn was hard and smooth, so you could bleach

it clean, or wipe it with Fantastik.
The critters had the surface give,
the tackiness of flesh, a touch elastic,

bearing the smells that live
on hands that held them, backed
them into holes, their heads out, passive.

Seven slots, aligned. Seven lives enacted
for me. A central green pig, round,
with orange piglets on each side racked.

Genetrix and progeny. The sound
of mewling and puking and the smell
of sour milk. Here no interest found.

At left a purple cow: puella,
my destiny. A sexy hexagon,
inverted hourglass, a nubile swell.

At right, a square blue horse, the brawn
of Archie Andrews’ jaw. The puer,
my designated prince. The bygone

smell of Kool-Aid: artificial, sure.
Far left, oval pink sheep: the vetula.
Smell of pink lotion, tidy and mature.

Far right, an ochre goat, triangular.
The senex with his grizzled beard,
gruff and smelling of cigar.

I don’t know where they came from, where I heard
these strange identities. No one told me, which means
the world did: that they came to me as Word,

timeless Platonic forms. I knew before my teens
I must achieve inversion of that bovine
hexagon, at any fleshly cost. Not queen

but forever princess, to sparkle and shine:
Ashputtel on her first night at the ball.
Back to the barn: its walls did not confine

the animals but molded them: each stall
imposed the destined shape. On me as well.
The toy was all of plastic, but some parts were more

plastic than others. Soft chicks shaped by hard shell.
The creatures were not taking my hands’ smell,
as I had thought before,

but leaving theirs on me, past all ablation.
Flesh follows form: such was my education.

Pristeen

At home, I unroll the yoga mat and YouTube.
The algorithms roll out, having smelled our shame.
Young women, feisty in leggings, stick out their faces, announcing,
‘My pits ain’t the only part of me that stinks.’

They grimace, pull out their waistbands and spray down.
A white-haired woman hangs her head, confessing
that for fifty years she’d thought a daily shower
and underarm deodorant would be sufficient.

Now she covers her whole body with the product
named for light. Yes, illumination is here, like those red
lights that reveal pet urine stains. She never knew, she said,
the hidden smells she had been harboring.

I think of the sixties magazines: Seventeen and Mademoiselle,
and those ads where ‘feminine’ always seemed
a code for a vague bodily shame: ‘feminine hygiene’ requiring
great stealth and secrecy. The young woman in white eyelet,

princess-cut, and a Tricia Nixon headband, casts down
her eyes as the caption proclaims, ‘The worst odor problem
a girl has isn’t under her pretty little arms.’ I don’t know
which shame is worse, pugnacious or demure.

But I remember that product: Pristeen. My female
biological parent used it; of course she did; she hated
the natural body. I remember the day
she called me inside to take a bath, and when I asked

why (baths happening normally at night), she said,
‘You don’t think the doctor wants to examine
a dirty old ugly smelly body, do you?’
So it seems I had a medical appointment.

She favored the medical model: washed her face
each day with PhisoHex, even after it was banned
for OTC, and she had to get a prescription.
She caked her face with Covermark, designed for burn victims.

It was the seventies, age of the ‘natural look,’
her nemesis. She ratted up my hair and sprayed the mound.
I cried, ‘I can’t even get a brush through it now!’
‘Who cares about that?’ she said, and I thought

of Marie Antoinette, of three-foot wigs built over armatures,
harboring vermin. That was her game. The body was ugly
and smelly, but could be tarted up, at least
long enough to attract a male, and then you were set.

In a rare moment of approval, once she told
the story of a high-school classmate
whose mother had fled an unnamed Eastern European
country with a gold coin hidden in a jar of cold cream.

That was her ideal. Escaping all danger and suffering
with a jar of artifice.
Well, mine is different. I am
no prissy teen. I wash, brush and comb, applying the smells
that please me, at peace with my own. No deception
needed; nothing to hide. My gold piece is deep
within, cradled in my solar plexus. Soft as a yellow
lotus, warming as the sun. If tart is needed, sour
as a lemon drop. Not for barter. Cannot be taken away.

The boon

So today as I was organizing my office bookshelves, I dropped
and broke a tiny vial of ylang-ylang. Wiping
the floor was a pleasure, as the fragrance permeated
the boards, the kleenex, the skin of my hands. Even the wastebasket.

As though some benevolent spirit was anointing
my workspace and my working hands. Even though
I ended up spending the afternoon watching vids on YouTube.

Then returning home to yoga on the deck. The sun warms my face
and strengthens my bones. The breeze does reiki over my body.
The birds make ambient music. My furry attendant stretches beside me.

I roll on my back. Overhead, the slow-moving clouds
tip me a wink, seeming to say: ‘So you decided to take
a day off? May we offer you this menu of free spa services?’
I breathe deeply and accept with pleasure.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Cheryl Caesar lived in France for 25 years before returning to Michigan. She teaches writing at Michigan State University, serves on the boards of the Michigan College English Association and the Lansing Poetry Club. Her chapbook of protest poetry, Flatman, is available from Amazon, and her poems and artwork appear in the anthology Words Across the Water, vols. 1 and 2 (Fractal Edge Press).