Christopher Woods

I no longer keep the list I once did. The list on paper. Take no effort whatsoever. But I can tell you that, for a very long time, I kept a list of night smells. Oh, I am not speaking of the sulfuric odor of falling stars, or even the damp clay smell of the moon on a humid night.

Instead, the smells of certain given nights concerned me. And still do, but now I have no evidence to show, on paper. The obsession is still with me, yes, but I no longer note the scents of night in my ledger.

You know how it is, how night can smell. Vanilla and almonds, bleach and honeysuckle, licorice and dust. Tarragon and camphor and, on some nights, the smell of blood, still warm. Odors of otherness, and maybe of interiors breaking open.

But I stopped all that. Someone told me a list like that was the work of a deranged person. Nothing good in that. Others don’t take kindly to that sort of person. So, to play it safe, I now keep my list inside my head.

Tonight, here, the air is thick with chemicals. They spew from smokestacks in refineries that in the dark resemble vast amusement parks. The air is clogged with secrets, dangerous and worse.

People in this night do not keep lists. Breathing so many things, night after night, they have lost count. Of scents, and of nights. They simply forget, walking back and forth in rooms of a house for sixty years. Embracing after midnight on a sweat soaked bed, the lace curtains limp with whatever passes for the darkness.

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Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Texas. He has published a novel, THE DREAM PATCH, a prose collection, UNDER A RIVERBED SKY, and a poetry collection, MAYBE BIRDS WOULD CARRY IT AWAY. His novella, HEARTS IN THE DARK, was published in an anthology by RUNNING WILD PRESS in Los Angeles. He has received residencies from The Ucross Foundation and the Edward Albee Foundation, and a grant from the Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation. His plays included MOONBIRDS, an absurdist play about census-takers in a country where there are no people left to count, FIRE, a drama about a woman who loses her family in a house fire she may have set, INTERIM, about souls in Purgatory, and HEART SPEAK, an evening of monologues for men and women. Gallery - https://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/f861509283