MY HOUSE OF SMELLS

Come sniff your way

through my house of odors.

Here, in the kitchen,

is the fetid smell

of a garroted tenant.

In that cabinet,

the decaying stench

of a door-to-door salesman.

Come into the parlor

where the putrid whiff

of a blind date

combines with the foul stink

of a stray dog.

Or, into the bedroom,

where sheets and blankets

struggle to entomb

the moldy stench

of he who overslept

by ten years and counting.

The basement is a veritable

Mardis Gras for the nostrils.

You get the noxious scent

of an arch-enemy,

a random stranger’s rancid reek

and the rotten smell of a debt collector.

The bodies are long buried.

But what they were to me

remains.

John Grey is an Australian poet and US resident who has recently been published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly, and Lost Pilots. His latest books, "Between Two Fires,” “Covert,” and “Memory Outside The Head,” are available through Amazon. He has work upcoming in California Quarterly, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa, and Shot Glass Journal.