Pua mēlia

I walk to the store and I can smell the magnolias as the stench permeates the misty morning. I don’t see the sun. The smell suggests the plumerias from home. Almost a stink sweet. But for some reason, the magnolias stink like death, like the slow burn of a Southern dying melancholy. Plumerias, so common, so complex, represent the opposite in my nose’s eye. The sap bleeding from the picked flowers or broken branches that ooze white lifeblood. So common, so complex. Like the rebirth of long-awaited airport greetings, or high school graduates buried in flora. It is the surging force of beauty and occasion, of celebration and happy.