1900’s high tech vocabulary comes to mind.

Following the stapler, stethoscopes, steam locomotives, safety pins,

and tungsten steel much spoken of in our metallurgist’s family

where Dad won a Bessemer medal and we all hazarded a worry

while stepping into the Barney’s department store elevator

about metal fatigue, came this rearrangement

of antique comforts and distresses. Camphor,

eucalyptus, levomenthol, thyme, and cedar oil:

call them to mind and hearing this

you can feel already the aromatic stirrings swirl

up your sinuses. I think of embalming — myrrh

in the exotic garden setting the space ajar between death

and preservation. I thought it was named after my Dad — Vick’s —

and remember dimly him circling it on my chest

at night through the crush and press and gasp

of pertussis, how he sat by my bed through the night

when I was four, and camphor swirled like saints’ ghosts

up from the sheets. Bitter bewitching notes of turpentine

made me dream of his soaked rag in a tin in the cellar

for wiping oil paint splotches off our hands;

and paraffin — that lit my Nana’s glass lamps before the cords

came spidering across the ceilings. These ancient consolations

cleansing, opening, embrocatory magic

worked their mending sorceries toward sleep.

I have only to unscrew the small blue jar

from the shrine of my medicine cabinet’s back shelf

and trustworthy hands are anointing me again like hierophants

by night, whispering: rest and mend, and then,

you, too, go out and heal and make things strong and well.

Jennifer M Phillips

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, and painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips’ poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling with the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock).