Portrait of dana’s mom holding dana, overimposed on her own mature self. Direction, photo, and collage by dana (created for Ramon Monegal Monbloom)
If I could carve
A tree hollow
In the chest of my beloveds
I would crawl in it
And sit in it,
Me in them
And the beloved in me,
Like a family
Of Matrioshkas. Wednesday, Mar 5 by dana. Part of “Songs for Their Sleep”, a poetry journal of pregnancy
Wildflowers. Photo by Laura Evans with treatment by dana
V.
Parascheva was fast, loud, and inattentive to what village protocol demanded of her. Left pregnant on the brink of WWII, she birthed and raised her daughter, Anastasia, without a fuss, and short of a husband drafted to the front line (who was growing, as an escapee from a prisoner camp in Odessa, his own storyline of infinite randomness). Much is not to be said about Parascheva; neither was she handsomer or handier than others.
What she was, though, was happier, as if the sun always shone brighter upon her humble hut. Animals thrived around her; strangers lost found shelter with her; her garden (in name only, as she never tended it) exploded with blooms like she was some old, happy which pushing life out of everything she touched.
Anastasia. Photo treatment by dana
IV
Anastasia was married very young and found herself mothering Cornelia soon after. Her household—her domain, ringing with the rhythms of her sewing machine and buzz of bees cradling the old lilac trees. Tied to the ground but elevated through the most random penchant for naive rhyming, Anastasia kept her hair done and her garden exact, blooms pushing correctly through the carefully-worked soil, healthy and proper and each knowing its place.
Detail of digital interactive poetry art by J.Piringer. Photo treatment by dana
III
Cornelia, unlike her lineage, lives in a town, where water is running, logopedy is a thing, and blooming happens on windowsills many feet in the air. Within cement boxes atop one another, she lovingly brings words to children who don’t have them, much like she did with her own Dana long ago: back bent, attention intent, and eyes beaming with so much light it pushes through and breaks the silence.
Ramon Monegal Monbloom. Photo and treatment by dana
As a female, you are born with all the eggs you’ll ever have- should one or more be destined to become another, they’ll have been in you since before you were born. Every grandmother, thus, is carrying their future grandchildren while they’re pregnant, bridging time in womanhood like a continuous song of collective memory.
Ramon Monegal Monbloom, too, is a bridge. Built in arches sprung across perfumery eras and levels of depths, it manages to be at once classical and fresh, grandiose but simple, intimate but universal. The first nose is intensely aromatic, like the perfumey infusion of an afternoon of garden work: oily herbs, slight sweat, fleshy flowers. What follows is the smoothest transition into (warm) earthiness, smoky, fulfilling, and resolved, which gives way, further still, to an enveloping, atemporal, almost animalic creaminess. And there it stays: life force in all its glory, reigned by a tuberose covering everything tuberose in the same way my she-tribe took words from naive rhyming all the way to CaFleureBon.
official notes: labdanum, tuberose, musk, patchouli, oud, ylang, jasmine, osmanthus, neroli, cedar
other perceived notes: vetiver, cumin, ambergris, suede, tonka, dirt, vanilla, tar
Disclaimer: Ramon Monegal Monbloom selected by me as a #BestofMonegal My opinions are my own.
–dana sandu, Contributor
Thanks to the generosity of Europerfumes, the USA distributor of Ramon Monegal we have a 50 ml tester of Ramon Monegal Monbloom for one registered reader in the USA or dana will send 5 ml to a Romanian reader. There is only one winner. You must register or your comment will not count. To be eligible, please tell us what you enjoyed about dana’s review and your favorite Ramon Monegal perfume. Draw ends 7/22/2019
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