Photo: Some of the most beautiful specimens . . . Mona Kayhan, Persis Karim, and Aphrodite Desiree Navab, New York, September 18, 2009.
***
I am the only one of four sisters
who hasn’t gone under the knife.
I resisted the pleas of my aunt and sisters
to become “more beautiful,” “more you.”
I’ve kept my stately proboscis
in-tact—choosing not to excise its grandeur.
It suits me, I suppose—evidence of my father,
those people who live in the dryer, hotter climes
of the Mediterranean, in high desert plateaus,
cooling themselves with naso-thermo-regulation.
My old Jewish boyfriend used to say how do the goyim
breathe from those things anyway?
On my wedding day, my husband, also Jewish
and rather plentiful in that region of his face
completed his vows by saying “there is no guarantee in love,
but of this, I am certain: if we have a child he or she
will have a really big nose.” When I nuzzle him
with mine, he pulls back his face, jumps
at the coldness of its tip. Contrary to popular belief, the nose
is not merely cosmetic—it can gauge temperature beyond the body.
And that’s another thing, I’ve realized about the nose—
that smell is an underrated sense, perhaps a gift.
Imagine the possibilities for amplification: aromas
of jasmine, apple pie, saffron, lemon, rose,
might grow more intense, depending on the height
and angle of that fleshy mound. I admit to having no
scientific evidence for this, but I do wonder
what happens when a person alters
the things they were born with.
Whole industries were born from Iranian women
watching blonde, petite-nosed movie stars
who made them forget their own striking beauty
took thousands of years to evolve, only to be undone
by someone who decided that hairless, plucked, tucked,
sliced, nipped, and trimmed, were the loveliest
of them all. I like to think of the nose as great art
waiting to be discovered. Like those large-nosed kings
depicted on sides of temples, on papyrus, on caves, in colorful
Mayan pictographs like Popul Voh. Noses were signs
of nobility and prowess. Any king with a puny one
might have been thought of as small and impotent.
These days, I get a steady stream of emails offering penis
enlargement. But that’s hidden, visible only
in bedroom interludes. The nose is the public display
of one’s endowments—the relief map of a human face.
I study people’s noses in order to read their origins—
to situate my gaze, to find how far out
in the world they really are.
