failed sonnet: bluebird
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Of all the ways to calculate a nightmare:
this murmur, this how-much, this that. The bluebird knows something we don’t: a banking alternative — AmEx can help take the stress out of money management. Blue, I want so badly to write about anything else. The sky is pale today, substanceless blue, full of bluebirds Romantic. As though its own insufficient magic, I return to the crevices of cold appliances, scrub them white, this so & so & so. Could you imagine shooting the colors from the sky ’til nothing at all, replicating it bare & barren & at all, replicating it barren & bare & how could I write about anything else when there are billionaires in jet planes? How do they assign the sky? Blue, I want so badly to know how desire can be contained to one little portion of air? The small robin-egg, the different mornings of your face, the how. They fly out and down, collapse into glass. The birds, the planes — no, the birds — In the window, a hairline fracture. We could sit by the window all day and still not understand flight, could Google different ways to grasp it, subtract our longing from this drawn-out mathematic equation. From this drawn-out equation, anything else you’d like to share? I am always filling out expensive forms to prove my suffering. Blue, how did you thrush up there? Is there anything else you’d like to share with us? Can I steal your nest’s attention for just a second? With singular purpose, is anything meant to be its own song? The tree’s semaphore, common forgetting, the branches plague. All this fake-citrus in the kitchen. Loaded with features, not fees, loaded as the sky pregnant with rain waiting to birth the blue, the blue, the bluest. |
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Caroline Chavatel is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Journal, among others. She is an editor at Madhouse Press, co-founding editor of The Shore, and currently a PhD student at Georgia State University.