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failed sonnet: bluebird

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.
Picture
Courtesy of Colored Pencil Magazine via Flickr.

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.
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