have you loosened into another or are you simply gone? It’s almost winter & I read about wars on Wikipedia & the death counts & wondered about you & your love for things that disappear. I gargle salt every night, spit on my paper cuts & watch them ooze. I thought of your love for discomfort—your blizzard, your no daylight, your dark & decaying sense of fit—how you want nothing more than to constantly shift like backing winds. I try & do good things & you’ve gone. There’s a cold front coming & I’m still updating you & I’ve become obsessed with war that it’s becoming its own kind of violence
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, Foundry, Poetry Northwest, AGNI, and Gulf Coast, among others. She is co-founding editor of The Shore and is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University where she is also the Poetry Editor of New South. Twitter: @caro___chavatel Instagram: @akababybranca
Photo by samantha celera on Foter.com / CC BY-ND