Caroline Chavatel
Elegy for Origin
So what about the blackberry? Its lingering
juice dashed on the wall, an elegy to what
it signifies. And maybe the spoken fruit was
never anything but residue. It is always
about language. There are numerous
ways to spin it: a spider gnawing its own
thread, globes turning history, the luck
of a one-sided coin. It is not always about
language. For instance, before planes there
was the urge for flight, a game made of
mimicking birds. The feathered coffins
are this elegy, floating into places we’re still
naming. In Kitty Hawk, heavier than air,
the impact. This is all insufficient magic:
the way a body stays in place, how it hovers
above, the turn of carousels caught in frame,
never showing who else rides.
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 Online, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and The Journal, among others. She is editor and co-founder of both Madhouse Press and The Shore and is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University.
Return to May 2020 Edition
So what about the blackberry? Its lingering
juice dashed on the wall, an elegy to what
it signifies. And maybe the spoken fruit was
never anything but residue. It is always
about language. There are numerous
ways to spin it: a spider gnawing its own
thread, globes turning history, the luck
of a one-sided coin. It is not always about
language. For instance, before planes there
was the urge for flight, a game made of
mimicking birds. The feathered coffins
are this elegy, floating into places we’re still
naming. In Kitty Hawk, heavier than air,
the impact. This is all insufficient magic:
the way a body stays in place, how it hovers
above, the turn of carousels caught in frame,
never showing who else rides.
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 Online, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and The Journal, among others. She is editor and co-founder of both Madhouse Press and The Shore and is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University.
Return to May 2020 Edition