Read More: A Brief Q&A with Caroline Chavatel
This Fabulous Century IV
I am never sure
of the collective garment we sew—its askew
buttons and misplaced hems.
At six, my grandmother taught
me the laws of the machine—
knob, pedal, stitch, reverse
stitch.
She would let me choose
the pattern, guide my hands to thread.
I am sure these clothes are lost.
We often lose the things we love.
I have no interest in learning that old thing.
We have interest in the new.
How to Butcher a Pig
Sometimes the sky looks like thousands
of plastic bags cased another thousand.
Below it, a thousand hogs. We lay corn
out for them, get them fat and ready.
They come back for their feed, trust
the fences we build. And once in a kitchen:
a dead pig ambivalent on the counter still
and inert, ready for the Chef’s tomorrow-slice.
To kill a pig, you shoot it once between
the eyes with a rifle. (Edit –certain breeds
or certain individual pigs are harder to take
down. In this case, we use a 20 gauge slug.)
How to forget about the bodies
we destroy: hang, wash, weigh.
Separate shoulder from loin. […]
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Cost Analysis
I remember one specific cost: the sunhat
I lost in 2007, how perhaps it flew off the boat
to Crane Point and landed among the sanctuary
birds. The hardwood tree’s branch hanging it
from its limb after a day’s slackening for
another tourist to find. I see her alone, discovering
how we can carry what the trees offer
around with us: shade, concealment,
one sunhat richer. At fourteen, I imagined it
a barter: the loss to be made up by something
eventually gained. I forced everything hers:
the single earring on the beach my gift
for the payment of the hat. How everything
becomes transactional in elegy. At dinner,
the sole sandal under the rattan table, how
it must have been her offering. The pair
of headphones in the seat-back pocket,
the dollar bill on the bathroom’s tile, the rain
on my parents’ garden that desperately needed
to be gifted its growth. Or perhaps
the hat lay abandoned on a beach with no
one to keep it, the tourist imagined. What
then of my loss?
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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 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.