This building is a pink and past-stained fossil— dear no one—
that costs twenty-two dollars and a billion years. Entry:
admittance, hello, free passage, the sliding
of memory into a charnel house.
Dear scar we deem dirty and cover
dear fake construction paper sun we hang
dear sequined sample of madness,
these are taken-in, frostbitten holds—
fingers, our land, your letters.
With your hungry glass-cased voice
and war-danced body asleep, we bury
the relic and burn the scrap we are
tarnishing, cherishing.
It’s dim on purpose.
They love the glass— the light, the skin, how
it enlarges the room, the body—
dear Folsom spear point— I’m sorry. You
sediment yourself, drifting current
in the bottom of a river.
I wonder if the sun
got cold when she went away. How could she
warm herself when she had to
warm all of you?
Dear headdress dear earth lodge dear America dear memory:
I frame you like a museumed artifact, safe from thievery and me.
Dear broken bread.
Dear broken skull.
Dear Thanksgiving.
Such a quiet man, the historian; running
his fingers over dusty, colored nothings
so he’s blank like some books. But the spirit
of labor is a woman—flattening roses in books,
he writes this.
Write this: entry.
I want to rub my hands over the sun like pottery,
mold the world as it has me.
I used to think a crescent moon was hungry
and a full moon was stuffed, hearty and whole
like a wheel of brie, and if I
nibbled enough I could make darkness, but I fear
being full; not needing what fills me.
Dear no one—
There are so many little dyings, how do we know
which one is death?
Caroline Chavatel is a Baltimore native and received her Bachelor’s in Creative Writing in December 2015 from Salisbury University. Her poems appear in Slipstream, Potomac Review, 30 N., and Crab Creek Review. She has led literature groups for inmates at a local prison and enjoys marrying poetry with critical political theory. She plans to pursue a M.F.A. degree in fall 2016. When she’s not writing poems, she’s French-pressing coffee, or thinking about time travel. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.