Junkmail
by Caroline Chavatel
Bataille said that poetry leads to
eroticism: a fusion of separate
objects matching sun and sea.
It made me feel dirty: the work
to imagine death was the same
as a sexual fetish. I read this
in an email, where you called yourself
petulant, called me weak, wished me well.
You attached him, some Rimbaud,
and I couldn’t help but droop
for our sad season: the unsavory deletion
of what had the chance of salvation,
the impossible delirium of love,
the no name machinery of the heart
that beats on like a bird’s beak
against a feeder, demanding to be served.
Bataille said that poetry leads to
eroticism: a fusion of separate
objects matching sun and sea.
It made me feel dirty: the work
to imagine death was the same
as a sexual fetish. I read this
in an email, where you called yourself
petulant, called me weak, wished me well.
You attached him, some Rimbaud,
and I couldn’t help but droop
for our sad season: the unsavory deletion
of what had the chance of salvation,
the impossible delirium of love,
the no name machinery of the heart
that beats on like a bird’s beak
against a feeder, demanding to be served.
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, AGNI Online, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and others. She is an editor at Madhouse Press and a co-founding editor of The Shore. She is currently a PhD student at Georgia State University.