Infomercial for Soft Things (Alcibiades)
Alcibiades—Athenian playboy, politician, and general who switched his allegiances between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War—embraced wantonness and excessive luxury. He had the planks of his ship taken out to make room for his much softer pillow-filled hammock and his shield did not bear the traditional military insignia but rather was embossed with a Cupid holding a thunderbolt in its hand.
-THE COLLECTOR
Make room, make room and what of this
soft purple that holds me
like night’s forgery. This is the room
in which you were fated
to arrive. Who desires
the knock of a cold plank
against an ankle, bones
weakened into habit? Soft is
king but I am not
selling you softness, but then again, I am
not selling you anything at all.
A thousand men nod and this
is my warranty. Dear
distant troops, break your
allegiance to this-that-and-others. I have
tried them all.
The sky
exiles us into tomorrow.
The moon is up in arms.
I’ve counted
the craters and ended
in loss, that smooth command
of star and bone, thought no artillery
fit. Now nothing remains which
could not be bent or burned
by noon—and now, a phalanx
of smoke fogs this
sensible window. Act now
before it closes, before
this house of ours
is ash, before this handsome
offer spends itself away because
the camera loves
my custom face. How warm
love could be. The sun and moon
conspire and this, my word,
is permanent. Do not
let this chance slip into
waking. With so many ways to
end a sentence, I’m bound, and this
is all for you.
Infomercial (Socrates)
If what is locked both keeps & refuses, what is
the key to great locks? I cannot keep this
from you a moment more. I wish to keep you
from this unruly static, to make you
whole again. Lately, I have been
of the agora’s habits, at the moneychangers’
tables, a stranger to the way of artificial light.
But now, that camera’s rude eye fixes
on mine and I ask: do you struggle
to tame rebellious flyaways? How
you have felt I cannot tell but recall
when— during the summer months—
your nose is a door and the smell of cut grass
reminds you only of itself. Then do not
mistake repetition for lack of
motion, scent of rose for rose, cloud
for its hole of shade. Or recall when you might have
ambled into town without purpose but instead
for the promise of distance alone with so much
purpose in the hot, birdless sky and the path
unlocked to a misfit, to some new
wind clouding your head. Please do not
mistake these cues for keys, these keys
for doors, these doors for distance, this claim
a lock. I only wish to sway the counter—watch
it brightly rise in another vote
of conviction, a new charge ahead.
Would you see that Linda from Omaha wants to know,
Brenta from Philadelphia wants to,
Deirdre from El Paso wants—
Would you hear, from this cavemouth,
the whole truth and release your daily charge?
Do not mistake this screen for distance, our distance
for dark, this light for lie. Know I will take these
testimonials to my grave. Just look
at that transformation.
Plato Haunts the Real Housewives Reunion Set
& Andy Cohen is none the wiser
but can tell someone has forced
the fill & key light dim, the bouncer
hanging like a button. The crew
eats it up: the ladies’ backlit & lined
like slices of commercial bread, their backs
in chain upright as slats to a blind &
under their eyes: a highlight,
a shadow, ten years of light exposed
to the grain. They wear their dark
celebrity like jewelry & gemstones fall
from their laps. They have seen
some things & Andy says someone from
Atlanta or Miami or Plano wants to know
if bees will sting unprovoked, wants to know
of their nature, or if bees differ as bees
& one says once, in Mykonos, the Queen
landed on her wrist & the others hold
an arrogant swarm at their teeth’s gate. They
all become a hive of accusation as the answer
slouches toward its question, that bounce of light
ascending from their pedicured feet.
Caroline Chavatel is a teacher, poet, and editor from Baltimore, MD. She is the author of Consume Her, winner of the 2024 Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry, and White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), winner of The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Missouri Review, AGNI, Sixth Finch, Smartish Pace and Poetry Northwest, among others. She is a co-founding editor of The Shore and currently teaches First Year Seminar and Poetry Workshop at Bard High School Early College in Baltimore, MD.
