OF THE RING: ZAZEL
CAROLINE CHAVATEL
"Impresarios capitalized on women’s growing participation
in public life as a form of salable novelty.”
–Dr. Janet Davis, Smithsonian Magazine
How you labored—Zazel, the human
projectile. Your body flung like a shot
from a cannon. Human cannonball,
less-human. And how to keep the patterns?
How the dresses flowed and how the freedom
rang. It is one thing to reform. It is
another to re-form, to occupy that
sacred ground in a flesh not your own.
Your skin is a one-sided coin, all
metal and cold and you began in an old
London church, practicing your balance
across the dusty pews. You said a prayer,
probably. You did not say a prayer.
You did not say.
And the Great Farini conceived
of your contortion and fling. How tightly
you wound the projectile of herself,
and unwinding, unwinding, unwound.
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Caroline Chavatel is a poet, teacher, and editor and currently lives in Baltimore, MD where she teaches at Bard Baltimore. She is the co-founding editor of The Shore and is the author of White Noises (Greentower Press, 2019), which won The Laurel Review’s 2018 Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work appears in various journals such as The Missouri Review, AGNI, Sixth Finch, Foundry, Smartish Pace, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She received her Ph.D. from Georgia State University and her M.F.A. from New Mexico State University.