Two Poems
Leigh Chadwick
ON BEING
Stop giving me emotions, I tell my emotions.
Be better at being better. I am always fighting
a head cold after walking through December.
I was seventeen when I left my virginity
in a basement in Cleveland. The Mississippi one.
That’s a lie. I was eighteen and his dorm room smelled
like a box of cinnamon that woke up sweating.
I like to drink a glass of orange juice after fucking
with the lights on. In all of my dreams,
it takes a machete to cut through the fog.
I hope his chemo feels like listening to the Talking Heads
for the first time. It’s useless to hope for a heartbeat
after the second round passes through
what the boy used to call his chest. What have we
stepped on that isn’t a burial ground?
POEM ON HOW TO SURVIVE AWP, WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO HAS NEVER ATTENDED AWP
Tattoo your living will on the inside of your left thigh. Dream of the shape of a lover you haven’t seen in a decade. Ignore the cancer swirling through the city your daughter’s grandparents moved to after they retired. Instead, go to the hotel bar. Sit next to a man who would look like your husband if he looked more like your husband. Drink something brown. Drink something white. Drink straight from a well. Eat pretzels out of a dirty bowl. Lead a panel on how to moan in enjambment. Lead a panel on how to walk home alone in a straight line on a Friday night. In bed, still alone, drink a bottle of six-dollar Chardonnay. Wake up in last night’s clothes. Eat a breakfast burrito that tastes like a regular burrito. Stand behind a table at the book fair and give out a complimentary Xanax with the purchase of your book. Run out of Xanax. Spend the money you made selling your books buying more Xanax. Ask an editor of an online literary journal named after a fast food restaurant to send a form rejection to the cancer in your father-in-law’s abdomen. Go outside and wish for thunder. Find a dog. Pet the dog once you find it.
Leigh Chadwick is the author of Your Favorite Poet and Sophomore Slump, both published by Malarkey Books, and co-author, along with Adrienne Marie Barros, of Too Much Tongue, published by Autofocus.
These poems are from the limited edition Zine, Sufjan Stevens Gave Me Tennesee, available in the Sophomore Slump Deluxe Package (supplies are running low).