Prologue to Your Favorite Poet, Leigh Chadwick
I write a book of poems. I title it Your Favorite Poet. It is a good book of poems. To celebrate writing a good book of poems, I tape origami wings to my shoulder blades and drink a bottle of red grapes as I unfold an atlas and promise to find you, so I can tell you that I wrote a book of poems titled Your Favorite Poet and that the book is good and that you are the reason these words were born, that they were given these pages, and then I am searching for you, searching in caves and on top of mountains—above the trees or in the trees or sometimes both—and I sleep in deserted bears and with my feet buried beneath the sand in Naples, and that one night in Lima, where I briefly lose my heart in a missionary’s broken condom. And then after months of teaching cursive to angels in the snow and tracing my fingertips along the atlas, now tattered and ripped and itself lost, there you are, in a bed made of smaller beds, and your eyes are full of sleep and your breath is tinted julep and after climbing on top of you, you say, There you are, and I say, I wrote a book of poems and it is good and you are in it and yes, here I am, and you say nothing because everything is already said because these pages are already written and you are real enough that I can pretend that I can be the same.
LEIGH CHADWICK is the author of the chapbook Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021) and the pœtry coloring book This Is How We Learn to Pray, illustrated by Stephanie Kirsten (ELJ Editions, 2021). Her forthcoming books include her debut pœtry collection Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Adrienne Marie Barrios. Leigh’s pœtry has appeared in Salamander, Passages North, The Indianapolis Review, HAD, Pithead Chapel, and Hobart.
