Halloween Poem Written in August

Leigh Chadwick

For Halloween, I save an abandoned monster from crossing a crowded interstate. I take the monster home. I ask the monster if it’s hungry and the monster nods, so I heat up some leftover meatloaf I made last Thursday. The monster eats the meatloaf while I go into the bathroom and shave my legs, even though I know I won’t see you for another week, when you’ll finally get back from your trip overseas volunteering with Pumpkin Carving without Borders. What a ghoul, you wrote in the last postcard you mailed me, to leave your skin dressed without touch. I wrote back, I miss having your toothbrush next to mine and yelling at you for leaving tiny hairs in the sink after you finish shaving. After giving out Bite-Size Snickers and Three Musketeers and Milky Way bars to children dressed as lazy ghosts, radioactive turtles, scarecrows that have run away from the cornfields of Iowa, Taylor Swift’s favorite cardigan, and Rupi Kaur’s bank account, the monster and I share a bag of microwaved popcorn and watch a movie on Netflix. In the movie, a character named after a city in the Midwest says, Feminists are more likely to do anal. I don’t know if that’s true. I ask you if you think that’s true before remembering that, even though I shaved my legs, you’re still not here.

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Leigh Chadwick is the author of the poetry collection Your Favorite Poet, the chapbook Dating Pete Davidson, and the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue, co-written with Adrienne Marie Barrios. Her poetry has appeared in Salamander, Passages North, Identity Theory, The Indianapolis Review, and Hobart, among others. She is the executive editor of Redacted Books and is also a regular contributor for Olney Magazine, where she conducts the “Mediocre Conversations” interview series. She can be found online at www.leighchadwick.com and on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.