Bullets Not Included by Leigh Chadwick

On Highway 61 a billboard reads FREE BULLETS INCLUDED WITH THE PURCHASE OF ANY GUN. At Target I buy my daughter a Fischer Price electronic drum machine. The back of the box states BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. I look in every closet in Tennessee. I find bullets but no batteries. My daughter presses on her plastic drum machine and nothing happens. I drive past a pawn shop on Lincoln St., directly across from the Head Start Daycare Center. I drive to the last Toys “R” Us that still hides the haunts of laughter in shredded caves of concrete. I carry my daughter through the rubble of abandoned super soakers and Slip ‘N Slides. I sit her on a giraffe’s neck. The giraffe coughs. We feed it a cough drop. We look up. I count fourteen clouds and think of Austin. My daughter points toward a hill covered in trees curled like semicolons. She asks, What is this? I tell her it’s the amount of free bullets that are packaged in the back of semis rolling down I-75. At home I make chocolate chip pancakes for dinner. I still haven’t bought batteries for my daughter’s drum machine. In Alabama an employee working for a company that distributes water goes to work and shoots and shoots and shoots. I wonder if his bullets were free. I wonder why it’s harder to buy batteries than bullets. I wonder when bullets will get tired of running into people. I wonder if you put two bullets in a remote control, will CNN report another shooting in a warehouse. I am trying to figure out why some people get to exist and others don’t. I should buy batteries. I should be a better mother. Four mass shootings in six hours, thirty-eight wounded and six dead. Everywhere is scary when there are more bullets than batteries. When there are more guns than song.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), and the poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021). Wound Channels, her full-length poetry collection, and Pretend I Am Real, a novel written in vignettes, will be simultaneously released by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, and Milk Candy Review, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5. 

How to Feel by Leigh Chadwick

I buy one of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits off eBay and go as what if for Halloween. If you wait long enough even a cloud will rot. I stand at the edge of the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn Express and watch a manatee chase a speedboat. It is easier to buy a gun than adopt a dog, so I buy a gun and rob a pet store. I steal all the puppies. My favorite emotion is Taylor Swift. For our anniversary, my husband gives me a bouquet of femurs. I put them in a casket we use as an ottoman in the living room. I ask Siri if they sell bulletproof onesies.  

Siri says, You can’t see it, but I’m shrugging right now. She tells me to wave a wand and pull a rabbit out of a heart. I do, but the rabbit is dead. I vote we get rid of gym teachers and use their salaries to give every kid a bulletproof backpack. I am scared and it’s not even night. I tell my daughter she is the wilderness in the movie where the wilderness rips the beards off lumberjacks. I smoke a pack of menthols under a palm tree in the middle of a mirage. I ask Siri if 5G gives you cancer. Siri says, Cancer gives you cancer.

This morning I woke up breathing in reverse. Having a one-night stand with Ryan Gosling’s abs is my fourth favorite fantasy. Can you photoshop love? I can’t remember the last time I ate butternut squash. I don’t even know if I like butternut squash. Whenever I drive through Oklahoma, all I see is cowboys riding glue sticks. I ask Siri how many people fall in love at gun shows. Siri says, The same amount of people who were born on a Wednesday. 

I steal a lake and get run over by a car. If my husband had a twin brother, I’d totally fuck him. My therapist gives me a silver medal for waking up. I’m so good at kissing in Pig Latin, you don’t even know. Vampire Weekend is my seventh favorite band. When I take too much Adderall, my heart gets a migraine. 

I love it.

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), as well as the full-length collection, Wound Channels (ELJ Edition, 2022). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Olney Magazine, and ONE ART, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

A Brief Summary of My First Week of Being Furloughed From Work -- by Leigh Chadwick

For the first three days I don’t leave the house. I spend them in bed, only getting up to use the bathroom or grab a granola bar from the pantry or pour a glass of water I forget to drink until all the ice has melted and the water grows lukewarm and the glass is sweating, like it just ran a marathon, or it’s stressed out about paying rent, and so the once cold water I poured into the glass tries to run away, and there it goes, the water cascading over the coaster and dripping onto the nightstand. During those first three days I Google hysterical pregnancies. I Google hot dads wearing BabyBjörns. I Facebook stalk all of my ex-boyfriends: four are married, one is engaged, one fell off a mountain, one is halfway to having a kid, one moved to Hollywood and was in a commercial for Crest Whitening Strips, and one doesn't have a Facebook account, which leads me to the assumption he also fell off a mountain. I Google ultrasound pictures. I Google does space cause death? while wondering if anywhere is safe if space isn’t even safe and space is above everything, constantly circling us, slowly swallowing us whole. On day four I dream worry. I dream nineteen black holes. I dream bloody chests and quarters fitting through the side of a missing cheek. I dream I climb through the hole in your throat. It is dark inside your throat. I don’t like it, so I leave. On day five of my furlough there’s a storm, something chopped up and raw and filled with lightning, thunder, tornadoes in my lungs, a tsunami off the coast of my neighbor’s pool, hurricanes forming in the wishing well at the mall—the sky a madness I trace like one of those pages covered with dots spread out inches apart, where you take a pencil and draw lines connecting one dot to another, creating miniature constellations. On day six I wake up to a gasp. On day seven I consider getting in my car and heading north on I-65. Halfway through a state I’ll never see again, I’ll toss my cellphone and half of my clothes out the window. I decide I will become the dictionary of birth. I will teach the world how to start over. I will smile every time a server refills my coffee mug. I will learn how to spell every country in the world. I will start a new life in some small town in Michigan. I’ll buy an old, abandoned lighthouse in this small town in Michigan. I’ll sleep on a single bed I carried up the winding staircase to the top of the lighthouse, and I’ll spend the rest of my days walking along cliffs and the rest of my nights in glow by candlelight, watching a spotlight scan the shoreline.

Leigh Chadwick's writing is forthcoming in Salamander and Milk Candy Review. She is at work on her first novel.