Every Year Is a Year
by Leigh Chadwick
It’s 2015, the Monday after that third weekend in May, when you walk into Leigh Chadwick’s heart and forget to come out. Leigh Chadwick doesn’t complain. She is happy for you to stay, to build a house in her chest, to plant sunflowers in her lungs, and it is in this field of sunflowers where you ask her, If a train leaves Seattle at 3 PM and is going 60 miles per hour, and, at exactly the same time, a famine in Paris, Texas, clogs a hummingbird’s lungs and the humingbird coughs and coughs and the hummingbird is out of breath and so the hummingbird flies to the ER, where the receptionist tells the hummingbird it’s going to be a seven-hour wait, and at what moment does a Thursday bleed into a Friday? and Leigh Chadwick tells you, I failed calculus but my lawyer is an expert in maritime law, so I only rob banks in the Bermuda Triangle. This makes enough sense for June to smell like a National Book Award. And then it’s August, and Leigh Chadwick is licking a forever stamp and sticking it onto the top left corner of a postcard with scarecrows playing hide-and-seek throughout the Midwest on the front. Leigh Chadwick mails the postcard to That Place Where Adrienne Lives, but the postcard gets lost and ends up in a P.O. Box in a ghost town trapped in a snow globe. For Labor Day, everyone pretends the ice caps aren’t melting into bottles of Evian. Then, it’s Halloween, and Leigh Chadwick is teaching you how to lobotomize a stanza. You mess up twice, but no one notices. Leigh Chadwick spends November packing boxes into larger boxes. On the fifth of December, the two of you move seven states north, into an apartment with an extra bedroom you never go into. For Christmas, in place of stockings, you hang empty medicine cabinets over the mantle. New Year’s is the stretch in your moan. Leigh Chadwick spends the first month of 2016 watching the earth slowly empty itself. You ask her if it’s a leap year, but Leigh Chadwick says she doesn’t know. You don’t care enough to find out. Leigh Chadwick drinks a glass of water. You dress up like a universal remote and climb into bed. Leigh Chadwick presses the rewindbutton on your left hip and then it’s 2015, the Mondy after the third weekend in May, and you are walking.
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.
