Your Favorite Poet by Leigh Chadwick

Author:Leigh Chadwick [Chadwick, Leigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Malarkey Books
Published: 2022-07-12T06:00:00+00:00

How to Spend Your First Week Being Furloughed from Work

For the first three days, don’t leave the house. Spend them in bed, only getting up to use the bathroom or to grab a granola bar from the pantry or to pour a glass of water you 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 you poured into the glass tries to run away, and there it goes, the water cascading over the coaster, dripping onto the nightstand. During those first three days, google hysterical pregnancies. Google hot dads wearing BabyBjörns. Facebook stalk all your 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 Whitestrips, and one doesn't have a Facebook account, which leads you to the assumption that he also fell off a mountain. Google ultrasound pictures. Google does space cause death? Wonder if anywhere is safe if space isn’t even safe and space is above everything, circling you and everyone you know, slowly swallowing everything whole. On day four dream worry. Dream nineteen black holes. Dream bloody chests and quarters fitting through the side of a missing cheek. Dream climbing through the hole in his throat. It is dark inside his throat. You don’t like it, so you leave. On day five of your furlough there’s a storm, something chopped up and raw and filled with lightning, thunder, tornadoes in your lungs, a tsunami off the coast of the neighbor’s pool, hurricanes forming in the wishing well at the mall—the sky a madness you 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 wake up to a gasp. On day seven consider getting in your car and heading north on I-75 where, halfway through a state you’ll never see again, you’ll toss your cellphone and half of your clothes out the window. Decide to become the dictionary of birth. Teach the world how to start over. Smile every time a server refills your coffee mug. Learn how to spell every country in the world. Start a new life in some small town in Michigan. Buy an old, abandoned lighthouse in this small town in Michigan. Sleep on a single bed you carried up the winding staircase to the top of the lighthouse. Spend the rest of your days walking along cliffs and the rest of your nights in the glow of candlelight, watching a spotlight scan the shoreline.

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