Pudding Poem | Leigh Chadwick

During morning announcements, the principal comes on the PA 

and tells the student body, If you survive the semester, 

you will automatically receive straight A’s. Today feels like a meteor 

or public execution. I want to get knocked on the head and fall into a coma, 

so I don’t have to see how the day ends. I want to wake 

up in a hospital on a Thursday that bleeds into a Sunday. 

I want to eat chocolate pudding by the gallon. For foreplay, my husband 

pours Southern Pecan down the bullet hole in my neck. 

He licks the foam that comes back up and runs down my chest. 

Outside, everything is blue or black or a dark cape that is neither blue nor black. 

On CNN the chyron reads, Blink twice if you see the bomb coming. 

Then: Blink thrice if your nose itches. That night I dream my childhood 

bathroom is infested with ladybugs. I dream the boy with the neck 

and arms and face and elbows and stomach he filled with bleach is dead. 

I dream a group of miniature ghosts in an empty field. The ghosts 

say they are all sad they weren’t able to graduate from playground 

and move on to puberty and first touches. They sit in a circle 

and play duck, duck, goose. The ghosts tell me no one wants to be the goose. 

They tell me that with right heart you can kill anything twice.

Leigh Chadwick's poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Heavy Feather Review, Bending Genres, and Mason Jar Press, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Wound Channels, will be published by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Find her Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.