I GROW TOMATOES

by Leigh Chadwick

Brett Jordan

I like to grow tomatoes, so I go into the backyard & plant a bottle of ketchup. That night I dream I grow gills & wade into the Atlantic & then I am swimming & swimming & swimming until I come across an octopus. I ask the octopus, If you lost one of your hearts, would you be happier? The octopus doesn’t answer because it’s an octopus. When I wake up, I check on the ketchup bottle I planted in the backyard. I run my hand over the soil. I’m getting old enough to think about youth. I think, Oh, how life dissipates. I think about high school, I don’t remember it, though I remember getting fucked while high in the parking lot of a school. Sometimes something counts. I hate that I know how to spell tachycardia. I hate that I know how to spell malignant & hospice & goodbye. I never go to war because I don’t think I’d make it home from war. Every Tuesday I miss my mother’s mother. Have you ever cried in Pig Latin? Left home for another home? I am 7,224 Twitter followers away from getting a free ride to heaven. When I get there, I will plant an entire field of ketchup bottles. I will forget how to spell everything, even my name.

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Leigh Chadwick is the author of the poetry collection Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022), the collaborative poetry collection Too Much Tongue (Autofocus, 2022), co-written with Adrienne Marie Barrios, and Sophomore Slump (Malarkey Books, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Passages North, Identity Theory, Pithead Chapel, and CLOVES Literary, among others. She is also a regular contributor at Olney Magazine, where she conducts the “Mediocre Conversations” interview series.