Tag: Google

After Googling Your Name I by Julie Weiss

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After Googling Your Name I
                –for Purple Pam

Plod to the kitchen, gather all the ingredients
and build a sandwich you would have extolled,
my knees weakening under the shock of lost
time. I´m famished for fifteen, for my first job,
how the earth never stopped orbiting your smile,
even when customers stained our aprons with complaints.
For one of your hugs, its galactic blaze, I´d slip my finger
under the meat slicer again. I remember how you
numbed my fear, wrapping your voice around my wound,
kindness everflowing like the hip hop lyrics you mixed, breast-
scratching your path from Foster City catering queen
to Bay Area DJ supernova. Every stage you crossed
radiated in your wake, I read. But I´m fifteen again, life
endless as the salads we scoop, chill as the swimming
soiree at our boss´s house, where you pull me in, your laughter
sparking mine. We glide side by side in a universe that never dies.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s Editor´s Choice Award for her poem “Cumbre Vieja,” was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series, and was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her recent work appears in Sky Island Journal, ONE ART, and Feral, among others, and is forthcoming in Rust + Moth and Trampset. Originally from California, she lives in Spain with her wife and two young children.

One Poem by Leigh Chadwick

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Millennial Poem or: How I Learned to Stop Drinking Starbucks and Wait Patiently for My Parents to Die so I Can Cash in on My Inheritance

I put another avocado in my safety deposit box.
I sell my plasma and save half the cookie
the nurse gives me for breakfast the next morning.
I am poor and so are you and if you’re not poor
then who did you kill. My loans have loans.
My daughter is growing up to be a history
lesson in debt. I own a house and I don’t
know why. Soon I will not own a house
and I will know exactly why. I’ve never eaten
avocado toast but I drink milk without the lactose
and it’s like forty-two cents more a gallon
than regular milk. I type stock market into
Google Maps. It takes me to a set of train tracks.
I park my car in the middle of the tracks, turn
off the engine and wait.

*

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), the poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021), and the full-length collection, Wound Channels (ELJ Edition, 2022). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, and Olney Magazine, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.