November 5, 2023
Leigh Chadwick
Leigh Chadwick is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Your Favorite Poet (Malarkey Books, 2022) and Sophomore Slump (Malarkey Books, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Passages North, Identity Theory, and Pithead Chapel, among others. She is currently at work on a YA romance novel set around the Donner Party.
Every Saturday afternoon my husband turns my orgasm up to eleven. I tell my therapist, It’s easy to fall in love with anything after a mid-morning moan.
I think when I became self-aware of how ridiculously quiet we as poets are to the world at large, it opened me up more, especially my imagination. It allowed me to write about school shootings, the fear of keeping my daughter safe, the intimacy of damp sheets—it allowed me to write about all of that like no one else was reading it, which is probably because no one, or very few, were reading the poems. But as depressing as that may sound, it was the most freeing thing.