On Highway 61 a billboard reads FREE BULLETS INCLUDED WITH THE PURCHASE OF ANY GUN. At Target I buy my daughter a Fischer Price electronic drum machine. The back of the box states BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. I look in every closet in Tennessee. I find bullets but no batteries. My daughter presses on her plastic drum machine and nothing happens. I drive past a pawn shop on Lincoln St., directly across from the Head Start Daycare Center. I drive to the last Toys “R” Us that still hides the haunts of laughter in shredded caves of concrete. I carry my daughter through the rubble of abandoned super soakers and Slip ‘N Slides. I sit her on a giraffe’s neck. The giraffe coughs. We feed it a cough drop. We look up. I count fourteen clouds and think of Austin. My daughter points toward a hill covered in trees curled like semicolons. She asks, What is this? I tell her it’s the amount of free bullets that are packaged in the back of semis rolling down I-75. At home I make chocolate chip pancakes for dinner. I still haven’t bought batteries for my daughter’s drum machine. In Alabama an employee working for a company that distributes water goes to work and shoots and shoots and shoots. I wonder if his bullets were free. I wonder why it’s harder to buy batteries than bullets. I wonder when bullets will get tired of running into people. I wonder if you put two bullets in a remote control, will CNN report another shooting in a warehouse. I am trying to figure out why some people get to exist and others don’t. I should buy batteries. I should be a better mother. Four mass shootings in six hours, thirty-eight wounded and six dead. Everywhere is scary when there are more bullets than batteries. When there are more guns than song.
Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), and the poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021). Wound Channels, her full-length poetry collection, and Pretend I Am Real, a novel written in vignettes, will be simultaneously released by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, and Milk Candy Review, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.