Daughters of the State

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I put my Netflix account on the computer that’s connected to the projector in the classroom. Every Friday after lunch, instead of handing out worksheets on subject-verb agreement, I show the girls a movie. The girls like the movies where pretty people with white stained teeth kiss each other. For the girls, it doesn’t matter what happens before or after the pretty people with white stained teeth kiss as long as they kiss. The more kissing the better. If the word kissing happens to be in the movie’s title—The Kissing Booth, The Kissing Booth 2, Never Been Kissed, A Christmas Kiss—then I’m guaranteed a good hour & half to two hours of peace, but even when I put on The Notebook or A Walk to Remember or To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before or 10 Things I Hate About You, the girls don’t complain that kissing isn’t in the title. For as hard as these girls are, for as rough & grownup they were forced to become at such tender ages, for seeing everything they will never be able to unsee, for learning how to parent siblings still in diapers because their mothers were dreaming smack—when, instead, they should’ve been playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, their hands dusty from chalk—these girls are still so young, they are all our children, given to or taken by the state, children lost & abused & scared, children who crave what every child craves—a family, stability, someone who cares enough to make sure they’re home by curfew, the desire to feel loved without having to sell pieces of themselves, the continuous, unconditional kind of love, the love that is so pure & kind it’s blasphemous to ever imagine stepping on it with dirty shoes, & so who am I to not give the girls these Friday afternoons, who am I to not let them pretend, even if just for a few hours, that they might be given a day that begins with flowers & ends with nothing but a kiss? So, I show the girls whatever they want, which is the desire for a boy or girl’s chapped lips against their own, for the fantasy to be in the movie where the girl isn’t considered pretty—even though she always was pretty, but the director asks the audience to pretend we don’t notice—until the last third of the film, when she takes off her glasses & overalls that are splattered in paint because she’s an artist & she lets her hair drape down past her shoulders & it’s like oh my god this is her in bloom, even though she was already in bloom, it’s just that everyone was too stupid to notice, & the girls get it, & then the now pretty actress who was always pretty is in a fitted, red dress, going to a high school dance with the most popular boy in school, & it’s the first time the most popular boy in school is not wearing his letterman jacket, he’s decked in a blazer & tie—an outfit the girls only see when they have to show up for court—& the girls say, Ooooh, girl, you get it, & she will get it—the boy, the art school, new overalls waiting to be splattered with fresh paint—but first she will fall into bed with the most popular boy in school & then the scene will cut & it’s the next day & this perfect guy with his perfect teeth, the kind of teeth that never met meth, is making brunch & the girl, now so pretty that her bedhead is its own language, wakes up to the smell of coffee & bacon, & the girls in the dim light of the classroom are crying & I try not to think about you as the pretty people with white stained teeth hold hands & think about each other while holding hands, riding in an elevator or turning pretzel in the ocean as the heroine says, Now say you’re a bird, too, & the boy from the other side of the tracks, the boy who can’t not fall in love the same way the girls can’t not fall in love with the boys from either side of the tracks, says, If you’re a bird, I’m a bird, & the girls want nothing more than to be birds, to fly away from The Agency & stay away, to never have to worry about going back home to locked closets they slept in or the days without food or the boyfriends or uncles who steal their bones, or their uncles—they’re all uncles even if they’re not uncles—who were the first to steal whatever their boyfriends stole after, the girls want to leave it all & just fly, fly away, head south for the winter & never come back, & sometimes, only sometimes, while the girls are watching their Friday afternoon movie, I sit at my desk & think about you in an elevator, & sometimes, only sometimes, I imagine us holding hands in an elevator & then I imagine that you are in an elevator without me & I’m at home baking a cake even though I can’t bake more than the cookies you peel apart & stick in the oven for eight to ten minutes, & I have to step away from the stove to answer the phone, & I say, Hello, & it’s an officer at the police station & he’s saying, We need you to come down to the station, & so I leave the stove burning & when I get to the station I’m asked to sit in a stale chair in a stale room where I’m offered even staler coffee as the police officer, his lips born sloths, tells me you were in an elevator accident, that the cords snapped & no one can survive a twenty story free fall.

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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 Salamander, Passages North, Identity Theory, The Indianapolis Review, Pithead Chapel, and CLOVES Literary, among others. She is the executive editor of Redacted Books and is also a regular contributor at Olney Magazine, where she conducts the “Mediocre Conversations” interview series.

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