Chelsea Dingman Poems

that we might've been together
at the union hall, with the beer

bottles and the night that didn't fall
away? I might've saved you from

that car ride to the end of this calm

world. Would we have been happy?
The morning you died, I slept.

I got the kids up for school in the dark.
There were hours that I thought

you were alive. I keep thinking
about the cost of living. Your body,

unwrung and above me. Clothes
scattered like the hours you were

missing. What is happiness?
What I count on is the dark. The light.

Wanting to live anyway. The river
in my teeth and the reasonable grass

under my feet like someone I loved
once, impossibly alive.
...

A mournful voice sings to quick beats
in my head, but I know nothing of heaven. In a frenzy

of whirling wind, headlights on a white wall, I pull
over the truck. Late April & the sky has broken
its neck. I swear I see faces pass the windshield. The howl

of voices I've forgotten in the cracks of the doors. Whistling
through windows. I close my eyes & count

their bones. Wonder if this is the dream where children are
buried. Why each move towards home takes me
further away. The cab rocks & creaks. When I open

my eyes, every tree is erased, Every stone & bird & gravel
road. Stepping outside, I lean into snow, wanting

to be lost again. To know that kind of violence. How cold needles
the insides of my nostrils. My mother, in a ragged babushka,
bent over Rohatyn's fields. How I began in a place I can't find

with my hands. Now, how not to welcome the snow's blades,
a torn blood vessel, the fire in my fists. How when wings plume

on cold a spring morning, I am blinded instead.
But, I whisper even though there is no one
to hear. Even as I wonder who's talking, —who I hold

so tightly inside. Like a hummingbird, before
it flies out of my throat & falls

to the ground. Before I palm its heart
& find it still beating.
...

"This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching:
the touches of the disappearing, things."
—Aracelis Girmay


When I see wax, I think of submission.

I think of afterlife. I think of the sky
& what it leaves behind. I used to think

myself a doe, then a hurricane. The muscle
inside the tongue. The prayer-sore. Again

& again, something foreign. Fugitive. So briefly

I was a girl. A young woman. A mule, mother, arm-
rest—the sky resting on a bridge overlooking

the river. That cold, cold water. I waded in,
three seconds to numb. & nothing. I can't give in

to love. What will become of us

when it's the child that is imagined?
Our gods: the fields under a haze

of mosquitoes. And lo, the stars' white
fire. And lo, the splintered spines of spruce

trees. And lo, the disappearing hours.

I stretch my neck into the next life.
I breathe in the cherry blossoms & bomb-

scent of aftermath. I don't care why
I didn't want this. I lean into myself.

I take what is offered until I forget

I am what is offered. With the orchard
& the apple I didn't name. There is

an hour that bears my grave already.
It's late. I can't help but wish I wasn't

lonely. That I wasn't made to disappear.
...

Is this heaven? Hidden
highways. An avalanche. Nothing
around for miles to hear tires
leave the road. The mountains
bow, back-lit by white skies. I walk
& wonder if I walk for any reason
except to walk. My father,
drenched in drifting snow, was left
here. Yet I can't say I'm closer
to the truth about loss than I was
as a child when the world I saw
was a world that doesn't ache
to be anything else. It's funny
how easy it is to forget
the sound of water in winter. I lay down
on the banks alongside the frozen
lake. Its long body, still. But
I'm listening now, as water
like a sleeping child wrestles
with the blankets pulled over
its face, waiting to see
which one of us will wake.
...

Every minute or so, a hallelujah
dies in someone's mouth. Every minute or so, a gunshot.
A ceasefire. A tire shreds

on the highway, & pieces flit like sparrows
across the sky. Silly me. I thought
we were here to live.

The garden's hallelujahs: tulips & rhododendrons, alive
in the ground. We expect so much
of life. Once, I was a child. Then, a child

was locked inside me. Now, a different
country claims us. Tie my hands
to the wind. Strip my mouth of any country

that doesn't fit. Sorrow the sparrow's
steel cord & textile torso. Its irrational wings.
The problem with flying is most people

settle for land, no matter how often
we are unloved by land.
Rewind the centuries:

before planes, the accidents of a gun,
or mouth, or gentle morning, how many people
believed they could fly? Breaking gravity,

what names did they cry when they took that first step
away? Listen to me. I'm telling you
what only the wind knows—

here, the sparrows were, all along. Nailed
to their species. Alive, or not
alive. Sometimes, not alive at all.
...

Church of the Holy Spirit, Rohatyn 1924

You enter to escape
the cold & find a canvas of St. John,
his hands unsealed

to write. Other icons,
painted in vibrant reds, mounted
on wooden walls' slick gloss. All white

men, suffering and suffered. Christ,
stripped. His chest: ribbons
of bone. Archangel Michael, Abraham—

young boys again. You ask them about
hunger. How to outrun changing
flags like a child outrunning its name. A war,

past, yet still humming. Your mother
thinks God must be dead, but you ask
the sky to show its hands. For manna

to frost the cemetery's leaning statues,
forlorn rows. To frost wood, overrun by lifelines
like an old man's palms. For red

water to spill forth from the Hnyla Lypa
cursing below, its name already lost
on new maps. You search the saints' eyes

before turning, light ivying
their faces. You think a house can keep
you safe. The bodies, buried. Doors

that won't spit you out. You search
their hands, empty as spoons. They can't take away
what you pray. This weight: fist & bone

& wail. In their silence, you hear blood,
as it spins like air through a windmill's vanes.
As it coppers the chambers, makes them flame.
...