WHEN THE WIND CULLS ITS NAME, BY CHELSEA DINGMAN

from frost laced over fences and ferns,                there is a fragment
of past tucked inside

the meadow. A sense that I’ve been here before, yet
I didn’t know what it was to loathe the quiet

a body is owed.                             Somewhere,
in these lean months, survival reduces the ragweed

to nothing.                          The first time anyone touched me
wrong was the first time. Near any home, defiled

is the snow                    stone                     fence.                     Above,
the planets beg to be known. Who pretends to be alone

when touched?                     The body, in all of its quiet
escape.                                                    I’m not special, but what does that matter

when bone turns to night?                                               Midnight
trains pass through the country

of my waking and, more than this cold,
more than the specific quiet of the unknown,                     to strip anything is an act

of tenderness                     rather than a tell — ​
did I ever tell anyone                     I’m not comfortable being touched

or did I let the world enter without using a door
in order to prove what I’m willing to surrender?

What is surrendered:                     the night, put down
next to the fence                     the body                     the whereabouts of a blizzard

that buried itself in the woods behind the house. Blue
was winter. I was once. Even now, the snow                     ​I fell.

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Chelsea Dingman's first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second book, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2020). Other writing can be found in The Southern Review, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review, among others.