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. |
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.