Three Poems by Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018).

When Cancer Tangles Itself in Bone

I don’t know you well. I look at your wife
& wonder how she can withstand

not knowing you, skeletal now, a dream
of a butterfly. I want to sit in your bones

& know how it is to be loved
the way the human mind loves

to connect two seemingly incompatible
things. I don’t think I’ve known

love & you are dying to keep it. How monstrous
am I to envy someone dying

by inches in front of me? Further, your eyes sink.
More time she spends bent over

wounds & more wounds. Unwound now,
perhaps living long isn’t what I should

want. Perhaps, I should want someone
to see me as you are seen. Before

I am an ache in the night. A fly, one
-winged, trying to walk.

 

 

 

Elegy in Bone

For how many has the sea been a grave?
Like letters on a page, my children

twist at arm’s length, salt air
in our mouths. They go & go

& go, the surf swilling.
I wait for what it brings back

to me. The doctor, on the phone,
saying cancer like it’s a country I’ll be

visiting, The sea, as memory. A black dress
coat, the tie my husband will drop

into its dark to forget flies, flitting
over my open mouth. It’ll be

a good death. To be buried
without these bones I want

never to be free of, my sons’
hands & spines like elegies

they’ve written. The flies hover
over us already, touching

wounds with wounds they carry
from mouth to open mouth.