Chelsea Dingman

Poetry

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). She is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She has won prizes such as: The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and The South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Her recent work can be found in Redivider, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.

Memento Mori

I am what you will wear forever. I walk carefully, so as not to jostle you inside me. It is early. I came to this open field to have words with the sky. A chapel of bones, my body is the house you will forget how to breathe in. I’ve already been warned, the doctors talking about syndromes & chromosomes. Remember everything will die. What reminder will you leave me with? This sad architecture of bone & bristle & sack cloth. This vanitas. On your walls, I hired a woman to paint a forest. The ceiling, a night sky. I wanted to give you the world. What mother has ever been more holy? Rain is coming & coming in the distance. Let us refrain from sinning. Tell me, again, about the woman who threw her daughter from the Skyway Bridge, I want to ask. The body, almost all water. Does it hurt to drown? There is something exotic about housing an idea. At the end of this longing, there will be almost three hundred days I can’t account for. I mean: you are the absence of landscape. I mean: in case of fire, I’d save you first.

“ This is the first poem in a manuscript about stillbirth and its effects on the couple experiencing the trauma of infertility. I say ‘trauma’ because any death is a trauma, even miscarriage, in my experience. In this particular poem, I wanted to start near the end of pregnancy as a gateway into what results afterward. A few years ago, a man threw his 5-year-old daughter off the Skyway Bridge in Tampa and she drowned. I couldn’t stop thinking that he had a child that he didn’t want and all I wanted was a child. There is that moment, with my children even now, where I would save them first. No matter the circumstance. That was the place I was trying to write from. And also, how can one have so much love for this child, and do everything right, but lose the child anyway? The mystery of pregnancy will probably never leave me. Who lives. Who dies. Why. Like life. So many questions why. ”

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