‘Fugue’ and other poems by Chelsea Dingman

British Columbia Pastoral   September: almost snow. White sheets across the sky, the fields. How strange   the frost, feral over desert hills. Sage brush caught in the cattle’s   teeth. The river cuts a swath where I am trying to tell you about grass   that presses up through the ground without urging. About merciless suns   taking our eyes. You shield your mouth as I speak. The wars I won’t admit   like dying daisies, their corpses linting the grass. In summer, we swam in the Thompson   River. In feral heat. Baptized new again. The kites of our bodies cutting   a swath through green water. But as water rises in spring, it will take you   with it. With thawed glaciers & snow. With bones we can’t make smaller   once grown. Dead trees claw at rocks on the river- bottom, swollen belly   of a child rising up like a balloon in the April sun.   (Originally published in Sugar House Review)   Accident Report: After the Baby Dies at Birth   First, I asked for mercy, when mercy was a small sliver of light. My bones softened by the body leaving them. You asked questions, green tea in hand. Some lemon. A cleanse of sorts, as I refused your prayers. The sky, faithless, darkening again. You wanted to know what’s next, when we would try again, what every doctor had to say. I was an empty stall in a gas station bathroom. I said, never. But now I say now, let’s try now, before I lose my nerve. But you don’t want to touch me yet. You eye my body like a broken trough looking for any sign of seepage. I drink from the mug. You move away, the way the wounded animal moves before it tucks tail & runs. Every good-bye is unnecessary after holding something as it dies. I want to feel full again, I say. The door, open as a mouth. You raise your hand over my body & ask, where does it hurt? But I can’t say, everywhere. I can’t say, it hurts everywhere I’m touched. I can’t say, touch me every -where. Please.   (Originally published in Bennington Review)   Fugue   “When Plath’s journals, with their claims of abuse, began to be published, many critics pointed out these claims as not only false but also proof that Plath was paranoid, crazy.” -Emily Van Duyne   There is a river, & in its mouth, the Holocaust night I gave birth to a broken mirror,   the shard that stuck in a man’s neck. He pulled it out & that was the beginning   of blood. The nightmares. Being chased through a small ghost   town, windows shut & boarded, only shadows to command: break or break me.   I had a god, once. Somewhere, I think I’ll know how to be full & limber   & not the husk that held the crowning dark. Not the woman, unbelieved.   He hit me. The night the baby died, I was tired of the blank stars dying quietly   years from here. I should’ve braced myself— his fists like arrowheads. The glass   river, leaking bodies. I’ll fucking kill you. Even now, I close my eyes & hear water.   There is no baby. There never was.   forthcoming in Pleiades   Travelling Through Tennessee in January   Again, I drive through dead forests longing to flower. I think of nothing. Not you. Not our children with their mouths hanging half-open like shutters over the windows, the summer Rita followed Katrina into the Gulf & taught us what women are capable of. Frost on the ground, the morning after Rita left, when it had been ninety degrees a day before. The remains of the poor creatures that couldn’t withstand the cold, curled on white-tipped grasses. Fields & hills pass outside the car’s windows, late afternoon. Houses riven from each other by land. Not water. Not here, north of where I left you. The fields, lit from inside as the sun slides behind hills. I try to remember your voice. Low, like dusk. It didn’t mean anything, you said. But I know that you can’t feel anything & I can’t feel anything less. At the interchange of I-75 North & I-24, I drive further into the night from where I left you. From where you were standing when a voice on the radio cautioned us against a new woman blazing in from the east, a bloody heart tucked between her teeth.   Originally published in Arcadia

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Hunger [or the last of the daughter-hymns] (n) a feeling of discomfort or weakness caused by lack of food, coupled with the desire to eat— as I talk to wind winnowing my ribs into wind chimes. I swallow small coins from the counters, wanting change my body can keep. I stand on the street corner in the rain & coax water into my mouth like a woman who doesn’t know the fullness of the sea. My mother worked three jobs to feed our family. Now, I horde toilet paper & paper towels in spare closets with cans of soup & creamed corn. The wind hollows the oaks. Their bones don’t know what it is to break, but I am a hollow instrument, a sacred text. Daughter [less]. (v) have a strong desire or craving for a body inside my body— a child, a man. Fields, full. The sun, aflame. Fear like a shot -gun, an aborted flight plan, people jumping from buildings. But my daughter, I draw back down. The one I lost. The ones I have left to lose. Like snow— the bodies that are ours for a season. For less. (v) to feel or suffer through lack of food the weak sunrise in my daughter’s new silence. My skin, a loose sheet. Her clavicle, hip -bone, head. My cervix, thinned. Her body, an offering. A prayer I whisper as I tear new maps in a lucid dream where I live alone & she folds herself into a crane to hang from the ceiling of someone else’s womb. Originally published in Sycamore Review Near Narajiv Selo -Hunger, cold, and ethnic oppression forced Ukrainian and Jewish people to look for refuge in faraway lands (1919-1939, when Eastern Galicia belonged to Poland)- Roman Zakhariy A dark road. Stars like paper lanterns. Long grasses unthread in thousands of flickering fingers. Poppies’ mouths buttoned black, as wind shrifts crimson petals from stems, from fields torn by tractor tires, from a barn below the hill. My stomach, where I left things unliving, pierced by little more than night air. Like shackled light, the moon is outlawed in the pines. I unholster the sky: at dawn, cattle cry in the clearing as I dig up rutabaga, cabbage to wrap the rice. Water claws through dirt. Claw hammers for hands, I carve our breaths into trees. Our breaths, like silver buildings. As I slowly empty the earth, sky buries night. Night that smells of gunpowder and grease. Night that leaves nothing more than a handful of stars, twined in the pines’ rime. Nothing more than a river where no one has drowned. Originally published in Southern Humanities Review

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). In 2016-17, she also won The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in Ninth Letter, The Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Cincinnati Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Visit her website.