Chelsea Dingman
January
As if love is transmutable—, the snow
haunts the bare trees. Nowhere to be
caught. Like me, now, do snowflakes
long to collect & hold tight to the tree
still upright? The stink of last night’s trash,
absent. Even the dead wouldn’t stink
in this subzero cold. I waited the night
for another person to pass. People turned
to parcels in the corners of the room. I
opened the windows to snow. From the dying
man,
I learned to pray, little birds broken
like teeth in my mouth. In the end, god,
I wanted to learn none of this: the snow,
the stink, the end. Don’t make me sorry.
What is the greatest struggle of this life,
if not the struggle to survive it?
Chelsea Dingman is a Canadian citizen and Visiting Instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved, is forthcoming from Madhouse Press (2018). 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: chelseadingman.com.
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