Two Poems by Chelsea Dingman

Psychogeography

where his body fell to earth like paper:
all that remains is a wooden cross,

wildflowers on the side of a highway.
I’ve been trying to go home my whole life—

my mother tracing my face,
my fingers. Trying to find my father

in the country he left her. I was home there.
Longer & longer, I belong nowhere.

Longer & longer, I belong nowhere
in the country he left her. I was home there,

my fingers trying to find my father.
My mother tracing my face,

I’ve been trying to go home my whole life—
wildflowers on the side of the highway,

all that remains is a wooden cross
where his body fell to earth like paper.

Wintersong

December’s cold comes to pity us again,
fields stormed by dry riverbeds & dead leaves.
I’m afraid, but I don’t want to tell you.
The baby hasn’t moved & there is blood
where there shouldn’t be. My body,
less godlike when still, cleaves to yours, almost

whole when someone else is inside. Almost
sane, I imagine our daughter again,
the vine-like cord wrapped around her body.
On the news, there is a woman who leaves
her child on a schoolroom floor, covered in blood,
& no one is safe. Not even us. You

know the truth: I’ve only ever loved you.
Even when we were power lines, almost
breaking under snow. There’s blood
on my thighs & I call you home again,
but we’ve never been people to choose who leaves.
Tonight, each psalm we know is a body

broken off in our teeth, the baptism of a body
we will never touch back from blue, but you
sing anyway, hands clasped like leaves
around my swollen belly. Something is always almost
breaking inside me when you touch me. Again,
birth is sometimes about destruction: blood

& shit & sound. Or no sound. Just blood
we want to reinvent inside the body—
what happens if we break all the way open again?
Without the tiny bloom of her, will I be enough for you?
In this failure: hunger-songs like a firing squad. Almost
brave, I want to run for our lives, to leave

this cold ground beneath us, the leaves
like ghosts I can’t give away. Like blood.
We were almost in love yesterday. Almost
sane. I turned you on, my body
swollen like sky you want to part. A promise you
will love me when you can’t. Again,

we blossom & break, leaves in a gutter. Again,
blood when I bend. For a few months, you
were almost real. The lyric, longing a body.

Chelsea Dingman’s first book, Thaw was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (2017). She recently won The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, The Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and Water-Stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize. She has work in Ninth Letter, The Colorado Review, and Gulf Coast. www.chelseadingman.com.