Thaw

Poems

Chelsea Dingman, Beth Dial

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780820351315
• eBook ISBN: 9780820351308
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kin ship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them.

Unflinching and raw, Chelsea Dingman's poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and of what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.

1.

PROOF OF DISAPPEARING

Hunting (circa 1985)

What we grieve is
not how death can be
dispelled in a photo, or a dream
on our hip we carry
like a child. But a man’s eyes,
blackened by the butt of a rifle.
Stars fading in the crosshairs
of the sun. A phantom
trigger, his finger
hooked through its heart.

At a glance, the blood
could belong to a deer, breath
escaping in the chill fall
air, just smoke.

Like the camera, our eyes fail
to see what falls outside
the frame—twisted limbs
like a bird’s wings
broken on the ground. How a bullet
can enter so quietly as to leave
a skull almost intact. How,
afterwards,
a body glitters
like the cherry
still burning
in someone else’s fingers.

From a Morgue in Minnesota

Ataxia Telanglectasia is a rare, neurodegenerative, autosomal
recessive disease causing severe disability and appears in early
childhood.—A-T Children’s Project

We bury a child each year, sometimes
two, bones like cell bars, bland food

fit only for a baby’s slick gums. Their mothers
wait years for a chest to flutter

closed, herringbone ribs
barely lining the canvas. False

light, a shaft, hangs children
in moving hands like miners

digging six feet down. Each child
withers—an anorexic who refuses

water, heart protesting
long after the body is lost

hope in our mouths. Crowning,
they wrap their hands in a fist. Then,

at age three, they can’t. Bodies turn
inward, a flower’s petals folding

regardless of the rain, tender
ground, the unwavering desire

that forces our eyes away.

Felled Pine

Behind black curtains, dogwood
blossoms scattered from seam to seam, I
asked after you, a secret

squirreled away like a moment
I can no longer see. Children
crying in the wet street, you pretended

to control the rain, a ruse
to ease our fear. I wonder
where you’ll wake this morning, sickness

sticking to your skin. We didn’t
drag you to the nearest bed, stay until the fever
broke. It’s what I’d do if you were my child,

but you are the sibling
four years behind me, tiny scars
we carved into our arms like names

in wood, little hearts. I always thought
you’d age, rings on an old pine
in a churchyard in Revelstoke, soft

and rotting from its cuts, bark crumbling
beneath my fingers. But you lost yourself
in the sky, ruined by years

of rain and snow, dirty
hands on the saw before you fell.

Sirens

Say someone will come, but no
one comes. The echo

filters through buildings, palm fronds
feathering tile and stone,
yet I remember

only mountains, snow circling our house
like crows’ wings. How I long for the metal

sting numbing my hands. I had
a mother then. I held the wind
in my throat like a song. A coal

black sky, blue-lit by morning
that arrives too late, somewhere
north. I lay down on the bed to sirens

like a loon’s calls. Like a warning. The torn pocket
of skin dangling where the blade exited

my mother’s back. Each staple
making a new hole. Tonight,
no one comes

with sounds that carry, with water
that will tumble from the sky. That starved town
in the distance is the gash

where she was torn from
breast plate to shoulder

blade. If I could unzip cold
skin, maybe I’d know
how to stop reaching

for snow, dark blue
mountains haloed by stars.

Little Hell

I can’t breathe this
morning—my dead father, smoking
at the kitchen table, marred

by the scenery, trees
on the flatbed of his truck
going somewhere. He’s

a terrible dream I had. Empty
rooms, dust in a corner. He
disappeared near Hope, ice

beneath his tires, and I
went south, to vultures
feeding on entrails

in the yard, dead
armadillos. I escaped
the snow, not its secrets. They follow,

whispering of mold
in the grass, corpses
of trees, naked and shivering.

Testimony of Hinges

This is how we stay: tongues
on fire, two people dancing
to our own screams. This is how

we dance: you, on the phone,
begging to come back to a house
I flee on foot. To the dagger

in my mother’s smile. This is how
you love: fingers trawling the skin
under my shirt as I pretend to sleep. If not me,

who else do you skin? My father
sleeps in a body I can’t touch. You are someone new
who abandons hair on our pillows, the day

turning us against ourselves. If I leave
now, no one will know
I broke my wrists to give you my hands,

sawed clean through the bone. I dreamt
new hands, pink-tipped fingers
to drag over the knobs of your spine. All I have left,

dear stepfather, is my mouth: a blade
I draw across the petals of your flesh, bruised
blood rising in ragged blooms.

Athanasia

This body is in tatters, worn
by winter’s long argument
with the snow. Perhaps it’s time

to speak of rusty hinges:
your eyes closed while you sleep,
hands steepled, a pale mouth’s

flattened horizon. Violet sheets
swell the space
you once lay next to me

in the dark. It comes to this: a shudder
in your chest, my breath
seeking a warm place where

there is only a body
of snow. The words I hold back,
you can’t have now. But on this skin’s scroll,

we wrote with our hands, words
that can’t be ruined by cold,
empty streets, a second hand. Perhaps we are gods

now, black ink spelling us out—
new blood threading the bodies

of the damned.

Elegy for Empty Rooms

There will be no more sons. Bodies
twisted in the shade
of a canopied crib. I know

the shape of their blood, the long
wait for their faces
to materialize. What exists now

behind a closed door? In me, a hollow is
ice-cold. I exist to exist, a street
covered in snow. I dreamt

more faces at dinner, the table
stretched by wooden wings. Instead, I endure
parlor games: at a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1. PROOF OF DISAPPEARING
• PART 2. PROOF IN DISAPPEARING
• Notes