Chelsea Dingman
After His Mother Dies, My Husband Calls a Suicide Hotline at 3 a.m.
Nothing but raw edges & ribboning
& Rorschach tests. If anger is rooted
in pain, he is planted near his thirty-ninth year,
his mother’s ashes, our stillborn daughter’s
umbilical blood. Ashen now, all
intent. Beauty. The things we understood
human life to be. No one has ever been more
desperate to find the year that’s earned
so many lives. Our living children mewl
in another room. He puts a gun in his mouth,
but his fingers are too misshapen to pull
the trigger. He wants my help, so I bind
his hands behind his back. I feed him
soup & soft bread. If I will him to live,
am I powerful? The god in godless.
Another murderous year is upon us,
another ice storm to catalogue our nights.
Tonight, winter is the vowel, low
in the backs of our throats. Cold, we swallow
Christmas lights like the littlest prayers.
Chelsea Dingman is a visiting instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph for the National Poetry Series (Georgia, 2017). Her chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved, was published by Madhouse Press (2018). Her website is chelseadingman.com.