How briefly the body is a story
where everything matters,
even its name. The oaks outside
dip & dangle in the wind. Sun
dapples deep-green leaves, ripe
with spring rain. But in the body, I am
a transient. I’ve had a host of women’s names
kneel down inside me. When I can’t
name the reasons I listen to rain
fill me like words on a page, the body
is a story of devotion: it knows the cost of moving
into morning, asking to be spared
nothing. I asked only to be alive,
but I can’t know where I’ll find climax,
or if denouement looks like my mother
kneeling, as she asks for bare skin
to enter like the first bars
of a hymn. In the body, everything
has an end. I can’t yet know how it is
to enter morning & be left
with myself—every story I’ve known
carried off like tree pollen
in the white spring wind. But I enter, however
briefly. Asking nothing.
Chelsea Dingman continues her MFA and teaches in the University of South Florida graduate program. In 2016, her work can be found in Phoebe, Harpur Palate, The Adroit Journal, Grist: A Journal for Writers, Boxcar, Sou’wester, and The Raleigh Review, among others. She is originally from Western Canada. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.