Chelsea Dingman

“No.” is a sentence.

If it is Not Only the Moment of the Event But the Passing Out of it That is Traumatic, Survival Itself Can Be a Crisis No lights on, my Baba sits in her living room, telling me about the end of the world. I am alone there. My father dropped me off two hours from home when he went away to work. July, merciless in the heat of the valley near Kamloops. The sagebrush, under the sky's weight, sulks. The world burns as smoke from wildfires along the Pacific coast consume the city. Outside, she sees a war instead. The old country. She will not see her parents again. She will not see her husband who drank himself to death after two of their children died. My father will die within a year. An unmarked shoulder of highway will testify to the existence only of time. I will grow my hair like loneliness. Memory will become the address lost with my father's body. If I had loved myself too? When the TV quieted at night. When the fires reached the doors.

New poem in the Winter issue of The Indianapolis Review. Thank you to Natalie Solmer for including me along w/ all the other stunning work in this issue.

theindianapolisreview.com

Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion - The Rumpus I don’t want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I’m beginning

"To stay alive, even the dead must endure / temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean / a refrain. Its vows."

@chelsdingman.bsky.social in @therumpus.net therumpus.net/2026/02/02/r...

Pat! ❤️❤️🙏

The cited quote and information written in black against a sky blue off-white background. The full Rumpus logo is at the top.

"To stay alive, even the dead must endure / temporariness."

From "Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion," a new poem by @chelsdingman.bsky.social.

➡️ buff.ly/EBzGLxN

“What is death/ if not a dream of distance?”

This stunner by @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @therumpus.net.💙

Thank you, Melissa! 💜

Thank you, Han! 🩷

Thank you!

Given Limits Exist, Streets, Oblivion I don't want to be at peace. Outside, the buffalograss rails at the houses. Terracotta storms the bougainvillea. Each street in any direction is directionless. I'm beginning to think the concreteness that I seek in theory is waking each day, walking along a tree-lined pond. Today, approaching a fallen aspen, my child turns to me and asks, do you want to live forever? Beyond April, trees are wildfire. The child is a stranger I held in a blood museum once. Our narrative, one of proximities. I like to imagine I knew aloneness before I was occupiable. Reterritorialization: a migration from within desire (or do I mean language?) —reality's jumble of tenses & imagined borders. Something must give. I have everything I thought I wanted, still I'm incurably lonely in the way of capitalism or an abandoned child. In the only photo I have of my dead father, the image refuses identity. Whom I can or cannot remember I murder or save. To stay alive, even the dead must endure temporariness. Despite disease. Despite the burden, by which I mean a refrain. Its vows. Without her child, today, a young friend calls home a chapel of wet grass. The black trees. Absence. And what of the symbolon? That unpronounceable name transmitted as a promise that connects touch to a touchable silence. Sometimes, I think pain is a world I am too tired to carry. A creek, creeklight. The bee crawling on a rope in the basement I crushed this morning. Lest, beestung on a Tuesday in some future June, I arrive. Last words: the rain falling through the child. My body, failing to imagine me. Asking to be known. What is death if not a dream of distance? I wish I could see my child to the end of their life and not see them die.

I’ve got a new poem up @therumpus.net today. Thank you to Saeed Jones & editors for giving it such a wonderful home.

"Stefanie Kirby's chapbook, Opening, will open you like 'a highway,' 'a window,' 'a second mouth / filled with birds,' a cracked landscape. Kirby directly confronts the strange irony of living in a body which 'gives birth to death,' the uncanny after-reality of miscarriage. This is a transformational unfurling through and past the body. Kirby blends the body with the living world until the pain of being alive after a loss sits somewhere in the chest. In these vivid, surreal, and often fabulist poems, 'Drought brings up / shipwrecks like a body emptying itself / of bones.' Every poem aches and burns. 'Mary Magdalene turns / to smoke, bones soft / as incense.' Kirby, a master of the surreal, continually writes the wombed body in revolutionary and enchanting ways. Opening left me open to the bone." — Sara Moore Wagner, author of Lady Wing Shot

"Stefanie Kirby's Opening speaks unsentimentally to the horror and grief related to miscarriage and stillbirth, instead reveling in the almost-fantastical rituals of the mind and body undergoing such experiences. Each poem is locked in its tiny little box, as if the poem is one place that even absence might not escape. Under pressures of form, Kirby's vivid and sensuous descriptions of loss and longing are even more haunting for what they cannot control. The tension between the living and the dead, thin as a uterine wall. In the 'smaller field' of a poem, unlike that of the body, 'there's no limit to all / it can hold.' A poem can never be emptied, though it too is inhabited by the deaths it births. How else to attend to the memory of that which has little trace? The brevity of Kirby's collection thus brilliantly reflects the brevity of a life unlived. Each poem, brief as a breath, and as wondrous." — Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost

Advanced praise for Opening by Stefanie Kirby (@msstefaniekirby.bsky.social) by Chelsea Ding an (@chelsdingman.bsky.social) and Sara Moore Wagner (@saramoorewagner.bsky.social)!

www.glass-poetry.com

The River Kneeling on a mat, bent over a stone, my mother washes and washes and washes. My little sister sleeps in a basket covered in willow leaves. Me? I am sitting on piled straw, watching how the water leaves and how the river stays.

From 'Five Poems'
—Humberto Ak'abal (tr. Michael Bazzett)

#poetry #poem #poems

The poetry collection, More Flowers, resting against a vase of red carnations. ♥️🌸💐

Proof copy is here, and she’s lovely, so let this be a little reminder that MORE FLOWERS is out with @triohousepress.org in less than 3 months! You can pre-order at the link in the replies or wherever books are sold!

Here’s to more poetry and more flowers!
🌺🌸🌼

Thank you!

❤️🙏

“only after breaking was my body/ believable”

This poem by @chelsdingman.bsky.social in @amsterdamreview.bsky.social is so beautiful. (Thanks for passing it along, @pdforan.bsky.social!)❤️

Thank you, Pat! 💜

We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour by Chelsea Dingman | Amsterdam Review Read "We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour" by Chelsea Dingman

“… You are a homesickness
buffered by fantasies of orchids, scotch

pines, daybreak. Blue
graves scattered over cities. People

I tried to love
but couldn’t. …”

@chelsdingman.bsky.social in @amsterdamreview.bsky.social www.amsterdamreview.org/we-have-know...

Out of the earth forest forest mountain river someone has time

Ann Jäderlund

tr. by @johannesg.bsky.social

❤️

Sunset Do you forget the roar of tiny lungs unsettling your sleep? How I was once, a sparrow lost in the yard? Or was it safer for you to let him open new seams, your scars still so raw? I used to wake and run all of the faucets, as if we lived inside the falls. The house, lit like a constellation. Was I ever yours after that? There is such violence in the sunset. You wanted me to beg, but I held my breath as I wanted to be held. I should have said I wanted sky to claim the stars. That I understood to be a good girl I had to lie low like the aging hardwood floor. But, when I return, it's to stand in the soft light on the sun-porch. To admit the sunsets are drawn by my hand.

Chelsea Dingman ♥️

“There is such violence / in the sunset.”

@chelsdingman.bsky.social

GUTBUCKET I want, like water, you— something wet gainst the back of my throat. Carry me out reel me in I been down this well too long—

“Carry me out / reel me in” A poem by Kevin Young.

At dusk, the dusk holds the days apart. I am also other than I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness, Simone Weil wrote at the onset of WWII. Still, this almost-hour. Its snows. All that I still have to lose. What grain, what glacier, what child, what plain did I hand my emptiness that I would feel full? Still, I don’t understand why

"Belief gave way / to grief, its purgatories. Who will look out for you / after you are grief enough / to believe in?"

A poem by 𝗖𝗵𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗲𝗮 𝗗𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗺𝗮𝗻 @chelsdingman.bsky.social in the Fall 2025 issue

bit.ly/AmsterdamReview

#poetry #poetrycommunity

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

—Louise Glück, from "October"

from "Apostrophe" I know now, if I drive long enough, // yearning opens onto a smooth lake in the dark / where I can set down my lanterns like questions. Sarah Green

Listen to Episode 79 with @sarahgreenpoet.bsky.social here: share.transistor.fm/s/23bf7d41

And read the full poem “Apostrophe” here: pioneerworks.org/broadcast/sa...

📚💙🎙️ #poetry #podcast #booksky
@uakronpress.bsky.social

The Bear The bear came to me. I did not ask. I did not want.

Today's Featured Poem:

"The Bear" by @amiewhittemore.bsky.social from Nest of Matches published by @autumnhousepress.bsky.social

Read here:
poems.com/poem/the-bear/

Where is Mosab Abu Toha? A Poem from Gaza in 22 Languages Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was reportedly detained in a mass arrest by the Israeli Defence Forces on the morning of November 20, 2023. He was at a checkpoint in Gaza traveling south toward the…

"My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?"

#TodaysPoem #poetry
What Is Home? by Mosab Abu Toha (2023 Literary Hub) lithub.com/where-is-mos...

Practice Ellen Bryant Voigt To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward— is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We'll float, you said. Afterward we'll float between two worlds— five bronze beetles stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust: it I came back as a bird I'd remember that— until everyone we love is safe is what you said.

Ellen Bryant Voigt 💙