Chelsea Dingman
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chelsdingman.bsky.social
Chelsea Dingman
@chelsdingman.bsky.social
1.3K followers 1.2K following 120 posts
Author of Thaw (@ugapress 2017 National Poetry Series) Through a Small Ghost (@ugapress 2020) I, Divided (@lsupress 2023) PhD Candidate @ualberta Poetry editor @sweetliterary
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chelsdingman.bsky.social
Ellen Bryant Voigt. 💔
Adagio We never said aloud: into the earth or fire. And if earth, then where. And if fire, then where to cast the ashes. Each thought the other would choose: choosing for two, not one— the body lying flat, the body left upright. And if a stone.
October 24, 2025 at 6:08 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
“Let’s fix our bed it’s in splinters
and I want to stay all year.”

Thinking of this Jean Valentine poem a lot lately.
Friend Friend I need your hand every morning but anger and beauty and hope these roses make one rose. Friend I need a hand every evening but anger and hope and beauty are three roses that make one rose. Let's fix our bed it's in splinters and I want to stay all year. Let's fix our bed it's in splinters and I want to stay all year. Did you hear what that woman on Grafton Street was saying? You won't be killed today. We don't even know were born.
October 20, 2025 at 2:42 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
—Frank Stanford
I dream and it is Another life
October 19, 2025 at 3:57 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
New poem up! Thanks to the editors @amsterdamreview.bsky.social for including my work. Follow their link to read the issue in full:
AMSTERDAM REVIEW We Have Known Each Other at Every Hour by Chelsea Dingman 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 we describe it as falling— in orbit, the satellites going fast enough sideways that they fall past the earth as the earth turns from them. As in love, when I looked you in your face the first time and understood you too will be impossible to see to the end. Some days, I think it would be easier not to know hat I now know. You are a homesickne uffered by fantasies of orchids, scotc pines, daybreak. Blue graves scattered over cities. People I tried to love but couldn't. The cow's bright eyes in the fields might've been fireflies tonight had it not been March. The river cries out from under its hood of ice. Its mouth a silo. In it, a perfect silence arrives after the clamor of breaking. As a child, only after breaking was my body believable. Belief gave way to grief, its purgatories. Who will look out for you after you are grief enough to believe in? You who emerged from me in the future, where I delivered us, two fragile creatures lured out into the ryegrass, the permafrost. And what on earth is lost that is not lost fercely, and on purpose? When I'm dead, still I'll dream of you. A rebellion of late snow I moved toward without meaning to. A howl of dusk trembling against me from within. Chelsea Dingman's first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series (UGA Press, 2017). Her second book, through a small ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2020). Her third collection is I, Divided (LSU Press, 2023). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). As a PhD Candidate at the University of Alberta, her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com. « Two by Eric Pankey Two by Stefanie Kirby >>
October 9, 2025 at 4:15 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Adrienne Rich
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, w no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
September 28, 2025 at 5:01 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Bhanu Kapil
I don't want to beautify our collective trauma. Your sexual brilliance resided, I sometimes thought, In your ability to say, No matter the external circumstances: "I am here." From this place, you gave only this many Desiccated fucks About the future. Day by day, you discovered what happiness is. As your guest, I trained myself To beautify Our collective trauma. When night fell at last, I turned with a sigh Towards the darkness. I am about to squeeze out an egg, you Murmured As you kissed me Goodnight. Hold a funeral for the imagination, I thought.
August 31, 2025 at 5:09 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
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: if I came back as a bird I'd remember that— until everyone we love is safe is what you said. "Practice", from Messenger: New and Selected
August 29, 2025 at 3:52 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
—D. Nurkse
Not Yet America At the end we are marching and yelling, waving signs we inked in ourselves, just as we did when we were kids. The street never changes. Drinkers watch from a bar, suds glinting on their upper lips. A bald man is being shaved in a barbershop. The chair swivels toward us: how round those eyes are, in a face smothered under lather. A baker in a white paper bag hat stares from a doorway, poised to clap flour from his hands. Behind an iron grille, a nun sighs and crosses herself. Apparently we will always have to march, singing to keep awake, calling "peace" and "justice" as if those sibilants could answer: in the numbing cold, even in the night sky, in the empty quadrant of Scorpio. There you'll find us, and the street too, since it stretches forever. A bodega with steel gates. A Jiffy Lube. A chain-link fence on which a child has spray-painted the first stroke of the first letter of a name.
August 19, 2025 at 3:10 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Larissa Szporluk
Benefits of Drowning The light has been so awful. Not whipped as a child, I'm scared of human power. They say there is an end but I go round and round with unscrupulous desires in regions of my throat. Nests smell from neglect. Autumn will smell too if the summer wasn't good. Hard rain brings exaltation. All the little mouths come out, blowing rings of brightness. I can enter them, not stagger, not a skeleton, not plagued, not by ghosts.
August 16, 2025 at 4:26 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Lucie Brock-Broido
Herculaneum No one is bored, just barbaric Anymore. Ash admixed with rain, which cooled The air. How much longer will this beauty Of yours last? As if even the idea of the city Has been lost for twenty centuries. Don't quail like this; go Gracefully instead. Eros enters The room like a lesser god stopped still In the middle of a bath of oil & umbrage in The exquisite hour. No one is Exquisite anymore. The river is so small now It will be hard to drown In it. And still this world's a pretty one. What world.
August 13, 2025 at 4:33 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
if all that breaks our hearts is yesterday, and the silent colonnade anticipating the dynamite, if all we love is a lost world then let the dust swallow our names let the maps beneath our feet burn. If all we are is past, who are these millions noW gasping for air?
August 12, 2025 at 3:17 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Audre Lorde, from “Difference and Survival”
тетее la. S, gender, and nes its excess to truncate your frei: delible part platere t Is, the it leition So this is a call for each of you to remember herself and himself, to reach for new definitions of that self, and to live intensely. To not settle for the safety of pretended sameness and the false security that sameness seems to offer. To feel the consequences of who you wish to be, lest you bring nothing of lasting worth because you have withheld some piece of the essential, which is you. And make no mistake; you will be paid well not to feel, not to scrutinize the function of your differences and their meaning, until it will be too late to feel at all. You will be paid in insularity, in poisonous creature comforts, false securities, in the spurious belief that the midnight knock will always be upon somebody else's door. But there is no separate survival.
August 11, 2025 at 4:11 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Audre Lorde
Love, Maybe Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home.
August 10, 2025 at 3:10 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
August 9, 2025 at 12:09 AM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Malena Mörling
TRAVELING Like streetlights still lit past dawn, the dead stare at us from the framed photographs. You may say otherwise, but there they are, still here traveling continuously backwards without a sound further and further into the past.
August 8, 2025 at 4:34 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Fady Joudah
Travel Document It must be like forgetting how to die: Your grass-grown ruins, Stonewalls, sadness without eyes. The body puts on its phantom Limbs' pain as true account Of what happens, and a woman Who's worn the wrong size Shoes, all her life in flight, her toes Now crooked, calls flowers by names You gave then took them back. If it's the body you want, there is the body That couldn't return, there is the one That wouldn't. Sullen Vengeance. An egg's Invisible axis rising and sinking In boiling water, salt As measure for pickling olives, Hands without echo's desire To be heard. Tell me, what else Is there to say about land?
August 8, 2025 at 1:42 AM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Etel Adnan, from Shifting the Silence
We have to deal with hopelessness. We hoped, and hoped, and ended up with the the atomic bomb and the death of God. We are here, stranded in an airport, queuing for some extraterrestrial destination, for just displacing our fears.
August 6, 2025 at 4:21 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Michael Burkard
Ж THE SUMMER AFTER LAST I do not want to belabor invisibility, but if it isn't there in the spaces among the people as a spiritual thread then I do not want to be there either. Sea or no sea, house or not. There is a useless rage in returning to the past. It is a labor not unlike labor among the stones, 5 years time and someone is made to break them for nothing. Sea or no sea, house or not. In the unrational time of the summer after last I found myself alone with the sun, simple night, water when I wanted water. My heart almost broke for not being used to this. It is amazing, the chains attempted upon the heart. Sea or no sea, house or not. — for Bill
August 6, 2025 at 3:40 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Yes! 👇
August 6, 2025 at 12:06 AM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Hala Alyan
so many, too many, things in this world are awful or beautiful, depending on the time of day, the year in your life, the angle you are tilting your head.
August 5, 2025 at 3:34 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
—Canisia Lubrin
DREAM #29 & these hours where finally we demand the fucked-with be unfucked-with
August 1, 2025 at 5:04 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
—Wendell Berry
- For the Future - Planting trees early in spring, we make a place for birds to sing in time to come. How do we know? They are singing here now. There is no other guarantee that singing will ever be.
July 29, 2025 at 2:52 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Jennifer Chang
The Innocent For weeks we watched for hatchlings to come of three smug eggs tucked into a nest, the nest tucked into the crook of a neighbor's honeysuckle. Time nodded, was nodding— the shred of living, how offhand the wind teeters toward erosion. Hard at work, on guard in two backyards, the robins mothered and fathered their territory daily. And beyond, our block's alley stretched, aimless as fields, where watching happens by accident, by nature. They'd squawk on a streetlamp, a cedar fence, our back stoop, warning off the tabby, my two young sons, everyone stuck at home. I lost my mind with watching and thought it grief or egotism, the bruise of yesterday, not least the sky unraveling another season. It was easy to mistake the bared skeletal pinions as lawn clippings, old leaves. That circle in the grass, a massacre of feathers. That terrible cat. It was easy to lose my mind. One neighbor said, Let's not tell the children, why know the world as always fated toward remnant. Another said, Go, take the nest, set it under glass, and make it a lesson. Instead, I watched our habits pass, the honeysuckle fade from sickly sweet to nothing but heat. Call it science. It's summer again, and then everything's remnant. What did we do those days, stuck at home, my sons might someday ask. We lived or tolerated living. We looked away from death.
July 27, 2025 at 5:23 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Naomi Shihab Nye via Boa’s newsletter
The Time By Naomi Shihab Nye from Fuel (BOA Editions 1998) Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this in winter especially. Summer comes, I want to tumble with the river over rocks and mossy dams. A fish drifting upside down. Slow accordions sweeten the breeze. The Sanitary Mattress Factory says, "Sleep is life." Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon? Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early." I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it. Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.
July 26, 2025 at 4:34 PM
chelsdingman.bsky.social
Wednesday mood:
Meadow & rain & mountains & mist
July 23, 2025 at 4:33 PM