Recovery is Memory
Whatever the sound, where it comes from, what it makes
you feel, you want a surrender that doesn’t sound
like any other privacy. The ways you’ve been lost
to the fields warring with the wind back near the highway—
between Kelowna & Tijuana, the cow your mother hit
destroyed the front end of the car before pulling itself back
to standing. Before walking away from you on some dust
road. Fuck winter, you thought as your mother drove south. You went
to sleep, holding on. When you woke, the fool
trees were live oaks. Spanish moss, strangling them
without a sound. Didn’t your mother warn you?
The boats, the bougainvillea. The burns from riding three
wheelers along the beach at San Jose del Cabo, your thigh
pressed tight to the hot engine on one side. How desperation
makes a thing unbearable. How you’d wanted instead
to uncurrency time. The old gods too much like the old
gods. That angel left in the snow back home, not playing
dead. What about the ways you’d been hurt
was warranted? You wanted to gather your mistakes close,
not to know who made you, but what you were
apologizing for. The rain, uninterrupted by its own falling
on the Baja. There, your mother, turning away until you
couldn’t see her face, even in sleep. A deck chair
thrown through the kitchen window while you were
gone, the car in the garage loaded up with a TV, your dead
father’s rifles from the bedroom closet, the sheets
they were wrapped in, a computer and silverware,
all ditched in another city. Even then, you were to blame—
not knowing when to go, when leaving is different.
Would you have been happy had you stayed in that Gulf
coast town? Asking no one for forgiveness. Your hands,
not windows. The water all around, not giving up
the sky. Not giving up on your anger. The sound after
gunfire, which is a silence unlike anything else—
there is no end to it, and no describing it. It just hangs
unboundaried in the air. Like the kind of surrender
that tears you apart, then asks you to invent again
the ways you’ve been left. The ways you’ve been a child.
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 I, Divided, was published by LSU Press in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She is pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Alberta, and her current work draws on research supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).