Chelsea Dingman

Nachträglichkeit

Between survival and surrender, what is rearticulated in the shadow
archive? If memory is present

not once, but several times over. As it rained, it might’ve been 

summer. To enter the forest across the street
from our house, I might’ve agreed. Only in writing

about my father years after he lay down 

by a roadside, do I re-transcribe
the encounter. With time, or death. My own

loneliness. I was only nine. The older boy who took me to the woods 

moved soon after. My father went away for work
that winter & did not return. Yet, I return to memory 

unarmed. The red cedars loom. They allow me to remain 

unseen when the boy takes off my clothes. I remember sky.
I remember looking up. I remember not wanting 

to look at myself, unsure why. I remember running home 

through the dusk until home was a memory of trees
and dusk, the betrayal of the body

that would later become a disturbance 

like love. If time too can be lost,
the shape of the world I was. Beneath the shimmering leaves

strewn across my bare belly and back. I’ve learned nobody 

exists, day or night, except in the present. That I might
betray what I know, even in memory—

in a year of damp forests, of tenderness 

like youth. The dusk, an endless loop
where rain begins & begins. From ruin.

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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, is forthcoming from LSU Press in the fall of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Alberta. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.