iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

“I do not want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.” Nobel Prize Winner & longtime fave, Anne Carson. This is only one example of her brilliance. ✨

1389

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

My new poem in the summer issue of @triquarterlymag.bsky.social with thx to the editors!

A Question of Archives
Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive, Derrida says.
As when I had a child atter miscarrying, 1 began to see my fathe: everywhere. The deer he'd shot in the woods the winter before he died
My mind, Decembering the snow, the sun, the cold.
A four-day-long migraine.
The strange unabsence that is also unpresence. A shadow tense: the winter trees.
Too often lately, I sleep on the bathroom floor. Hormones laced with swords. All ridding riddled with sweat and nausea and pain.
My father, crving in my sleep as we sit in a truck near an outdoor pooll Neither of us speaks or moves. Night, like memory, yields to time.
It time is our greatest currency, that I might rearrange the past as the lodgepole pines rearrange the surface of water.
ly father, crying near the woods instead. The trees' shadows, kneelin a the blood of a dees
I he lost object is not an object at all, according to Lacan.
A dead man, a miscarriage. Lost addresses. Tell me again how anxiety has no object?
How contagious our despair. The Werther Effect: the friend before me, the one after. We were only children. Unlike water, the pines. My long attachments.
Still, I don't know how to endure. I don't know how not to.
The historical truth vs. the material truth. Certain pasts will disappear within and without language, our only witness.
My father, crying in the open field of my mind. Unable to find his way home.
Adorno insists that the living rescue the dead through memory.
I am my father's murderer. I am my father's savior. I am neither
Say child in place of father.
What is a truth if not a wish
to be held
"he way my father carried himself through the world. The way he carried m when I could still be carried. The way a river carries-
I want to be held like that. Years and years ago.
That water, white-cold as it moves. The current, its currencies. Withheld from being able to stop or go back for anyone.
The way a parent moves when withholding a world that they don't want a…

1112

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

My new poem is up at The Los Angeles Review this week:

The Face-to-Face Encounter by Chelsea Dingman
Twenty minutes away from this house is a house without rooms and cabinets and foal-dark carpeting and a woman who wears my mother's face to clean the dishes and the linoleum floors and the delicate white lace underclothes
that she wears on special occasions and the problem of loneliness in the form of a crawlspace. In some ways, I lost my mother when my father died. Before the house was gutted. Before someone changed the locks. Before she began disappearing in front of me, like her
mother, as I told her about my day from the kitchen
doorway. Sometimes, I think writers are just
people who weren't listened to as children, and so remain strange everywhere but in language. Sometimes, when I say mother I'm speaking about my father. I'm trying to figure out what I owe a future where 1 am not, and that is different. My grandmother,
in the years before she died, endured the slow siphoning of her mind. How sad but maybe kind, I'd thought, not to remember being cruel or rash, nor the cratered body in the bathroom mirror, Christmas
baking and days out by the lake, playing gin
rummy or solitaire, knowing that she was dying, that she would die in a strange room in her mind. In a care facility, how fast she forgot
to feed herself, the names for her children. Their faces. Is one life
exchanged for another when one retires, or might retiring be
how one turns away from a life, from aging, from aphasia, from winter's slag? My mother picks my daughter up from school
every Thursday. Early retirement she took after her mother died and her partner retired. I wish we were closer, but I don't say that. I wish I'd let her know me instead of what she imagines
of me. My young sons left home this year to imagine a life
apart from mine, which is all I've wanted for them amid the waiting mothering amounts to. The indignity of days where they are not not breathing or eating or fighting now I face. The presence of their absences, deathless as a dream I…

22311

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

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

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.

3185

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

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

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.

33910

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

“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.

2176

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

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 >>

1169

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

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.

033

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

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.

073

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

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.

0133

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Sunshine Meadows views today, 15 mins west of Banff:

0162

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Camille Dungy, from “Arthritis is one thing, the hurting another”

Last year was no better, and this year only lays the groundwork for the years that are to come. Listen, this is a year like no other.
This is the year the doctors struck for want of aid and schoolchildren were sent home in the morning
and lights and gas were unreliable
and, harvesters suspect, fruit had no recourse but rot.
Many are dying for want of a cure, and the poet is patient, and her hands cause the least of her pain.

050

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

“Once more, only in darkness, light.” —Etel Adnan, from Sea & Fog

Ecriture is no different from planting roses.
Bombs are relentlessly being dropped. To go to war is to enhance one's life at the detriment of
other lives. We can't easily abandon such plea-sures.
The elusive 'now' is just the present's intensity.
When in disarray we realize how relative reality can be; we hear music made with no instru-
ments, we traverse books.
Light decreases without changing its speed. Every object is linked to the past: this chair, this moun-tain. Then, what about this idea?
Once more, only in darkness, light.

1124

Chelsea Dingman @chelsdingman.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Lucky to have two new poems in the just-dropped Spring issue of @kenyonreview.bsky.social 🖤 I also have audio up on the website. You can log in & read the whole stellar issue (so many of my faves!) & hear each of us read here: kenyonreview.org Many thx to the editors!