Today's poem is by Chelsea Dingman

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.

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Copyright © 2024 Chelsea Dingman All rights reserved
from The Southeast Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission