{"id":4875,"date":"2017-06-23T12:19:44","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T12:19:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=4875"},"modified":"2017-06-25T15:18:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-25T15:18:08","slug":"confession-chelsea-dingman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=4875","title":{"rendered":"CONFESSION &#8211; Chelsea Dingman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Like you, I am built out of sky:<br \/>\nlight &#038; air I use to mend<br \/>\nthe bones I owned before your body roamed<br \/>\nfree &#038; I made of myself this silence<br \/>\nlarge enough to multiply<br \/>\nin my womb where our daughter<br \/>\ndied when I was afraid to be touched<br \/>\nby water or anything else. She was pretty,<br \/>\nwasn\u2019t she? Our daughter, not your excuse<br \/>\nfor vanishing. Her ribs, like folded wings.<br \/>\nI should\u2019ve known faith is like a father.<br \/>\nHere. Not here. You are like the god<br \/>\nI called when the cramps came. You raise<br \/>\nthe forests where sacrifices are the trees.<br \/>\nNot a baby. Not human need. I, myself, am<br \/>\nalien now. Something not quite realized.<br \/>\nA sentence missing its verbs. The blue<br \/>\n-bellied birds are back at the door, the sky<br \/>\nburned from their feathers. In the fields<br \/>\nof my body, a pond. So I may know<br \/>\nhow to be full when consequence is a sea<br \/>\n-son. The sky refusing rain. The months<br \/>\nwe\u2019ve pretended to know ourselves.<br \/>\nBut what is grief? A noun we can\u2019t hold<br \/>\nwith our hands? A Hallelujah? o ghost,<br \/>\no mother-grave\u2014, Hallelujah.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<br \/>\nChelsea Dingman is a Canadian citizen and Instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, <em>Thaw,<\/em> won the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (2017). She has work forthcoming in <em>The Sycamore Review <\/em>(Winner of the Wabash Prize), <em>The Southeast Review<\/em> (Winner of the Gearhart Poetry Contest), <em>Southern Humanities Review <\/em>(Finalist for the Auburn Witness Prize), <em>Arcadia<\/em> (Finalist for the Dead Bison Editor\u2019s Prize), <em>Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review<\/em>, and <em>Gulf Coast<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like you, I am built out of sky: light &#038; air I use to mend the bones I owned before your body roamed free &#038; I made of myself this silence large enough to multiply in my womb where our daughter died when I was afraid to be touched by water or anything else. She [&#038;hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4895,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[218],"class_list":["post-4875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-photo-by-gerhard-gellinger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4875"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4879,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4875\/revisions\/4879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}