- At a Party on a Colonist Car Across Canada
You sit next to a man struggling to sing. The true northstrong and he warbles like that bird that struck the window earlier. It didn’t seem to notice
anything but the blur of its own wings. Then,a sound you didn’t know a bird could make. A cry. A hiss. The pin letting air loose from a tire. You sip
at the drink you were given for hours. Voices loud, beginto slur. You stand on guard for cracks in the ice on the lake outside. You wind with the train’s
motion, the same seat you will sleep on for four or fivenights. The cracks swallow snow, growing wider. Slowly. Water, wanting more of everything. More earth. Through
the crowd: dilapidated chairs, bare walls. Our native land.Before the crack thunders again, music swells. This hunger you’ve felt for so long. You let your hand float up
to the window in answer. But all you can make outare shadows flittering like wings. A stranger swaying in the dark night. Someone else’s hands. [End Page 117]
CHELSEA DINGMAN’s first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press in 2017. In 2016, she also won the Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize and the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, and was a finalist for the Auburn Witness Prize, Arcadia’s Dead Bison Editor’s Prize, and Phoebe’s Greg Grummer Poetry Award. Her forthcoming work can be found in Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and Third Coast, among others.*