Girl in the Sky
- Girl in the Sky
My mother is the ice fieldthere in the distance, flat
on her back, sheltering the frozenprairie. My daughter is an arc
of lightning in a starless sky, limbsslicing the air. What will be left
when a new season comesisn't for me to know. I am the one
on a plane, a strange voice telling meto put my mask on first. I am not land
-locked, but has a body ever been freeof the sky? In my yard, vultures
fighting over the flesh of a fieldmouse, caught in the fence's clasp,
won't fly to the brutal norththat my mother watches over, waiting
to disappear. Perhaps, they too fearthe suck of a plane's propellers. But
my daughter is fire, not air. Notwater. An element to be feared. I can drag
these bones over burned-out fields, overseas, over raw edges of the trees,
but I can't survive fire—, survivewithout fire. She's grown fierce [End Page 1]
enough to fell a man without beingaccused of killing. To hang her
body against the sky, accusedof inventing light where there is none. [End Page 2]
Chelsea Dingman is an MFA candidate at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming (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, Phoebe's Greg Grummer Poetry Award, and Crab Orchard Review's Student Awards. Her forthcoming work can be found in Mid-American Review, Ninth Letter, and Gulf Coast, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.
