SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
  • HOME
    • EVENTS
    • Pushcart Prize Nominees
    • RESULTS: Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York 2022
    • RESULTS: Editors Chapbook Prize for Fiction 2021
  • CURRENT ISSUE
    • ONLINE FEATURES
    • REVIEWS
    • STORE
  • ARCHIVES
    • The 1960s
    • The 2010s
    • The 2020s
  • SUBMISSIONS
    • Submit
    • Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
  • ABOUT
  • HOME
    • EVENTS
    • Pushcart Prize Nominees
    • RESULTS: Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York 2022
    • RESULTS: Editors Chapbook Prize for Fiction 2021
  • CURRENT ISSUE
    • ONLINE FEATURES
    • REVIEWS
    • STORE
  • ARCHIVES
    • The 1960s
    • The 2010s
    • The 2020s
  • SUBMISSIONS
    • Submit
    • Auburn Witness Poetry Prize
  • ABOUT
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

POETRY

Let Us Consider Madness as a Solution to Grief

By Chelsea Dingman





Vertical Divider
The cattle, screaming from the slaughter
house, can be heard
 
all the way down the dirt road
to the next ranch. Their deaths are handed
 
to them. Handless, & capable of nothing. Beyond sound, white
-tailed deer skitter in the distance.
 
Once, my father reached for his rifle. 
Once, my mother stood at the split-rail
 
fence, close but far enough
from slaughter not to own it. The ranch
 
would be hers alone, afterward. Perhaps
I am the distance. My father always said
 
the head is first to be lost. The heart, first  
to be eaten. The cattle, though. The sounds. Stunned
 
before being hung by a hind limb to ensure
a humane end. Tenderness. The abattoir
 
rules for each house. The poverty of logic. 
A truth with no hands, & birds circling overhead.
Picture

About This Unit: Poems on Family and Finding Other Lines of Symmetry



CHELSEA DINGMAN’s first book, Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection, Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook, What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.
​ 

CURRENT ISSUE
SUBMIT
EVENTS
ARCHIVES
STORE

Vertical Divider

CONTACT
SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
9088 HALEY CENTER
AUBURN UNIVERSITY
AUBURN, AL 36849

shr@auburn.edu
334.844.9088

Vertical Divider
Official trademark of Auburn University

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS