"Lockdown Drill" by Chelsea Dingman

Originally appearing in Flypaper Poetry Issue V.

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 and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (February 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Her work is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and Triquarterly, among others. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com​

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Lockdown Drill


Keep thinking of the dead babies the dead
babies the dead so like the babies at the ends
of our fingers the babies that will grow
to leave too fast if they live long
enough the babies that mothers once held inside
like secrets they promised to keep
safe—keep thinking that no one is safe
if not the babies if not the near-visible
bones we grow to outlast us keep thinking
nothing lasts while the sun sinks below
the late winter horizon the hours of daylight
getting longer but only by seconds
the bones grown away from us like the babies
so close to being the only evidence of angels
the babies that moved through the world
just yesterday & now move in the dark
beyond the windows beyond the glass
lake of memory                           keep thinking
there are reasons for everything
but do not find a single reason for a bullet
to enter a baby like a wind that opens
a door it can’t close keep thinking
we’d do anything to deadbolt the doors
to shut out the wind to put breaths back
in their bodies to give them a new history
a new exit strategy a world where hate is not
a bullet where dead babies aren’t snowflakes
fallen to rest under our feet where the babies that live
at our fingertips are what we hold instead
of what we could be holding
when to hold them is never enough is never
enough is never enough