Month: July 2024

Dark Water

Content warning: This content contains content.

This morning, a woman at Fry’s stopped me to ask for help finding food for her husband, who’s preparing for chemotherapy treatment. She described the kinds of things his doctor said he should have. We walked and talked and found some good options for him.

It’s easier to remember being young than it is to imagine growing old.

Eight years ago, I thought we were post-narrative, post-storytelling. Now, I fear we’re post-community.

The problem is poetry isn’t part of our daily discourse. I’m serious.

Write the poem you want to see in the world.

The birds are acting strange today. The humans, too. And the dogs.

I’m the dark water, but I’m also the buoy cast into the dark water.

Again, I’ve dressed for the wrong desert.

I like having two houses. If I die, my dog will think I’ve just gone to the other house and she’ll see me soon. I’ll be away, not gone.




Weird

I’m disappointed that Kamala Harris and those who support her are using the word weird to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance. Why? Because it’s ableist, normative language that’s long been deployed against folks who are different in any way, especially young people who are neurodivergent, who have values that differ from their peers, or who don’t fit neatly into the ready-made boxes that are used to define and limit them.

I turned off an NPR interview earlier today because the person being interviewed kept saying JD Vance was weird each time the interviewer asked legitimate questions about his positions and statements over the years, including inquiries about his sexism and racism. There was so much more to say than labeling him as weird and shutting the conversation down.

We have critical issues to discuss that can’t be captured by the word weird, and making it part of an attack line at once diminishes the issues at hand and encourages voters, especially younger voters, to call anyone they don’t like weird, which isn’t progress and doesn’t encourage people to avoid using language that dehumanizes and others their fellow human beings.

Here

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Do you ever see them?
Every day in every sunrise, every songbird, every sand, every silt.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are you now?
In the light, in the bird, in the sand, in the silt.

New Doves

Two mourning doves just landed on my porch light. They have the adorable, bewildered look of fledglings. Hello, Rosencrantz! Hello, Guildenstern! I don’t think they know what to do next. Where to go? What to eat? When to rest?

Oopsie, Rosencrantz almost slipped off the light. And poor Guildenstern is trying to eat stucco. Now they’re preening. Now they’re looking up down updown downup down down down down.

This is the world, little birds. I hope you like your time here. I’m sorry the Earth is in such shabby condition. There’s water two doors down. There’s food pretty much everywhere because much of this land is still wild. Stay cool. Live smart. Watch out for the Cooper’s hawks.

Post-Monsoon Bloom

I have a Mojave Desert wardrobe, but I’m a Sonoran Desert dweller now.

I need to be more columnar cactus, less Joshua tree. More legume tree, less pinyon-juniper.

More post-monsoon bloom of annual flowers, less monotony of Mormon tea.

More thornscrub, more upland, more plains. Less ecotone, less basin, less mountain.

More swelling tropical air, less strained, stolen aquifer water.

More desert, less golf course, less water park, less carwash.

More diversity, equity, and inclusion, less banning of diversity, equity, and inclusion.*

I don’t want to walk around like that old desert, its desiccated husk wrapped around my body, though the desert’s not to blame. No desert is ever to blame. As Samuel Green writes in his poem “Convenant: Saying Hello to the Land We Will Love”:

              We have only
              the compass of how we walk here
              how our feet move
              over the soil that will feed us.

Let us feed our lands, not feed on them. Here in the Sonoran Desert. There in the Mojave Desert.

Let the lands guide us. Let us honor them. Let us save them and in turn be saved by them. Let us not always destroy everything and everywhere and everyone.

Give me that wardrobe. I’ll suit up.

—

* Utah recently banned diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses and in government.

Dalexina

My husband is more than halfway back to our house in Utah, where he’ll stay for at least a month before returning to Tucson. Since he left this morning, I’ve made social plans for next week, cleaned and organized the house, written a prose poem, worked a small puzzle depicting Zion National Park, and made nectar so I can feed the local hummingbirds.

It’s important for writers to have time alone. It’s important for everyone to have time alone, but writers need it to produce work, which is what we’re compelled to do during our time on Earth. Have you ever been around a writer who’s not writing? Probably not for long. We’re intolerable.

My husband and I love each other and also need time away from each other. That’s been impossible since the pandemic, which is when his company went remote and there was no workplace for him to go to anymore. I was largely doing freelance and remote volunteer work, so I was also home most of the time.

From late 2019 onward, we’ve been one thing, a single entity. I have the antique typesetting letters to prove it. They sit on our kitchen shelf declaring that we are either Dajonna or Jodanna, not Dana and Jon or Jon and Dana.

For the next month, we will be Jon and Dana. I may eventually become one-half of the entity known as Dalexina, since Lexi is staying here with me. That’s fine. Lexi sleeps most of the day and doesn’t interfere with my thoughts and feelings, both of which need to be unfettered when I write. I might even get in on some of those naps. Dalexina has been busy lately. She’s accomplished a lot. She has big plans. She may be a tad bit overextended. Dalexina needs to curl up in her favorite bed with her favorite blanket and get some rest with her better half.

Did I just call my dog my better half? So be it.

Toads

Dozens of spadefoot and Sonoran toads died in my area after the monsoon rains last night. They’d come out onto Old Spanish Trail, which has a speed limit of 50 miles per hour in most places and is becoming more heavily traveled as dense developments transform the area.

Fifty miles is way too fast, in my opinion. There’s too much wildlife out here to be tearing through the area at top speed. A fox crossed the road when we set out yesterday evening. Fortunately, we and other drivers stopped, and the fox passed safely.

But the toads were a different story. It was dark as we made our way home, which is the least safe time to be driving. It’s when wildlife is especially active and much less visible.

We shouldn’t have been out at all. I don’t like driving at night because of the danger it poses. I should say the danger I pose when driving in the dark. We had an errand we couldn’t do earlier in the day, so we made an exception.

Other drivers either weren’t aware of the toads or didn’t care about avoiding them. Or maybe they simply couldn’t react in time, especially when driving so fast. To be fair, there were a lot of toads on the road. It reminded me of summer nights in Oklahoma down by the Canadian River when I was a teenager. Hundreds of toads would gather on the gravel road next to the river. You couldn’t even move your car if you stayed too late, unless you didn’t care about killing them.

I’m having several dozen funerals in my heart today thinking about those toads whose last act was coming out to enjoy the rain.