I’m dismantling the Kris Kristofferson shrine on my timeline now. Parts of it, at least. I must be reasonable. After all, I’m still alive. There will be more time for despair when I’m dead. I’ll keep a few photos up, my favorites, and try not to add any more as the day wears on.
Last night, I dreamed I was inside a frozen water droplet that was also a cell and an egg and the earth and the multiverse and the brain and the mind. It was the past, present, and future: all the possible pasts, presents, and futures. It was sliced horizontally all the way through as thin as sections of the human brain before examination in an electron microscopic.
Each section was an alternative reality or a past or a biological process unfolding or a sunrise or a volcanic eruption or a building full of people doing telemarketing in a sea of cubicles. There were openings between the sections, hidden passageways. On one side toward the bottom, there was a hemangioblastoma that was red and throbbing. It grew a little anytime something new was added to the droplet.
The droplet and the tumor had to grow at the same rate, otherwise the droplet would be compromised and eventually break. They grew together when individual worlds grew, new universes were born, humans and animals evolved or made new discoveries, things like that.
But trauma was different. It made the tumor grow but not the droplet. The tumor was growing fast, much faster than the droplet. You could see it encroaching on the rest of the droplet’s space, like retinal blood vessels into an eye’s vitreous body.
There was too much trauma in our cells, in our eggs, in our earth, in our multiverse. There was too much trauma in our waters. I woke up before the droplet burst.
My water is over my bridge right now. I say that knowing there is literal water over literal bridges in parts of this country and that bridges and every other imaginable thing, along with people and animals and lands, are being bombed out of existence right now. But my water is over my bridge. I try to keep it under my bridge. That’s how I survive. Otherwise, I will be my own undoing, and I don’t want that. Kris Kristofferson says, “You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.” I guess I’d better figure out how to paddle. I need to find some oars before I learn how to navigate the current without them. I think poetry might be my oars. It better be.
I think I’m done posting about Kris Kristofferson. It’s like my whole life has been a deck of cards precariously balanced, and he was one of those cards, so I’m moving pretty swiftly into old pain as my cards fall. I’ll clean up my timeline tomorrow. I just want to leave all my posts up until then.
There weren’t many good things about my childhood. Thinking I was going to grow up and marry Kris Kristofferson was one of them.
I’m sorry. I never thought about the fact that I’d one day have to live in a world without Kris Kristofferson. I was not prepared for this.
Animals know fear. I know that much.
I think I’m entrained on curve-billed thrashers singing in the morning as opposed to being entrained on dawn. That’s fine, I guess, since the thrashers are entrained on dawn. What bird will signal morning when I’m in Utah? I may need a curve-billed thrasher alarm.
I just earned twenty-two active zone minutes putting away the one hundred twenty-three diet sodas my husband brought home this morning. Apparently, they were on sale, so he bought one hundred twenty-two more than I asked for.
I asked my husband to run out and get me a diet soda. He came back with one hundred twenty-three sodas.
Say what you want to say and what you need to say when you want to say it and when you need to say it.
You never know what lives your poems are living outside you.
Who’s to say / how old I am / in poetry years.
The painters unwrapped my house while I napped on the sofa. I woke to sunlight turning my eyelids into glowing pools. I am reborn. I want nothing. I want everything.
I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today.
I’m messing around with my poetry database again today. It’s not going very well because I’m pretty high. Our townhome quad is being painted, and the fumes have made their way inside our house. The new color is decidedly ’80s dusty rose, a real blast from the past. It was supposed to be copper. It’s not copper. But the older women who live in the three other townhomes absolutely love it, so I will try to love it, too.
For no apparent reason, Meta AI sent me a message describing the geologicial features of Douglas, Arizona.
I managed to send five poems to one literary journal. That only took about forty hours of work. Now, I have to eat.
I want to write a heartbreaking poem about a wombat, but I am too tired.
I revisited my Eastern Washington poems yesterday. Now, I’m aching for Eastern Washington. I never left. (I left before I arrived.) I took it with me when I left. (It wouldn’t come with me.) It asked me to stay. (I didn’t stay. It never asked me to.) I left myself in it. (I left it somewhere inside myself.) I left it. (It was already leaving me.) I drove away. (It drove me away.) I was moving. (I appeared to be in motion.) I wasn’t still. (I wasn’t in motion.) I was the one who moved. (It was the one that wasn’t still.) We are both still now. (We are both still moving.)
My husband woke early and made the world light before it was light.
Someone left the moon on all night.
I sit in the dark. A cricket sings in the courtyard. The moon is gone.
I’ll stir when the rufous-winged sparrow stops singing.
Lots of coyote talk this morning, too.
I heard a western screech owl this morning and got a recording of its call. I’ve never heard or seen an eastern of western screech owl before. All the birds were communicating because a Cooper’s hawk was in the area.
We’re on our way to Target to get a second weighted therapy dinosaur so we each have one and they can sit at our dining room table and hang out together. I am super excited. They may even have a tea party. Yes, we’re in our fifties. Between the two of us, we’ve been on this earth for one hundred seven years. I guess that makes us almost as old as dinosaurs.
Edited to note that the second weighted therapy creature we bought is a dragon, not a dinosaur.
Lizards seem to have time on their hands. I could have talked about this with my friend, but she’s been dead for twenty months. The last time we spoke, she said, “Of course bees play. Of course they do.” I want to tell her how lizards climb and cling and swim and glide and run and how one teases my dog every morning by hanging upside down on the patio screen. I don’t want to have time on my hands. I want someone to call about lizards, someone who birds land on and who rescues cats and dogs and names them after characters in books, someone who knows the hearts of animals because animals helped her survive the unsurvivable until she didn’t and was no longer an animal, no longer part of time.
The dead usher us toward death simply by being dead.
As soon as I think about sending my poems out, they quit glinting and turn into sand, sand, more sand, so much sand.
Facebook is trying to sell me on an AI boyfriend. I already have an OI husband: an autodidactic neuroatypical advocate, artist, composer, electronics wiz, gamer, hacker, mentor, musician, outdoor enthusiast, pet lover, and software engineer. Organic intelligence for the win.
I learned some Spanish today from my fellow Tucsonans: Chinga tu maga, no mas naranja.
Now that you’re a bird, not my father, I can look at you. I did that. I turned you into a bird.
If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Open this gate. Tear down this wall.
Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter. I want another d or n. Something. Maybe a second i or one of those slashes right through the middle that allows the word to be at once one thing and two things. Wild|ness. That still doesn’t look right.
I had a thing to say about poetry, a quip or an aphorism that I came up with while I was making the bed. Then I saw my husband’s blood on a white pillowcase and lost my train of thought. He cut himself working on the house and didn’t think he needed a bandage. He needed a bandage. Because he had no bandage, the pillow became his bandage.
There’s something about the blood-red of blood on the bright white of white that makes the non-brain parts of my body react. To what, I don’t know. I saw a beaten woman bleed all over her white eyelet skirt at substitute teacher training last year in St. George, Utah. But this goes back further than that.
There are also, of course, the white floral handkerchiefs women used to carry that had crimson berries sewn onto them to disguise the blood they were coughing up because they had TB. But that’s not it, either.
It’s something from my childhood, something I saw or experienced. Blood drowning white cloth. White cloth destroyed by blood. Frantically trying to get bloodstains out of white fabric.
My mother knew how to do that. She removed nearly all traces of what happened to her, what she survived. She had a wildness that couldn’t be beaten or shaken or ripped out of her. I mean another word there, not ripped—a word I can’t say here on Facebook. Remove the i and one p. Add an a. Yeah, that word. By my uncle and later by my father.
Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter.
Trauma is one of those words that looks like it’s packed with bodies.
Mother is one of those words that looks like it can be anything at all. Moth. Ether. Mote. Other. Tome. Moot. Mere. Mete. Hoe. Tooth. Hoot. Root. Home.
Poems are everywhere. Find them. On social media, in thrift stores, in the air, tucked inside your body, in old typewriters, under rocks, on islands, in what you misread, in the margins, in dreams, in the dead.
Pay attention. Not the kind of attention that excludes multiple forms of attention, but rather the kind that embraces polyattentionality.
Write everything down. Keep it or throw it out, but always save what you’ve thrown out or at least part of what you’ve thrown out. Maybe tear what you’ve thrown out down the middle and rewrite the missing half or join two different halves and see what happens. Maybe take some Wite Out to ninety percent of it and see what emerges. It might be what you were trying to say all along.
Save what others throw out. Rummage through lives and handwritings not your own. Put a gilded frame around discarded words and see if they wriggle back to life.
Don’t be afraid to see a poem in a grocery list or a patient education handout or a menu or a box of rusted paperclips.
Collect things. The stranger, the better. Handle what you collect with love, always. All things are related to each other and to us. Treat things the way you want things to treat you.
Do the work. Make your way. Write as yourself and for yourself. Never write for others. To others, perhaps—letters are a lost art, after all. But if you write for others, you may get lost inside them when you need to get lost inside yourself.
Find one poem you wish you could write but can’t. Carry it with you until the paper it’s printed on is worn thin. When you can write that poem, find another poem that you can’t yet write. Carry it until you can. And so forth.
Know that you will die. If that bothers you, write about it. If not, just write.
One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.
My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Ruefle. He didn’t even say Mary Ruefle or Ruefle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.
My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.
I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.
What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Ruefle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.
We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.
I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Ruefle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Ruefle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.
Toquerville, Utah, is only thirty minutes from the Arizona border, so it’s pretty much like I’m not even leaving the state. That’s how I’m going to think about it. I’m uneasy about returning to an area that has so much embedded trauma.
Like the women and girls who were sex trafficked across a four-state area by way of a horse trailer that Samuel Bateman carted them around in. He was the father or husband of all of them. In one case, he was both their father and their husband. They were as young as twelve years old. He made them have sex with men while he watched. He said it’s what God wanted them to do and their hymens would grow back.
Like the man in Enoch who killed his mother-in-law, wife, five children, and himself because his wife filed for divorce. He didn’t want the embarrassment and shame that would bring upon him. Better that they all die than live as a broken family. Like the graves of the children and their mother lined up in the cemetery three minutes from Toquerville. Like his unmarked grave in some secret location.
Like runners who are trying to escape the compound Warren Jeffs still operates from jail but are found by other followers and dragged back inside the makeshift metal walls surrounding parts of the community.
Like the FLDS woman in substitute teacher training who met up with her husband during a break and returned with a badly split lip. How blood dripped onto her white eyelet skirt. How she cheerfully struck up a conversation about poetry while she bled.
Like the man patrolling BLM lands with a gun and a knife who calls women hikers he meets c-nts and tells him their presence is threatening so he’s justified in killing them. How the sheriffs say he’s within his rights to defend himself if he feels threatened. Besides, it’s a he said, she said situation, they say.
Like the youth who’ve died by suicide after coming out as LGBTQ and losing their whole families, their whole communities, everything they’ve known. Like the LDS church’s response, which is to be even harder on trans members, denying them opportunities the way they denied opportunities to Black members in the 1970s before they almost lost their tax-exempt status for doing so.
Like the outdoor adventure camps for children and young adults with behavioral issues that are riddled with abuses, devoid of accountability, and often run by staff with more unaddressed mental health issues than the children and youth they’re purportedly trying to help.
Like the seventy-year-old man who meets you in a state park and grooms you alongside his wife so he can later send you a photo of himself naked in his bathtub.
Like the mental health professionals who say your issues have absolutely nothing to do with trauma. You just need to go home to your husband. They write in your chart that you’re involved in trafficking, as if you’re trafficking others, when the truth is you were trafficked, sex trafficked as a child, by your family.
Like the therapist who lays her hands on you in a session and pulls the evil out of your body in long, expansive motions, the one who asks you to accept Jesus Christ as the one true savior, to renounce things like yoga and Buddhism because Jesus is the only one, the only way. Like your insurance paying for this session. The gaslighting of that. The mindf-ck of that. The absolute where the f-ck am I of that.
Like the things you still won’t put in writing because alt-right extremist groups are involved, militias are involved, ties to Cliven Bundy are involved, and these groups have thousands of local members who’ve gotten ahold of the Koch brothers’ playbook for destroying communities at the hyperlocal level. And they’re doing it. And it’s working because they have guns and rage and more guns and more rage. No end to the guns and rage. Someone has to pay for whatever’s made them so g-ddamn angry.
Like derealization as the only way out of that place, that inanity. Like insanity as the only sanity within insanity. Like nobody talking about any of the things that are happening. Like none of it even exists. Like trauma doesn’t girdle the area the way the lacolliths and sandstone formations do. Like abuses and suffering don’t rain down like summer storms, penetrating everything that can be penetrated and roiling from the creeks before they make their way elsewhere.
Our home is wrapped in thin plastic. We can’t get out or in. The doors are sealed, windows masked and covered. This is what happens when you can finally afford to pay someone to paint your house for you. You sit inside feeling asphyxiated.
I almost taste the plastic pulling into my mouth when I breathe the way it did when I was a child experimenting with airlessness—that “I know I’m not supposed to do this which is why I’m going to try it a few times and see what happens” feeling.
Oh, the rush of air pulling in with more than ordinary force and the way the mouth heats that air, then the alien sensuality of the bag connecting with the lips all the way around, followed by that sudden, hard stop when no more air can get through, the shock and aftershock of it all at once, like a symphony going silent after roaring from the stage at full volume, the timpanist’s hand held high above his instrument, the conductor’s arms hanging in front of her as if invisible wires control her wrists and the whole orchestra rigid, focused, tingling from head to toe and back again, the only thing keeping them in place is the downbeat, the one that’s coming, coming, coming, any second, any second, just as soon as the conductor gives her orders.
Then she does. She is me. The downbeat is the moment I pull the plastic from my mouth and air flows in, unrestricted and urgent and wanton. That cool air, that life-giving air oxygenating my body and bringing my brain fully back online. You could almost call it a form of rebirth if children who play with plastic bags are capable of such a thing. I was, or at least I think I was, but I’m not your ordinary child. Or perhaps I’m too ordinary. One can never know what one is or is not in comparison with others who may or may not be what they are or are not.
Light still penetrates the plastic-covered windows but it’s gray and gauzy like one of those days that happens all the time in Seattle but never here in Tucson. Even during monsoon season, storms make the sky dark, not the color of cement or that dull, not-quite-elephant color nobody uses in the forty-eight pack of Crayons. Do forty-eight packs still exist? I remember when I got my first set. It was thrilling to see all those colors lined up tidily in their box. It felt like as many colors as the world could hold. Then the sixty-four pack came out, and I suddenly needed those additional sixteen colors. Capitalism has had its fingers in my heart my whole life.
Some of the plastic is off now. That’s a relief. I could leave through the front door if I wanted to. Now that I can, I don’t want to. When I couldn’t, “I must leave now” was the only thought in my head. It pounded in 4/4 time as I wrote this, a percussive accompaniment to my hollow key clicks that only I could hear.
Maybe I felt like I was in the womb when all that plastic surrounded me. Maybe I felt like I was a cell inside its wall. Maybe I felt like I was going to turn into ooze and transform into a moth. Maybe I felt something darker, something only my body and animal brain remember, like my recurring dream of men who are wolves who are coming for me, and I’m inside a house but there are no walls, no locks, no doors, only gauzy drapes, so I wrap myself in them but the men see me, and I can’t run because the drapes only tighten when I try.
I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.
Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.
That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.
I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.
Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.
I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.
Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.
But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …
It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.
I will describe the heartbreaking wombat poem I wanted to write last night when I was too tired to write because I’d been messing with poetry submissions for fifteen hours straight. (I actually submitted zero poems after all that effort.) The time for actually writing the heartbreaking wombat poem has passed. But here’s what I kind of think the poem would have done. Keep in mind, I never know what the poem will actually do until I start engaging with it for real.
—
The Poem Has Some Kind of Title
The poem opens with something about how a wombat can’t survive in the wild with only three legs.
The poem goes into detail about the kinds of things the wombat can no longer do because of the missing leg, making reference to an individual wombat who’s experiencing this situation. Evading predators. Foraging. Climbing.
(The poem’s not sure wombats climb. The poem will look that up.)
The poem starts to talk about the wombat in ways humans can relate to, especially those of us who are growing older.
The poem turns to humans explicitly and all the things we can’t do. The poem provides lists here because they can cover a lot of emotional territory. Accretion can be an effective technique in the poem and help the poem avoid sentimentality and other gobbledygook that mucks up poems and may muck this one up despite the poem’s efforts.
Here, the poem may take a turn toward the emotional things we can’t survive, not just the physical things. Traumas. Losses. Unimaginable suffering. The poem will provide some examples, perhaps those pulled from recent news or perhaps from the poem’s past.
The poem might move out from individual traumas to larger traumas by talking about groups of people who are like wombats, ones who’ve lost their lands and are being driven from their homes into the harsh reality that the world is no longer designed for them if it ever was. It’s for others, many of whom want them gone the way they want wombats gone.
The poem may bring up Marky Mark and the way he brutally beat two Venezuelan men when he was sixteen years old, namely how that’s not dissimilar from people attacking and harming wombats, though of course the comparison is problematic because humans aren’t wombats and Marky Mark does whatever he wants, and it’s funny how the history of celebrities always seems to be getting lost, as if it’s all being tucked inside the pouches of wombats never again to see the light of day.
It’s risky, but the poem might talk about the emotional lives of wombats, perhaps discussing how we can’t know the interior lives of nonhuman species, but we can make some educated guesses. And we really don’t know that much about our own interior lives, do we, and that doesn’t keep us from talking about ourselves and each other, so why not allow the stretch here. It’s a poem, after all, not a scientific lab that experiments on animals. (And thank goodness it’s not.)
Now the poem may list a bunch of stuff a wombat can’t do after certain types of emotional damage, like being attacked or run over or left in the road or being burned or losing habitat or whatever. The poem may feel this is an effective way to bring you into the animal’s life quickly, before you can stop reading.
The poem wants you to feel all of this, both for the wombat and for other humans, but its mechanism of action is to get you to feel. You must feel what the wombat feels so you can feel what you feel and then extend more compassion and understanding to those around you.
That’s what the poem wants.
The poem will end but not before it tells you the wombat died. Humans made the decision to euthanize the wombat once they realized the leg couldn’t be saved. The poem may offer a kind of prayer here for safe passage from this world, but the poem knows it’s better if there were safe passage within it.
The poem will leave. It will disappear into the margins because the poem always has safe passage into silence.
In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.
The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.
It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.
The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.
Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.
May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.
Dana Henry Martin 