A man died last night in Toquerville where the bypass road construction is underway. He had just robbed Lin’s Fresh Market up the road a few miles and threatened to kill one of the store’s employees. He fled the scene and drove our direction. He crashed in the bypass area, was ejected from his vehicle, and was found dead by the police.

All the poems like woolen lovers.

I want to be the Marybeth Taylor of poetry. I went to middle school and high school with Marybeth. She was kind to everyone. Everyone. Not nice but genuinely kind. If I can manage to be her, someone needs to be her. All the kids in school needed her back then. Poets need someone like her now.

Oh, no. Woody Guthrie supported the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland that occurred that same year.

Those who’ve been shaped from birth by trauma sense what’s coming in the world, in the country, in the state, in the county, in the city, in the town, in the neighborhood, in the home, and in those around us. We can feel it rumbling inside us long before others do.

My job is to navigate these exterior and interior entanglements, to learn how to interpret and translate them without being subsumed by them, and to stay balanced in the most unbalanced of times. My balance doesn’t need to be perfect, but I have to recognize my center of gravity and anchor myself to it.

We have to survive what’s happening. We have to. The we is I that is also the we. The we of me. The I of you.

Poems are wild creatures. We need to treat them as such. They haven’t been bred over generations to prefer the warmth of our laps or trained to mimic everything we want them to say. Let poems roam. Feel their hooves shaking the ground. Watch them sleep in branches and devour each other in rivers and lakes. Don’t brand them, whatever you do. They aren’t yours. They never were.

I recoil when the language of power and control enters a conversation, then I grieve for what that language has extinguished.

We are in deep shit. All of us.

In my experience, nothing good happens behind closed doors. Everything unaccountable happens there.

I do not suffer gladly.

The more time I spend with poetry, the more faith I have in poetry. The more time I spend with poets, the less faith I have in poets.

I often wonder if we live in a post-community society. Now, I’m concerned that we live in a post-poetry community society.

Do not let fear nettle your heart.

My dog is trying to get inside my shirt.

Die by starvation or aspiration. Those are the choices modern medicine has given my brother-in-law. That’s his hospice plan.

And the foolish shall mow the earth.

I gather the fat bumblebees my neighbor has killed with his pesticides. They fall off his bushes and land in our yard this time of year. When I have enough, I’ll show him what he’s done without meaning to, but he won’t listen, especially not to a city girl who doesn’t belong in these parts. I’ll keep the bees so they’re not forgotten, add them to my cabinet of curiosities that already contains a rat’s skull my husband found on the back tier, a tiny moth who still stands with her wings erect as if death caught her off guard, a chunk of sandstone with an iron band running through it like a broken timepiece set to two hundred million years ago, wings from the hummingbird hawk-moth the bats devour on summer nights from the dark comfort of our unlit porch, and half of a kangaroo rat’s skeleton that I cleaned myself and placed in a jar, some of the bones smaller than plastic seed beads. The little size of dying Anne Carson talks about doesn’t get much littler than this. Even the bumblebees, gigantic by bee standards, die so small most folks aren’t even aware they’re dead.

A fallen soldier was on one of Jon’s flights. His family was there when he was taken off the plane. His grandmother sat in a wheelchair clutching a photo of him. This would be emotional under any circumstances. For Jon, today, when he’s on his way home to his dying brother and his veteran father who both survived and did not survive Vietnam, it hit deep, about as deep as anything has in his lifetime.

The last word Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book is the German word “moglichkeit,” which in English means possibility.

The wounded are the ones who can walk among the wounded.

Think about earthspan, not lifespans.

The healing that’s in our cells, our genes, our families, finds its way into the world.

He takes all the girls to see taxidermied two-headed animals.

Now that it’s snowed, the winds have come, the white-crowned sparrows are here singing raspily in the shrubs, and the dark-eyed juncos have arrived to bauble in the trees, my transition to winter is complete. I don’t even have to rookie my way through this season. I’ve got the pros here by my side to guide me.

The dark-eyed juncos are here for the winter! I just saw half a dozen of them in my honey locust. I know their range map says they’re found year-round across Utah, but they really don’t hang out down in Southern Utah, or at least this part of Southern Utah, until it gets too cold for them in the northern part of the state. When they come down this way, they show up in large numbers.

Stunned, I walk toward a blue father I mistake for the moon.

Trees look better up close than faces.

The trauma in the world finds its way into our families, our genes, our cells.

When the rock is exposed, time is exposed.

I know I’m not having an actual conversation with my honey locust tree, but I feel like it’s saying that it’s happy to endure the wind because wind brings rain and rain means life.

I looked at a wind map this morning hoping Toquerville and Tucson’s winds were connected. They aren’t.

I just accidentally ate a stick.

Even in Toquerville—
doing whateverthefuck—
              I long for Toquerville.

— Dana Henry Martin after Issa

My neighbor gave me two pomegranates from her tree last night. They’re conjoined, stacked one on top of the other. They’re the pink variety, so they look a little unripe to my eye, but what do I know. I don’t grow them or know anything about them, really, other than Persephone ate three seeds from one, according to one version of the myth, and that’s why we have winter.

I was once two.

I think my dog’s sleep schedule is entrained on the phases of the moon and not on dusk and dawn. She was up earlier this morning than she should have been. That means I was up earlier this morning than I should have been. It was a big-moon night, no doubt about it. And it lingered. Moonset wasn’t until 7:57 a.m. here in Toquerville, Utah. (That’s 6:57 a.m. Tucson time.) I’m going to have to make sure she sleeps under the covers or her blanket until the moon settles down.

May the last thing I write be nothing.

A dozen house finches just silently dropped into my sage bush like that paratrooper scene in Red Dawn as if they had no bodies at all and were therefore immune to the effects of gravity. Now they’re in the locust moss acting like house finches again.

You could live all your life in a cold desert and think it’s paradise. But you don’t know the warm desert. You may never know the warm desert. I know the warm desert. I almost know it. I’m learning it like a new language or a new instrument or a new key. I will weave the warm desert as I’ve woven the cold desert. I will write the warm desert, but first I must write the cold desert. I’m writing the cold desert now. I’m trying. It wants me to write it. I have to believe this or I won’t write it.

It’s hard to change times if you’re in the wrong time. But I believe it can be accomplished through poetry—without running headlong into the future or clawing your way back to the past. At its core, poetry is time travel. Let’s go.

What’s dying is already dead before it is dead.

What living is already living before it has lived.

What’s brewing has already brewed before it has brewed.

I was, too, once.

The white-crowned sparrows have returned for the winter.

We’re back in Utah until late November. It’s so beautiful here. Our home is situated in an ecotone where not two but three ecological communities meet. There are no words for these lands, this place. I would stay here for the rest of my life if I had adequate healthcare, acceptance, understanding, support, community, a sense of belonging, and a welcoming and vibrant poetry and arts community.

Birds are so sweet. I don’t belong on the same planet as them.

Early morning, dreams wash past into the present. Halls of unlocked doors.

I was lonely last night, so I asked AI to tell me some facts about Cooper’s hawks.

Morning Prayer October 3, 2024

Good morning. I hope to be as enthusiastic about this day as the Gila woodpecker in my yard who just found a tasty berry to eat and was moved to announce his glorious find in all caps: CA CA CE CE KI-KI-KI-KI!

May you all CA CA CE CE KI-KI-KI-KI at least once today, preferably when you’re alone and in public.

There should be a literary journal called Crouton.

Good morning, riven world, riven minds, riven hearts, riven creatures, riven lands, riven waters, riven air, riven fires.