Month: November 2024

Flip It and Reverse It

I dreamed I had four hands: two regular hands, a smaller hand with three fingers, and an even smaller hand with two fingers. They were arrayed on one side of my body and looked like some kind of tapered wing. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I just woke up and had to tell someone.

Listen. There’s a sprout growing out of the drain in my bathroom sink, and if that’s not a reason to believe anything’s possible, I don’t know what is. Here’s to 2025!

My sweet husband decided to eat the same things I’ve been eating for the past two weeks to see if any of those foods make him ill. He’s trying to help pinpoint the source of my digestion woes. He started with a nutrition bar I’ve been eating in place of the Munk Bars I usually have. Within minutes, he developed severe digestive issues. This is a love story. It might not seem like it, but it is.

What sings of joy in the face of sorrow? Everything. Listen.

Fighting tumbleweeds in the dark through the construction zone to get to Jon’s colonoscopy. Fell ten times this morning after being ensnared on a phone-charging cable that wrapped around and through my legs like a weed-vine. Screamed so loud all of Toquerville heard me. It’s not the first time.

Three death dreams: my best friend, my husband (or was is his brother?), and my mother. Can’t speak. Can only cry as we pass through downtown, lights washing the LDS church and the parking lot spread like a dark, wet shawl around it. We see an ambulance on the highway. A moving van. A semi. Above, the clouded sky looks like scar tissue.

I accidentally typed hibernaculum as Hubernaculum, and now I can’t stop thinking of a burrow full of brumating Andrew Hubermans.

On my screen, a little horse. A little horse who runs all day.

Like a religion, Gen X has its problems.


If I can survive in Toquerville, Utah, I should be able to survive among poets. I am just saying.

A black cow whose white face makes her look like she’s wearing a sun-bleached skull stares at me as I walk too close to her pasture. We watch each other until we both get bored. I wonder if she tells the other cows my face makes me look like someone who could kill her.

Don’t google the news for “bird kills man” or you’ll get pages of search results about the opposite scenario: men killing birds—really shitty men killing really splendid birds. And then your whole day will be borked because you dreamed you were dead, and you had to find a way to get alive again, and you woke up to your dog vomiting, and the unexpected visual onslaught of men killing birds will be so upsetting it melts your ear wax and gives you hiccups that won’t ever stop never ever ever.

If you are ill, do not lie in bed looking up long-lost friends and lovers to see what they’re up to now. You will not like what you find.

The inarticulate mutter. The inarticulable speaks.

I wrote a long poem in my sleep but only remember one fragment: skinned knees where their hearts should be.

I dreamed I lived in a box for so long I was shaped like a box.

I dreamed scientists discovered that the slime of the American eel cured all diseases. People were turning their swimming pools into giant aquariums to cultivate the eels for profit. I needed some slime but couldn’t afford it, so I broke into my therapist’s backyard and stole one of her eels. When I looked into the eel’s eyes, I felt its sadness and fear. It had given up. It was whatever a resigned body is while still alive but no longer living. I drove the eel to a river and set it free, slime and all, and continued my life despite my fetid interior waters.

Once, a therapist told me I was too involved in the lives of animals. She’s no longer my therapist.

What’s alive is just an animated version of what we’ve already killed. What’s built is just a constructed version of what we’ve already destroyed.

I just learned a bunch of stuff about hummingbirds and I’m sad so sad so incredibly sad about how small and beautiful and amazing they are.

The only friends I have are the ones I’ve made in this life that was never supposed to be available to me.

Individuals don’t have mental health issues. Mental health issues are familial, societal, and political and are driven by oppression, inequalities, and our material conditions, as well as by communities, institutions, and governments. Genetics is just part of it and, in many cases, they’re not part of it at all. We have mental health issues as a culture, as a society, as a collective that’s shaped and governed a certain way. Mental health issues are a shared issue, not something someone “has.”

Men, I like you. I feel the need to say that.

Fuck all but six. I don’t know who my six are. Jeremy, Jon, Jose, my dog, who is surprisingly strong. That’s three (plus a dog assist). Good thing I plan to be cremated and have no funeral service or celebration of life or whatever the fashionable things is to call them these days.

My GPS took me to a mortuary today instead of my doctor’s office.

Meet me in Anodyne.

At the intersection of POTS and trauma, my body goes both ways.

Unable to eat food, I drink olive oil and pray my body heals.

I stick my tongue in potassium salt so my legs won’t twitch tonight.

Poetry can heal my trauma, but what about my broken body?

How many times can I fight men who know they’re killing me (and want to)?

I want to live in these lines, but I also want to live in the world.

Tomorrow I will leave the house. I will be able to leave the house.

Tonight my body will sleep. Tomorrow my body will walk around.

—

Diary of POTS and trauma written in American Sentences.

The sky is an artificial construct. What we see is what we get.

Finally, the Anna’s hummingbird has come to rescue me from despair.

You can say certain things to me in Oklahoman that you can’t say in English. For example, you can tell me to simmer down, but don’t tell me to calm down.

Every time you tell the truth, you find the truth.

That big fat moon is still big fat out.

A term I coined in one of last night’s dreams: Fuckallogy, the branch of study concerned with those who do not do a single fucking thing.

Banal conversation from one of last night’s dreams:

Him: What do you call it when something hairy starts to tie you up?

Me: Very Good or Very Bad.

Him: What?

Me: When something hairy starts to tie you up, it’s either going to be Very Good or Very Bad.

Him: What?

Me: Forget it.

Hello migraine, my old friend.
You’ve come to fuck with me again.

I’m writing for Kelly. She survived things you couldn’t fathom from her first days on this earth, things that aren’t unlike what I’ve survived. But she’s dead now, and I’m somehow not dead. I’m writing for Kelly. That’s that. Kelly is poetry. Kelly is the sky. Kelly is everything even though she doesn’t exist. And none of you can touch her or harm her or ruin her.

My poetry work ends up being a lot of self-care after an incident like the one that occurred with the poet who attacked me yesterday. That self-care includes trying to sleep when my heart rate stays above one hundred beats per minute for more than twenty hours straight. It includes forcing myself to eat even though my digestive tract has shut down, I’m nauseated, and half of me wants to never eat again. It includes having a body that can’t feel anything and isn’t part of anything — the world is painted around me in dull colors and isn’t something I can physically experience through any of my senses. It includes putting clothes on like I’m dressing a child who can’t dress herself. It includes lips that tingle. It includes staring out my window for hours without anything registering or stirring within me. It includes dead words, dead music, dead trust, and a future I perceive as dead. It includes knowing everyone in poetry knows a poet like the one who attacked me yesterday or who does worse, much worse, while they look the other way, minimizing or normalizing the behavior, or otherwise allowing it to continue. How is that last realization part of self-care? Because knowing it is better than not knowing it. Disillusionment is a bitch, but it’s better than living with an illusion. We need clarity about poetry. We also need clarity about poets.

Seattle poetry is a Superfund site bounded by clear-running waters that everyone can drink from. Kansas poetry is a brownfield surrounded by more brownfields that march from Lawrence, Kansas, to Belle, Missouri. Utah poetry is a corrective action site. Tucson poetry is a voluntary cleanup site. Oklahoma poetry is a nearly pristine grassland. You can feel poetry in the wind sweeping down the plain and in the waving wheat and right behind the rain.

I’m here for poetry, not toxic poets. I’m getting back to work.

November. Two bees have returned to my sage bush, its scant blooms dry as construction paper. Winter will strip its twigs, turning the shrub into a sketch of itself drawn hastily, without fanfare, and without bees hovering in the nectar-sweet air.

White-crowned sparrows peck holes in my neighbor’s pomegranates while he’s distracted with his leaf blower.

What blights through yonder window bleak. They are the beasts and bayonets are their tongues.

Do whatever you need to survive. — Merry Mignon Guthrie Thornton

—

This is what my mother told me in a letter she wrote on her deathbed. Do whatever you need to survive. There was a lot more to the letter than that, but that was the upshot. Damn, that woman. She was fierce, and I love her fiercely.

Those of us in the United States may be the last people living on the fringed edge of the world’s last great democracy. As the birds sing, as the trees tremble, as time passes. And more time passes and fewer birds sing and fewer trees tremble and there are less and less of us to remember. These years: Carry them in your hearts. Remember them as long as you can. I’m glad I was here, even if here is gone.

Liquid outdistances itself. The field is fathomed.

Here’s the thing. The mind isn’t situated inside the individual body, so when someone loses their mind, we should automatically know that’s a process that extends well beyond the individual.

Facebook is trying to sell me an urn. It’s cobalt blue and depicts doves flying upward. It’s part of the tapestry of eternity, unfolding in shades of solace. It contains the essence of hope, devotion, loyalty, and peace. It has a hand-applied pearl finish. It’s where love finds its canvas and where memories become brushstrokes.

No thank you, Facebook. I’m still using this body. I will not be burned. I will not be scooped. I will not be contained. I do not consent to this lidding, this darkness, this diaphanous idea about what it means to be dead.

I am a double helix of joy and anger.

Worker bees pass nectar mouth to mouth to turn it into honey. Tell me this world isn’t worth saving.

I dreamed about a ghost who was everywhere. She was emptiness, the purest form of nothing. There was a coldness to her, a hardness. She was a white-walled room full of steel and quarry tile. Her air did not move. She did not speak. She did not emit light. There was no outline of her because she was everything. I was not ready for that emptiness, that stillness. I asked her what she wanted, but only I could reply. Suddenly, I heard a brillowy voice say, “Everyone is death walking.” It was me speaking from outside me.

I’d take a cabinet of curiosities over whatevertheheck is going on right now with the actual cabinet appointments.

(I also want to say poetry is magic.)

I just realized something about birds that I should have understood years ago.

My mind, my mindfield, my minefield, my field. Don’t mine me.

I’m too simple. I think poetry is about love.

In my dream, my friend’s birds sang like birds. My birds sang like men and chased me.

My neighbor texted to say Jesus is in my garage with Mary and Joseph. It took me a very long time to realize she meant the package we’re storing for her until she gets home contains part of a nativity scene.

It’s Veteran’s Day. Our Utah neighbors are flying a flag of Donald Trump standing in front of the American flag holding his fist up while several Secret Service agents grip his body. It’s called the Trump Shooting Flag and is available on Amazon.

My neighbor’s texts are full of typos. Yesterday, she told me the Lord would be home Sunday. Today, she told me Life will go on Monday.

Death always loses to love.

Dorothy Allison is the only person who was able to tell the story of a family like mine without having met my family. She is the sibling I never had and very much needed. Through her, I could see myself, my life, and my experiences in literature. That made all the difference. She brought me in from silence and shame and invisibility. She made a place for me in the world.

Well, fuck. Dorothy Allison died.

The singing did not help. The dancing did not help. I’ve taken to the bed. My dog and I are wearing pastel sweaters. We have books. We have mantras. We have the wind. We’ll try again tomorrow.

I’m really missing Kris Kristofferson right now.

We are ephemeral. What moves through us is not.

I just learned that Tyrannosaurus Rexes danced on leks, which are essentially giant dance floors and that they waved their tiny arms as part of their mating ritual. Now, I’m totally imagining them getting their groove and mood on to something like Missy Elliott’s “Work It.”

“Is it worth it? Let me work it

I put my thang down, flip it and reverse it

Ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnaht ym tup i

Ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnaht ym tup i”

P.S. They also used their arms to stab enemies and push sleeping Triceratops over at night. Badass.

P.P.S. What song do you imagine Tyrannosaurus Rexes dancing to?

Poets want to be music. Oh, how we want to be music.

Fear is on fire. Fear is burning dirty like something carboniferous ripped from the earth. Fear is sparking inside organs, turning them into what’s left after a carbon-based thing burns. Fear is not bone ash. Fear is not powdered like a colonist’s wig. Fear is no longer fear. It’s singing in the wind, in the trees, high in the air above this land, our land. Do you hear its singed melody? Fear has turned into song. The first thing we did as humans was sing. Why wouldn’t it be the last, the ever, the always?

Why do we have memory? So atrocities don’t recur. What do we do when atrocities recur? Remember them.

Oh, flounced and feathered world, why is hate strangling you in the flaxen hay?

How to Survive in My Father’s World

1. Write poems.

We’re entering a world I’ve known since I was born. This is my father’s world. I know how to survive in it.

Hate can win an election, but it always loses to love.

Hate was on the ticket and won.

A yard that is not my yard. A grave that is not my grave. A poem that is not my poem.

Just as the world’s finally caught up with my awful view of it, my view has shifted—toward hope and toward love, both of which tumble along like empty buckets let loose in Southern Utah’s wildlands during high winds.

Daily, I die in love and fear—the former extinguishing the latter while drawing it near.
















































Dead, I Wanted to Live

I dreamed I died. I saw my body lying on its side on a gurney. I was wearing a blue hospital gown. I was sort of in the fetal position, but my arms and legs were positioned unnaturally. I’d been turned and folded into myself after my death like someone trying to fit more garbage into a can.

I watched myself from above trying to figure out what happened. My mouth was partially closed around a laryngoscope. A tube had been inserted partway down my throat. Then I felt it: the heart attack that killed me. I remembered the shock, the pain, the flooding warmth like contrast dye used in CT scans, my belt-tightened chest, the last wild hoofbeats of my heart, then nothing.

The staff didn’t try to revive me. This one’s not worth saving, I heard one of them say. They rolled me into a side room that wasn’t monitored and left me there, where I was now watching over my corpse.

I don’t know how long I’d been dead, but the part of me that was disembodied began to feel cold. Everything went starry and black. Time wasn’t gone, but it was everything together all at once, not sequential. There was no past, present, or future. And it wasn’t a human time scale time. It was the universal time scale.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be cold forever, and I was pissed that the doctors and nurses let me die. I fought my way back to the hospital room where I was lying. The next step was to get back in my body the way I’d always done in lucid dreams when my consciousness became untethered. I laid down inside my corpse, but I wasn’t connecting with it. When I moved, it was just my disembodied self that moved, effortlessly and mass-free. Finally, with great concentration, I was able to move my arm. Nobody noticed because the room was empty. My heart began beating, but there where no monitors to alert the staff.

I was pretty fucked. I knew I didn’t have much time before I died again. I used all my inner strength to throw myself off the gurney and drag myself to the nurse’s station using my fingers. Boy, we’re they surprised. They immediately picked me up and fussed over me. “We did everything we could,” they told me as they dusted me off. I knew they hadn’t.

I knew then that I cared more about staying alive than anyone else cared about keeping me alive. Even when I was dead, I wanted to live, so I did.

I also knew I couldn’t tell the staff I remembered what they did. If a knowing look even momentarily hardened my face, they’d see it, and I’d never get out of the hospital alive. I had to pretend they tried to save me when they actually discarded me. I had to let devils be angels.

There was one hitch. I’d been dead long enough that I could no longer speak or write without every word being replaced with a different one. No matter how careful I was when I communicated, the wrong things came out of my mouth or appeared on the screen. That’s when I realized I should have stayed in All-Time rather than returning to Earth. Living is nothing if it’s gibberish, if every important word is replaced with a meaningless one, like vole when you mean love or oval when you mean love or leave when you mean love.

Five Things Addendum

I want to add to my November 16 post about five things that have happened to me as a female-bodied poet. Poets #1 and #4 are misogynists. Poet #5 is deeply disturbed. But poets #2 and #3 live in a different space.

They’re both sensitive, talented male poets. They embody poetry in ways few do these days. There’s a kindness to them that’s rare, a generosity that can feel unparalleled. But they struggle in different ways, perhaps not unlike the ways in which we all struggle. Those struggles may be part of why poetry is so important to them and why they need it to be central to their lives.

I get it. But when those struggles have a gendered component, that dynamic can draw some poets closer while leading others to be excluded, marginalized, and othered. That othering tends to happen more to female-bodied poets than to non-female-bodied poets.

A female-bodied poet’s kindness can be taken for something it isn’t. A male poet’s expectations can get in the way of reality. A poet who feels snubbed or hurt or like he’s the one who never gets the girl can cut all ties to a talented female-bodied poet in order to avoid those feelings without thinking about the consequences of doing so, let alone the role they’re playing alongside countless other male poets, which is removing support from, blocking opportunities for, and silencing that poet’s voice and personhood over and over during her/their writing career.

That’s why I included poets #2 and #3 in my list alongside two misogynists and a poet who sexually assaulted me. They may be different from those men, but they still did harm. And this body keeps the score, which means other bodies are also keeping the score. It’s time to talk about the damage being done to our work and to our physical and mental health.

The House

The house has been doused with gasoline. (You’re welcome in it.) The floor of the house is littered with matches. (Take your shoes off.) The house has no fire alarms. (Have a seat.) The cops don’t respond to house fires in these parts. (Kick your feet up.) The house is on fire now. (Be a love and close the door to save the rest of us.) The house burned down. (We wrote you a loving obituary.)

The loving obituary: We adored them. For some reason, they always looked uncomfortable around us. We did everything we could to make them feel right at home. They died before their time. Sometimes, [insert adjective here] people aren’t meant for this world. We will always remember them fondly.

—

I wrote this July 12, 2023. It’s about how we treat people we want to exclude while they’re alive versus how we talk about them once they’ve died. I was thinking specifically about how queer folks and those living with trauma and/or mental health issues are treated—and the ways in which the very people who exclude those folks from their homes, lives, families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, communities, and societies take no responsibility for their eventual, often untimely, deaths. There wasn’t anything we could have done is a common refrain. Really? Nothing. Not one thing?

I was also thinking about how it felt for me to live as a queer non-Mormon person with trauma and mental health issues here in Southern Utah, where I was routinely excluded and reviled even in literary communities. The poets who run two separate chapters of the Utah State Poetry Society told me they’d close their chapters down if I ever attended them because my work was inappropriate. I was a member of the USPS at the time and had every right to attend any chapter meeting in the state. Their issue was with my gender and sexuality, not my writing, which they hadn’t read.

I’ve thought about this post a few times since the election, so I decided to share it again. We need to bring the way we talk about the dead and the way we treat the living into alignment.

American Sentences

At the intersection of POTS and trauma, my body goes both ways.

Unable to eat food, I drink olive oil and pray my body heals.

I stick my tongue in potassium salt so my legs won’t twitch tonight.

Poetry can heal my trauma, but what about my broken body?

How many times can I fight men who know they’re killing me (and want to)?

I want to live in these lines, but I also want to live in the world.

Tonight my body will sleep. Tomorrow my body will walk around.

—

Diary of POTS and trauma written in American Sentences.

Five Things That Have Happened to Me as a Female-Bodied Poet

  1. 2009. A prominent poet in Seattle agreed to work with me on my poetry. Before the appointment, he googled (from his IP address) the words “married” and “naked” in combination with my name. He then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. But he didn’t stop there. He created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems. He later told folks associated with a book publisher in the area to ignore and disregard me.

  2. 2015. In front of a large group of poets, a prominent Kansas City poet screamed that I wanted to take him behind a dumpster and fuck him. This occurred after months of what I thought was meaningful friendship and seemed to be spurred, at least in part, by the fact that I was close friends with a more prominent Kansas City poet. The outburst occurred in front of that poet. Eight years later, he would tell me that I’m the one who harmed him because I’m a reminder of who he was at that time, and he doesn’t want to think about being that person.

  3. 2023. A talented poet who’s part of a tight network of poets outside Kansas City interacted with me for months as he was healing from a serious health issue. I was going to be in the area, and he asked if we could meet. I planned to give him the rare Japanese printing press I’d recently purchased so he and his friends could use it to make chapbooks. Before I left for the trip, he sent me a postcard with a poem of his on the back about how he never gets the girl, then he blocked me on Facebook. I still don’t understand what the hell happened there, but I know it’s bullshit.

  4. 2024. A Seattle poet I’ve known since 2009 decided to attack and threaten me yesterday after fifteen years of friendship and poetry camaraderie. We both lived in Seattle for years and spent time together in person on numerous occasions. Yesterday, he told me (and many others) that I’m cheating on my husband with him. That is not the case. I’ve posted screenshots of his accusations and the conversation he’s referring to because he threatened to out me publicly. For what, praytell? There’s nothing to out other than his unacceptable behavior.

  5. 2009. A poet who was my mentor sexually assaulted me en route to my MFA program in 2009. I’ve discussed that situation at length, including in a fifty-thousand-word essay on my website that was published for more than five years. I managed to stay in poetry until 2015—through my fear and my shame and my lost faith in poets and poetry—then I left for seven years.

I returned to poetry in 2022 with one vow: to never let anyone silence me again, threaten me again, terrify me again, or defame me again. This is a hard commitment to make, but I’m doing it. My responses will be swift when abuses occur, like the one that happened yesterday.

May nothing like any of the above happen again. May poets live up to what they are attempting to do in and through poetry. May poets who are women, female-bodied, queer, and otherwise marginalized find safety in poetry and among poets. May poets stand up for each other when it matters rather than adding ha-ha emoticons to posts in which poets are harassing and threatening other poets. May we find ourselves. May all these things come to pass.

How to Survive in My Father’s World

  1. Write poems.

  2. Hydrate. Eat. Sleep. Exercise. Meditate.

  3. Love yourself. Love your body. Trust yourself. Trust your body.

  4. Put yourself in the world and know that you belong there. The world is bigger than people with power.

  5. Find the exits. Know the exit routes. Plan your exit. Then enter.

  6. See clearly, even what you don’t want to see. Bear witness. Take notes. Synthesize. Learn. Speak. Sing. Recite. Remember.

  7. Write more poems. Stronger this time, more sure-handed, until metal strikes against metal.

  8. Pay attention but do not seek attention. Turn your attention into a Mobuis strip that moves inward, then outward, then inward again with no beginning and no end.

  9. Read people’s bodies more than their words, unless they’re poets, then read their bodies and words together.

  10. Call bullshit bullshit unless it’s meant to be bullshit, then let it be what it is without calling it out. We need a little bullshit, now more than ever.

  11. Read poems. Learn to move in and out of their white space. Listen and respond, listen and respond. Breathe through the lines. Inhale poems, exhale poems.

  12. Believe in poems and their power. Don’t give up on poems.

  13. Write more poems. Softer this time. Less heavy-handed, until the weft of each poem is as strong as churro wool.

  14. Fawn if needed for survival but only for survival. Try not to freeze or flee. Remove the “r” from fright and fight if that’s the only available option.

  15. Be ready to run. If needed, run. But circle back. Never leave. Draw an arc around the threat from a safe distance. Make that arc smaller every day. Remember: You belong.

  16. Know when you’re with someone who’s hostile. Know that anyone can be hostile.

  17. Be hostile if needed. Be loving as much as possible.

  18. If you don’t write poems, instead do whatever you love, whatever keeps you alive.

  19. Write poems.

The Triad of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate

My mother and I closely fit the archetypes of Demeter and Persephone, which is why I write about both in my poetry. I’m more like Hecate now that I’m older, or at least I’m getting there. My mother began the process of becoming Hecate as well. But first, she had to protect me the way Demeter eventually did by saving me from what she was partially responsible for.

That happened in 1985 when she risked everything to keep one of my father’s friends away from me. I remember that day. She saw his golden-bronze El Camero pull into the drive and told me to run and hide in my bedroom closet, quick. So drunk she could barely stand, she screamed at him to leave, every word she uttered a plosive, a bomb in his face. “SHE’S. NOT. HERE. R—.”

Anything could have happened. He was larger than her, stronger than her, and hellbent on getting access to me. She had no help from anyone in the family or the community. It came down to the two of them. She blocked his path to me by standing between the kitchen peninsula and the dining room table, interposing herself bodily, or at least that’s how I imagined it. I could only hear them from where I was hiding.

Her ferocity was derived from her own trauma, which prepared her for this moment. Trauma is often generational and repeating. It may not be optimal to live with trauma on a daily basis, but when you’re mother sees a moment for what it is and responds accordingly, her embodied trauma can provide the means for freeing you and your body from further trauma.

After that day, the path was cleared for my mother to become Hecate. She didn’t quite get there for complicated reasons, but I saw enough of Hecate in her to know the route. She stacked the cairns for me. Now, the journey is mine to make.

My mother and I are the original triple goddess, as are many traumatized women in traumatized families and traumatized communities in this traumatized world.