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.