They don’t know it, but the birds are competing to be the last bird I see in 2024.

Poems aren’t looking for advice or solutions. They don’t want to be told to see a therapist. They don’t give a rat’s ass about shaping up or shutting up or being shut down. Don’t treat poems like people, not even like the poets who wrote them, about whom you know little to nothing. The poems aren’t telling you all about the poet, not exactly (if at all). Poems are telling you about the poem. That’s what poems care about. Being poems.

My body’s resisting action, resisting thought. It’s off in the worlds Justine Chan creates, and that’s where it wants to stay. There are things she does in her poetry that make me think about how my poems operate, how they mean, how they exist. But I don’t want to move into the writing now, not yet. I want to listen to music and remain painlessly, effortlessly pried open.

Today has a stagnant-water vibe that I don’t particularly mind.

Oh, Jimmy Carter.

How do you not see that everything is everything?

At least my vomiting and diarrhea are being polite and taking turns.

I die and live, marking my days divined and madmade. This stoma of life strickens me. I am mummified.

(Trying my hand at some of the techniques Catullus uses in “Odi et Amo.”)

Love woke me today thinking about love. The cow love bought who gets to spend the rest of her life in the pasture. The tunnel love carved under a house that serves as a way out. The milk in the breast and bread in the mouth. An arm held close but not too tight. Branches tinseled with sudden ice. The stunned finch taken back by unbroken sky. Two old horses eating fresh hay. The dead in their humble pioneer graves. The broken fever. The cast spell. Dead words alive on the page. The prayer in the breath. The breath in the asking. The love of pleading, of desperation. Love of body, of cell. Love inside passing time, within lapsed memory. Those fettered by love who love even when they don’t want to love. Those shackled by fear who hear love mooing low in the distance.

It really hurts to write about dead people and dead birds and dead lands.

It’s gonna be a long night.

My job right now is to hold my dog while she dreams.

I dreamed I was dead but didn’t know it because my husband used petrification to preserve me perfectly. I looked like I was still alive. I couldn’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel, but I thought I could. I experienced the world as if I was still part of it, not realizing my husband was carrying me everywhere: from the bed to the sofa, from the sofa to my desk, from the desk to the car for long drives in the wildlands.

The angel’s in the details, too.

This poem says you belong.

I dreamed words were written on my back, but I couldn’t read them because I didn’t have a mirror.

Awake again. I feel like a helium-filled balloon that drifted from the party, got snagged in a tree, deflated, was eaten by a bird, and is now killing the bird slowly by blocking its intestines. Or maybe I feel like the bird. Or the tree. I definitely do not feel like the air or the rising helium or the child wailing about the lost balloon or the parent trying to distract the child with hand puppets. Maybe I feel like the hand puppets who know it’s all fun and games until they get wadded up in a drawer for another year and eventually stop coming out at all because the kid’s into 3D modeling and AI and sustainable farming, her days of being entertained by balloons and hand puppets long behind her.

I woke up early. I feel like warm Dr Pepper.

May we all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

I just got ageismed by a cashier at Lin’s Fresh Market in Hurricane, Utah. And they didn’t even have the one thing I wanted that nobody else carries, which is the only reason I didn’t go to Davis Food and Drug in La Verkin where everyone is super nice and never ageisms me.

I will get your attention, and when I have your attention, I will speak.

The world is bad enough that my poems make sense in it now.

Dr Pepper was once served as a warm drink with lemon. It was called Hot Dr Pepper. Hot Dr Pepper sounds like something that would pair nicely with winter hiking.Dr Pepper was once served as a warm drink with lemon. It was called Hot Dr Pepper. Hot Dr Pepper sounds like something that would pair nicely with winter hiking.

Other dreams last night, each an extension of the psyche dream: 1. A metallic spiderlike creature with telescopic presentation pointers for legs was singularly focused on continually mending the surface of the personal unconscious. 2. In the collective unconscious, I saw the face of a person who had eyes that were also a nose and a mouth, a nose that was also eyes and a mouth, and a mouth that was also eyes and a nose. These elements were randomly smooshed together rather than consistently arranged. I don’t think I was supposed to see that person. I don’t even think that person was a person.

Muse it or lose it.

I have a muse. It’s me.

Winter hiking sounds as awful as floor sleeping or day working.

The cow with a face like a skull is up on one of the steep rock formations near our house. Someone let her and the other cows I visited last week out to graze. I saw what I thought was an oddish set of brown and black rocks against the pale-green scrub. When I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look, the cow with a face like a skull was staring in my direction. What a surprise.

I dreamed I had talons for feet. Incredible talons.

Every day, I break for this world and want to be broken.

I’m thankful for anyone who will sing me away from this world when the time comes for me to leave.

My earlier years should have been happy but weren’t. My later years shouldn’t be happy but are.

I’ve decided that I can write my way into belonging here in Southern Utah. If I write this place, I will be part of it. I insist that this is possible.