I’m here to share. I’m here to learn. I’m here for joy, surprise, and to feel awe shoot through me like sudden light. Every one of you is a purveyor of awe. Here, now. Then, again. Always.

When light enters a certain way, it feels holy. Our eyes are wired for light. Our hearts. Our minds. We are vitreous chambers with the wisdom to let light through unimpeded, unquestioned. So flower can be flower. So sky can be sky. So love can have a body with pores and wrinkles and folds. A body that, in the right light, becomes light. Nothing but light.

I’m waiting for you in spring. Make your way to me through winter.

As you sit on winter’s hard ground, remember that you may be someone’s spring.

And just like that, a poem brings me back to the world.

Poems are not office memos.

January 18: Fell asleep to a dog barking. Woke to wind howling. Inside it, the dog continues to bark, but all the desert slopes repeat now is wind and more wind.

I want to wallpaper my writing room with scenes from Days of Heaven and then write like that movie. That’s what my manuscript Crude is supposed to be. It’s supposed to sound like the narrator from Days of Heaven and look like everything in Days of Heaven.

Leonard Peltier. Fuck yes.

Curve-billed thrashers woke me up this morning. The sun stared me down through our patio door. Saguaros threw up their arms, exuberant as always. Coffee tastes better here. Reading poems is better here. My keyboard sounds better on my Mesquite writing desk than it does on my IKEA desk in Utah. Music is more immersive here. Love gets bigger and bigger here. You can’t even find its edges or measure its volume or figure out its overall shape because it has no shape. Love is in everyone and everything, more evidently here than in other places I’ve lived. (Kansas City may be the exception.) I love Tucson because Tucson is love as incarnate as I’ve ever experienced it. Imagine the fruit of the prickly pear cactus as my watery heart laid bare between spines. That’s me on Tucson, baby. Good morning from the Sonoran desert.

Last night, I dreamed I was produce. I was in a cardboard box with a head of leafy green lettuce and an unwaxed cucumber. We all came from the organic farm and were part of a CSA delivery. I don’t know what, exactly, I was. Maybe a red bell pepper. I was trying to work that out in the dream when I turned into the cardboard box the produce was in. Before I could fully experience being a box, I was cut apart, folded flat, and loaded onto a barge for “recycling.” Me and all the other recyclable materials—nut-milk jugs, tin cans, egg cartons, and all kinds of plastics—jiggled and jingled our way to a nameless atoll that was packed with other recyclables. We were all just trash, really, part of some scheme to offload us with minimal effort where nobody would find us. I spent my final days there being broken down by salt and water until I didn’t know what I was anymore, or who, if ever I was a who at all. Parts of me stayed on the island. Parts of me floated farther and farther into the ocean, above the dead coral, where I met bits of other recyclables that were indistinguishable from me, if I could even call myself a me.

I know less about existence than twin fawns who died inside their mother days before she would have given birth to them.

I was listening to the Twin Peaks soundtrack when I learned David Lynch died. I met and interviewed him for a feature story for UWTV and ResearchChannel. He was at the University of Washington for a talk about Transcendental Meditation. He also talked about living in a sea of creativity and dissolving the suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity in order to have freedom. “The pain and suffering should be in the art, not the artist,” he said in the talk. That stuck with me. We sometimes get that backward. To the stars, David.

House sparrows aren’t sparrows. They’re weaver finches. (And that is how poets tell you the news.)

After all everybody is as their coffee maker is. Everybody is as the maker is quiet or loud. Everybody is as there is maker or no maker. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of brew, their kind of viscosity, their bitterness and their aftertaste, and their pouring and their sipping and their drinking. — Gertrude Carafe

Yesterday, I saw an ad for a ceramic Baby Jesus being sold on Etsy, but the swaddled body looks like a vulva, and Baby Jesus’s head looks like an oversized clitoris. I can show you the photos if you don’t believe me. Good morning.

There’s a poem in my throat. I don’t want it there. I don’t even want it there.

Love is coming at me from every direction. That’s how I know we’re all dying.

My husband is up. He sounds like rain.

There was a time in my life when the answer to everything was poetry. It’s still that time.

I hydrated, styled my hair, put on lotion, lifted weights, sat by my light box, color-coordinated my outfit with my jewelry, reading glasses, and handkerchief, and put on some sick tunes. Now I’m going back into my poetry database, where I will stay all day hyperfocusing on the task at hand: consistently formatting every poem, adding appropriate metadata, and moving every post from classic mode in WordPress to the blocks format.

See you on the other side. If I don’t make it out, bury me in poems. Good ones.

I organized my poetry database all day long. I got pretty obsessive about it, and now I can’t shake the buzzing feeling inside me that is screaming, “Organize more things, STAT!” My hands are vibrating. My feet are vibrating. I’m covered in fake butter because I ate popcorn while I worked. My pen is buttery. My keyboard is buttery. I haven’t brushed my teeth for hours. I didn’t bathe. I didn’t style my hair. I didn’t exercise. I just sat here typing and formatting and labeling and blah blah blah blahblahblah. There are more than one thousand poems in the database, and that’s not counting collaborative work I’ve written with various poets over the years. It’s so many poems. It’s too many poems. I think I might be pretty obsessive about writing poems, not just organizing them.

I’m embarrassed about how much fun I used to have in poems.

It’s hard, but not impossible, to see a man as a hook.

New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” makes me feel a certain way about my childhood, like I’m back in it. Not only that, but that I love it, that past, exactly as it was because every transcendent feeling I had was only possible because of the dirt I lived in, because of my Oklahoma crude family, because of the everything of everything. My body hummed. It sang. It insisted. My terror had nothing on my joy. How I trilled at being alive, my roots growing down, my crown hitting the sky.

On a thousand islands in the sea / I see a thousand people just like me / A hundred unions in the snow / I watch and walking, falling in a row / We live always underground / It’s gonna be so quiet in here tonight — New Order

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. — Carl Jung

New Year’s Goal: Write poems that make readers blister.

I just learned that white-tailed deer chase Canada geese. My friend Kelly would have loved knowing that.

I just got a nice rejection from a literary journal. The editor wrote, I’m grateful to have read your work, especially “Persephone.” The last stanza is perfect. God. Damn.

I feel like Mike Birbiglia is in my digestive tract right now throwing himself around on an improvised stage he’s set up on my pyloric antrum.

Last night, I dreamed octopuses who could no longer live in our polluted oceans. They devised a scheme that involved attending open houses, sneaking off to the bathroom, running a bath, throwing in some salt and rocks and stuff, and taking up residence for as long as possible. If they did this toward the end of the open house, chances were the home would sit vacant for at least a few days if not longer, especially in a bad housing market. They’d have it made. And it wasn’t that hard to drain the tub and hide during an unexpected showing. I happened upon a pair of octopuses at an open house. They were mating. The male’s hectocotylus was rammed way up in the female’s siphon. Startled, I shouted, “Get an aquarium!” But I knew what they needed was an ocean, a clean ocean.

It’s interesting how love expands when we’re scared but contracts when we’re angry, which is also just being scared.

Coming off the sudden stress of the past few days, I’m in a space that’s part relief, part surge of emotion. This means I may tell every single one of you that I love you—and mean it.

Some poems are like passivation layers on exposed aluminum. They protect the poet from vulnerabilities beneath the surface, maybe reader, too.

I’ve been watching a looped video of a hydra every day for months and thinking about hydras’ many arms reaching, feeling, without thought, without the conjoined burdens of meaning and purpose—planted, going nowhere, wanting for nowhere. Hydras are completely embodied. They don’t have brains. We have brains attached to hydra bodies that make us yearn, strive, interpret what our bodies are doing, usually incorrectly.

Some poems feel like de-icer.

Jon and I were driving into town this morning and going over our lists of things to do if the other one dies. Things like cremate body, inform relatives, get death certificate, alert life insurance, and so forth. For the scenario where I die before him, Jon suddenly blurted out—wait for it—call Oliva Munn. I’ll allow it. I might even make him an Olivia Munn playlist in case he needs it. Just music I think she’d like.

Some poems feel like licking an old sofa.

The light is moving. Slowly, slowly, the light.

Writing is breath. As breath, writing is life.

Did you know tin cries when it’s bent? That’s because its crystals are twinned, meaning two crystals grow into each other and share points along its lattice structure. When bent, the crystals rub against one another, creating a pressure wave we hear as a cry or a squeak. The phenomenon is known as deformating twinning but is commonly called the tin cry.

There’s a poem in there somewhere, but I can’t find it, at least not today. Maybe you can. I know the poem’s title: “The Tin Cry.”

Slowly, the sky turns violet, its true color. Suddenly, the laccolith turns coral, as if to say: “You had your night, sky. The day is mine. Give it here.” A common raven flies between the two, a glossy witness, all ink and no page. Both the sky and the mountain turn gray.

I feel kind of bad about my perfect-poet post yesterday, my future-husband post, like I’m betraying E.R. Fightmaster.

I hear the stars hidden in the blanket-swaddled sky. I hear them beating.

In my dream last night, I’d just finished a poetry manuscript. It was an exquisite thing heavy with history, like a body that’s lived several lives. I bound it with ribbon, placed it in the passenger seat of a new Cadillac, and pushed the car off one of the cliffs here in canyon country. Someone tried to stop me. What are you doing, they asked, laying a hand on my left arm. You wouldn’t understand even if I explained it to you, I answered before giving the car one final shove.

Just enough light these days to give thanks to darkness.

I picked out my next husband. I showed photos of him to my current husband. He’s a poet who looks like a cross between my husband, Prince Harry, and someone who’d nail a guy’s hand to a table if the situation warranted doing so. In other words, he’s perfect. My next husband might be a wife, though, or I might just marry myself. I have a friend from high school who did that. She had a ceremony and everything. She’s very happy together.

Note: I would only go with another husband or wife if Jon’s been dead for at least ten years. Maybe twenty.

It’s super quiet now in the ER. I’m weirded out.

I can’t believe I got all gussied up for this CT scan.

A wallpaper-installation company whose slogan is We’ll help you get it up.

Last bird seen in 2024: rock wren.

First bird seen in 2025: Anna’s hummingbird.