I showered and put on my pantaloons and corset as a form of self-care. Also, Donald Trump is a fucking monster.

Uniformity and exclusion are as shit in poetry as they are in our institutions and communities.

Dana Henry Martin is out of order. There is no handyperson coming to repair Dana Henry Martin. Please enjoy what’s left of Dana Henry Martin before she becomes rancid. Be careful: Parts of Dana Henry Martin have already spoiled.

Sometimes, we just need to be with each other.

Thank you to those who make me feel like I belong—in poetry, in my communities, and on this planet.

Poetry can be a matter of life and death, even for the poet whose work you don’t admire. Some things are more important than anyone’s precious standards, namely human life.

I spelled tyranny incorrectly yesterday, but that won’t happen again. I was dealing with all caps, which is always disorienting. Plus, I haven’t had to use the word much until now.

A power outage just ended here. Everywhere I’ve lived, folks can’t go outside when the power’s on and can’t stay inside when the power’s off.

I’m going to put googly eyes on this two-liter of Cherry Coke and call it my best friend

The present we remember as the past is the future.

This body remembers democracy.

Me: Do not start the day crying. Do not start the day crying. Do not start the day crying.

Oh, menfolk, jump into my life and save little old me, said me never.

When I wear a corset, I’m not bound like a woman, which I am not. I’m bound like a book, which I am becoming.

I just adore a beautiful font.

Creating is resisting. Create. Resist. Repeat.

Jocelynn Rojo Carranza

Unpopular opinion: Some songs hold up better than some poems.

Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.

If you think the now-famous male mandarin duck and male mallard hybrid pair here in Arizona are just friends, you’re living in a hetero fantasy world.

I call them Adam and Steve.

Blessed are the newscasters for they shall usher in fascism.

There’s a tiny “museum” of art on the moon that contains six drawings. The first is a penis by Andy Warhol. The second is a line drawn by Robert Rauschenberg. The third is a black square with thin white intersecting lines by David Novros. The fourth is a template pattern by John Chamberlain. The fifth is a geometric variation on Mickey Mouse by Claes Oldenburg. The sixth is a computer-generated drawing by Forrest Myers.

highly irregular = totally illegal

The sanist diaries: Some of my closest friends are sanists.

The sanist diaries: Nothing brings folks together like sanism.

Dear supporters of all this bullshit: Have fun in a world without us. Have your fucking fun after you chain us up, drive us out, imprison us, intern us, force-labor us, dehumanize us, and make living not at all viable for us. Have all the fucking fun in the world. It’s yours now. Even the birds will hate you.

Note to self for a future essay: amygdala regulation by time-stamping events in our lives through and with writing and art.

Tell me you’re a female-bodied Gen Xer with trauma without telling me you’re a female-bodied Gen Xer with trauma: A young man once told me I was too pretty to have an asshole, and I was like “I have a great asshole, Asshole,” then I had a bunch of boring sex with him because I didn’t know how to do better and also because I wanted to have sex with his girlfriend but she didn’t like me so he was as close as I could get.

I’m pretty sure our leader sees a dead American as a profit and a living American as a loss.

We remember. We are rendered.

The oilbird’s diet is so high in oily fruits that the chicks were once collected and rendered for lamp oil.

I dreamed we had to wear vinyl records as hats.

I dreamed I used my thighs to choke a ten-foot-tall man who represented the patriarchy.

I just misread a jumble of headlines as “Trump Gives Musk Tuna.” I wondered what tuna was code for and if they’d both need penicillin shots.

Thanks to inflation, it will now be more expensive to eat the rich.

Why do I write about Oklahoma? Because Oklahoma is eternal within me. No Masonic or Hermle clock governs its presence in my body. The trauma—that first trauma and the countless ones that followed—has no timestamp. The Red River is as it was then. The bullfrogs are as they were, plentiful and at times inconvenient, especially when they flooded the road flanking the river. The moon lowering and lowering until it meets the sandy riverbed and shimmers like an arched doorway to heaven or hell or maybe just to someplace better, someplace where pain might exist but suffering isn’t manufactured faster than mobile homes and oil pumpjacks.

In my dream last night, I invented yambushing, which is pretty much what it sounds like: ambushing people with yams. I was eight years old in the dream and had to fend off my bullies. They did not see the yambush coming.

I dreamed I made millions writing Mormon erotica.

𒆪𒋆

That translates as Kushim and is the first known record of a person in writing.

The largest known human coprolite is 1,200 years old. It’s 20 centimeters long and 5 centimeters wide and was discovered in 1972 in an ancient Viking settlement in York, England.

It’s weird how old some things are, like murder.

Tonight, a fellow writer asked why I write about Oklahoma and my family’s history there, as if writing about the past and the place that made me who I am is of no value. It’s 2025, and you live in Utah, he said. I write about the present, too. But poets have pasts, and those pasts matter. They inform the present and the future. We live in many worlds and many timelines. Not everything is now, though then becomes now when we breathe life back into it.

I just learned that some canaries were kept in cages with oxygen tanks so they could survive after warning miners about dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.

And this ink is a suture. And this paper is a body. And this poem is a prayer for healing written one stitch at a time.

Will Journavx make me feel like I’m still living in a democracy?

In this light, ink on paper looks like sutures in skin.

I have no words to meet this moment.

Do whatever you need to survive. — My Mother