Month: March 2025

Without Horse

At daybreak, all the birds have black feathers.

I wake from a nightmare into a nightmare. The first is personal. The second is global.

I want to put giant googly eyes on my refrigerator.

Jon and I were talking about what skill we’d use in the apocalypse. I said I could weave garments for people. Jon said he could impregnate people.

What do we see in each other? Ourselves.

You can’t blindly promise people hope. You need to give them reasons to have hope.

Hey, Walz: How’d that “He’s just weird” message work out for you and Harris? It’s ludicrous that you used an ableist childhood insult to frame Trump as nothing more than a schoolyard misfit, as if he didn’t have a massive political apparatus supporting him, one that has more funding than we’ve ever seen, an extremely detailed horrific playbook that will usher in untold suffering and eventually the apocalypse, and that’s steeped in and caters to the worst impulses humans possess. He was never weird. He was a monster, and that message wasn’t the one the American people needed to hear. They needed to understand the atrocities that were underway and on the horizon. I am just saying.

The Delusional States of America.

A mosquito got inside my pants and bit me. No, that’s not a euphemism. A mosquito really got inside my pants and bit me.

Is it wrong to call the firefighters every day to say there’s a snake in my house?

Lately, my Fitbit seems more like a Zoltar fortune-telling machine than a legitimate fitness and activity tracker. It says I’m sleeping soundly when I’m awake and swimming when I’m sitting at my computer and that I’m always ready to do things, which clearly I am not, ever.

I just saw two curve-billed thrashers ushering something along right outside our Arizona room. It was a large rattlesnake.

Correction, see comments: It was a large gopher snake.

Am I in a bad mood? No. I’m in all the bad moods.

So, gum is full of microplastics.

I dreamed hospital campuses were the new cities in our blown-apart country. As everything from democracy to the environment collapsed, people who could provide medical care and those who needed it congregated in these places where humans have lived and died, survived and succumbed, for thousands of years. Those who cared for others would invariably end up needing care. Many died. Sometimes, everyone died when a virus made its way through these improvised communities, turning each building into a mausoleum. This is what heaven is, I thought in the dream. It’s what we do here and now, what we choose to do or avoid doing, together. Yes, these hospitals were heaven in a time that looked like hell. And hell was those who refused to help, to care, to save, to die while saving. Hell was everywhere. It already is.

I woke up in the middle of the night after having a vivid dream. You know what got me back to sleep? Looking at my beautiful Trello boards.

My dog just wrapped herself up in the arms of her stuffed octopus and fell asleep.

Pliny the Elder threw salamanders into a fire to see if they could really extinguish flames. I love myths, but this is what happens when we extend them too far and take them literally. Don’t throw our democracy on the fire like a doomed salamander because your stories about the world have ossified into brittle truths.

Our HOA hired a landscape-maintenance crew to blow dirt away from dirt and onto other dirt.

I dreamed my internal organs were salamanders.

Here’s how much I love organizing my Trello boards: If I were at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) right now, I’d be sad that I wasn’t at home organizing my Trello boards.

Spring is a bird defending its nest in the middle of the night from a threat I can’t see or hear. It’s coyotes howling in the morning, a sound I mistake at first for my empty stomach contracting. It’s learning that a wombat joey named Petrie who was rescued after her mother was killed by a car has also died. Her leg was broken in the crash. She was too little to set it so it could heal. She was euthanized wrapped in a pink blanket that matched her pink body, her toes curled, her back legs crossed. I was pink like that, too, once. I had feet like hers, minus the claws. I was a combination of awe and sleep, dreaming more than waking or thinking or doing. I imagine Petrie staying in my spring forever, or maybe I’ll stay in her fall. Part of me. The part that splits off and remains where my heart beat faster, where I feel more deeply, where I love and yearn for love. Those parts of me peel away all the time, in every season, every state, in every universe if there really is a multiverse we all move through from moment to moment. Or at least in the endless blending of past, present, and future that makes this spring every spring that ever was or will be, which makes everything a process and an absolute all at once, including living and dying.

In my 20s, I worried I’d be bored all my life. In my 50s, I’m delighted when I get to wear my favorite underwear to bed.

March 24, 2025: Spring is two gila woodpeckers who blare like stuttering car horns from still-dormant trees. It’s the body that doesn’t want to wake or move or walk into spring or at least onto the patio, which is where spring wafts in through the screen. It’s the body moving anyway into the garish light, into what opens and what will open. Spring is remembering the first snow in Oklahoma that was heavy enough for making snowmen. Spring is remembering snow in spring.

I took another nap with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Apparently, I’m no longer a person who can read while lying down.

I don’t know why I’m here. This is total bullshit. The refrigerator vibrates like it wants to get out of its body. It’s not the only one. Outside, Gambel’s quail seed the brush with their calls. They’re a caravan of tiny feathered clowns, and I love them. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Spring is full of detritus and dust. I can’t stop coughing. My visions are sand in the eye, motes of awe. There, there, Buddha’s here. God’s here. I know because I feel them in my aching spine. Soon, it will be hot enough to sit around in underwear all day and call it grace, call it ease, call it devotion.

I wake with so many wrinkles in my décolleté that I could use it to grate carrots.

I learned a lot about mindfulness from my hamster, Tater McGee. She would sit up on her back legs for hours with her front paws hanging loosely in front as she stared into a distance far beyond her cage, the room we shared, our home. I swear she was looking into eternity or whatever approaches or approximates eternity. Can a hamster be enlightened? I think so.

La-Z-Boy is getting dangerously close to designing a chair that you’re born in, live in, eat in, shit in, fuck in, die in, and are buried in.

Spring is two gila woodpeckers who blare like stuttering car horns from still-dormant trees. It’s the body that doesn’t want to wake or move or walk into spring or at least onto the patio, which is where spring wafts in through the screen. It’s the body moving anyway into the garish light, into what opens and what will open. Spring is remembering the first snow in Oklahoma that was heavy enough for making snowmen. Spring is remembering snow in spring.

The vultures and the storm arrive together. Below, the dead, waiting. Below, the dry land, waiting. Famine, feast. Drought, water. A blue tractor pushes a single bale of hay across the pasture just before the rain begins to fall.

Time to eat a whole thing of dark chocolate dessert hummus.

Poets enter into themselves to create and enter into poems to be created. — Dana Henry Martin

—

Adapted from Thomas Merton’s quote: “The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.”

I dreamed the Target in Southern Utah was bought by Christian Nationalists. They would call their customers all day and all night. Target loves you, an associate would say. Target is protecting you. Target is watching you. Target can see everything you do. Don’t do anything Target wouldn’t want you to do. They even had a makeshift radio station between 103.1 and 104.1 where you could hear Target sending faint messages through the static. Have you visited your Target today? Have you tithed to your Target in the form of a voluntary but strongly encouraged ten-percent upcharge on all your purchases? Do you carry Target in your heart? They called the program waferboarding, a love- and commerce-driven religio-capitalist form of waterboarding. It was inescapable. People couldn’t sleep because of all the calls and the fuzzy radio station blaring from houses 24/7. Whole neighborhoods roared like holy tornadoes. People couldn’t work. They couldn’t eat. They couldn’t even have sex. Poets couldn’t write. Nobody could do anything but shop. We wandered in a daze, half hallucinating, half wishing for a silence we would never hear again. When we tried to escape, we drove and drove and drove but always ended up at Target. Bless us, Target, for we have sinned. We’ll do better, Target. We love you and are not worthy of your love. Forgive us our transactional transgressions. Target, our word. Target, our lord. Target, our savings. Target, our savior.

I misread thoughtful as thoughful and imagine a sea of qualifiers, of despites, of even ifs flowing like blocky lava into my field of vision until I can’t see anything but the letters t-h-o-u-g-h piled on top of each other, shifting, creating friction, even though I know that’s preposterous, even though it’s not what the writer meant, even though my brain is trying to write itself, even though I want to come back to the actual sentence and stop all this lava, all this flow, all this heat, all this darkness, all this uncertainty, even though.

I avoid places that have too many people and not enough birds.

Cue lighthearted meme from 2020: I had a lot of things to do today, but you know what I did instead? I DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. IT WASN’T A VERY NICE NAP BECAUSE I DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. I DIDN’T GET ANYTHING DONE AND I ALSO DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. 03.12 You turn the object into a woman and the woman into an object.

I call this sleep position someone threw me out of a small plane and this is how I landed on my mattress and nothing is broken thanks for asking but I can I get a couple of Tylenol.

Poetry was dead to me yesterday. I couldn’t read it or write it. Every word sounded like a gong struck while someone was holding it. Dead like that. Sound dead. Sight dead. This means I was dead in the world. I refused to believe my skin touched air, exchanged molecules with it, was in conversation with it all day long. Thunk. Thunk. That’s the sound I made when I moved, so I stopped moving. Thunk. Thunk. I stopped speaking. Thunk. Thunk. My body did not tingle here and there the way it usually does to communicate with me in its peculiar buzzing code: around the left side of my heart when I feel love or anticipation or concern bordering on worry, in my forearms and the center of my chest when I read something that astonishes me, around each ankle when I’m scared or suddenly want to run. The language of my body was dead so of course I was dead and everything was dead, even as three coyotes slinked past our house, even as the Gambel’s quail came over and over and over the hill like footsoldiers, even as the singing bowl tried to call me back to the world and my place in it. I am not alive yet, but I’m getting there. The door to life is cracking open. I won’t barge in, but I’ll enter quietly when I can.

Did you hear? Love has been transformed into a supersolid. It’s light, actually, but I misread the headline as love.

Facebook, how would I watch two rescued prairie dogs eat grape tomatoes without you?

My neighbor has two big red onions, a can of soup, and a straw hat on top of his dashboard.

You turn the object into a woman and the woman into an object.

I dreamed I met the two women who were going to save the world. Their names were Maya and Nissa.

Woke to rain here in the Sonoran desert and birdsong from curve-billed thrashers and Northern cardinals. The pip of a Costa’s hummingbird sounds like water dripping on metal from a distance. Now the water-slick trunks and branches darken. Now clouds muffle the sky like batting. Now the trill of a bird whose song I don’t know plays on repeat. You can know something without knowing its name. You can. In the senses, in the body, in the heart. Now more rain. Good morning.

With my eyes, I have tasted the world’s first ambers.

Good
Trouble

I don’t like to eat my cookies when anyone’s in the room with me. I like to eat them alone.

Without horse how can you imagine running like a horse? Without shadow how you can imagine falling like a shadow? And so forth and so forth until you’ve named all the things you can name because they exist and you exist through them and as them though you are not them even if you are a little them. Without horse give yourself a name. Without shadow give yourself a name. What do you fall on, darken? What do you run with and on, and to and why? Why do you run I mean? Why do you run? Toward or away.

I love the way branch shadows fall across the body of a wild horse, making the tree part horse and the horse part tree. And, somehow, making me at least part love that brambles the world or is brambled by it or both, back and forth, for as long as there are horses and trees and trees and horses so I can imagine myself in those terms.

Once, my house was almost a library. Then, I donated all my books and started going to the library. Now, I want my house to be a library. Also, I want to keep going to the library.

𝐶𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑙𝑢𝑚 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑎 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠. That’s terrible Latin for “My cookies as a whole are divided into three parts,” a play on Caesar’s quote 𝐺𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑎 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑎 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠. What I mean is, I’m eating no-bake cookies for the next three days. Technically, I started a little early by having some yesterday evening, but the three-day undertaking officially starts today. Yesterday was kind of a pre-event event like the ones literary conferences have.

I have some spines for sale if anyone needs one. They make great gifts.

I accidentally ordered six cases of Bubly water instead of six cans. Between that and the coconut water, almond milk, Muscle Milk, Cherry Coke Zero, and Jon’s kombucha and diet Mountain Dew, our entire grocery order for the week is almost all liquids. And no-bake cookies. Plus, the debit card got locked while Jon was picking up the groceries. He was trying to get cash for the poetry reading we’re headed to so we could buy the reader’s book. The machine took the card and wouldn’t return it. He came through the door announcing: I’ve worked out my anger about this, and I’m in control of my emotions, just so you know. Then he showed me all the beverages and told me the debit-card story. He’s trying. He is. I’m eating a bunch of cookies, some of which taste like deodorant. Good thing I have a selection of beverages to wash down whatever it is I’m eating.

I keep reading the MedPage Today headline Smartphones Assess Cognition as Smart-Ass Cognition and thinking it’s a condition I suffer from.

I dreamed I was invited to a party and was all like, “Wait. Let me get my infographics!”

I dreamed I was the handle on a mug.

In the “Oh Look a Strawberry” meme, the United States is currently the fourth strawberry. We’ll be lucky if we can get back to being the third strawberry at this point. First strawberry? Forget it. Second? A long shot.

I had a friend who was sexually attracted to a mannequin. He’d walk over to the window where it was displayed and look at it during his lunch break. He took me once to show me what the deal was. I didn’t get it. The mannequin had no head. He had a wife with a head. Was the head the problem? He liked its breasts, the way they looked in sheer clothing. Its nipples, the way they defied gravity. He liked its white skin, its arms with no hands. His wife had hands. A head and hands. Skin with color and texture. He never went inside and looked at the mannequin’s ass. I would have if I’d been into it. You always have to look at the ass. Everyone knows that, even if it’s a mannequin. Why did I just think of this? Of all things.

We do not want this on their tongues any more than we want it in their hearts.

Not a good day for democracy, poetry, or marriage.

My feet are bleeding all over. I used a compounded cream on them that was apparently meant only for my heels. My heels are also bleeding, though, so yeah. This pain pairs well with the loss of our democracy. On fleek, as they say, or as I think they say. I have no idea how to slang anymore. Or walk. Or American.

Fill my bones with henbane seeds.

And the award for most interesting way to die goes to the man whose brain was turned to glass through high-temperature vitrification during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It’s the only case like it in the world. I’ll include a link in the comments. Have at this, poets. This is premium subject matter.

I dreamed my pillows were clouds, and they ate me, but in a good way.

I dreamed I was lying in bed dreaming that I was lying in bed dreaming that I was lying in bed dreaming. This went on and on until I woke up. Somewhere, I am still dreaming this nested dream of dreaming.

I dreamed Donald Trump was sitting in a sandbox using a play shovel to dig up rare-earth elements. They’re here, they’re here, he kept saying while all the children backed farther and farther from him in a perfect expanding circle, like rings pushing away from Saturn, that oversized gassy giant with its 146 clueless moons, some of which have names like Hesgeth, Kennedy, Musk, and Vance. Soon, Trump and his little moons were all alone. He had torn up the entire playground and found nothing. And there was nobody other than the little moons and one Russian planet called Uranus left to faux worship him. Everyone else had fled. It was not enough. Trump needed more attention. Trump always needs more. My kingdom for attention, he wailed, then drove an armored Tesla full of his little moons right off his flat earth.

Windy day. Outdoor restaurant. Downtown Tucson. Wind-driven menu turned weapon, its laminated edge a blade headed straight for my neck. I ducked and was unscathed. But I could have been done in by the lousiest of all texts, the uninspired casual dining menu. Decapitate me with John Donne, with Gertrude Stein, with Anne Sexton, with Jack Gilbert. Anything but Ben’s Handhelds.*

—

* That’s literally the name of one of the restaurant’s menus, which is actually pretty entertaining.

Zelensky’s not the one in that room who’s unsuited.

I can’t see the entire landscape in American poetry. I just can’t. Its lowlands, its highlands, its rivers and plains. Its coves and quicksands. It would help if I could, if I had more information than what I see from my position and in my experience. Without that broader perspective, I’m liable to either over- or underestimate how much generosity, inclusion, and kindness there is in poetry. And having a good sense of that matters as I navigate poetry and try to find my community or communities.

He’s the demon Mara. Time to touch the Earth.

I would go all the way straight for Zelensky. This is not the time to say that, but I’m saying it. (Jon knows. It’s fine. He has Olivia Munn.)











Light Music

Morning. I feel my hair feathering the sides of my face, a sensation I don’t like but can’t remedy because I’ve lost my hair clip. When I do find it, a section keeps falling out because it’s too short to reach the clip. I locate a smaller clip and ensnare that section separately from the rest. I look like I have tree stuff stuck in my hair, the fluffy, seedy matter that forms before the leaves do and litters streets when it’s shed to make way for actual leaves, actual spring, actual warmth, actual hope, whatever hope is these days, actual or otherwise.

I have to find my earplugs now because my fifty-five-year-old husband is playing a video game at 6 a.m., and I can hear him clicking the controller. CLICK CUCLICK CLICK CLICK CUCUCLICK. There’s no pattern to the clicking that I can settle into, make sense of. I feel like someone’s strumming my ribs with their nails.

Now, the refrigerator is trying to get out of its body as it does for several minutes every morning, poltergeisting the entire kitchen with its WAWUM WAWUM WAWAWAWAWUM. I used to have a wooden rabbit on top of the fridge, but it would vibrate off to the left side whenever these hauntings occurred. I didn’t like seeing it askew, putting it back, and seeing it askew again. At some point, we have to stop engaging in repeated patterns that will never change, never turn out any different. So no more wooden rabbit.

Oh, good. The refrigerator has gone silent, as if it’s been practicing self-soothing techniques. Cry it out, fridge. Cry it out. Breathe or whatever you do.

This is not the morning I want. I want om tare tuttare ture soha playing quietly while I read my new David Ray book. I want to sink into that sadness and silence and away from the furniture banging around in my skull. David, I have taken the counsel of trees / and wise enough to wait for dawn. I’ve waited and woken into all the things. I’ve taken my thyroid medication and had my morning zero-sugar soda and gentled my dog into the morning alongside me and plopped myself down in front of this big window that looks out into the wildlands surrounding Tucson. And David, you used to live here. And David, you lived in Kansas City where I lived. And David, Studs Terkel loved you. And William Carlos William loved you. And you were at one time one of the most celebrated poets in the United States. And now?

You’ve only just died, David. Last December at age 92. I knew before I picked up this book that you were gone. Somehow I knew, though I hadn’t read the news. But here you are on these pages. How can I call you dead? Let me tell you about the things in my head, David. All that furniture that lives inside sound. My husband’s clicking. His footfalls. The sound of him urinating right now with the bathroom door open. Pouring coffee. Clearing his throat. Opening a door. Closing a door. I love him, David. I do. But I am at the edge of the forest. I came there, as you did. Is the darkness before me, behind me, or all around me?

All of the above.

You’ve gone the way every one of us will go: into obscurity and into everything. Being lauded means nothing in the end. Living a certain way, writing a certain way, means everything. Good morning, David. Thank you for the gift of your “light music” over this scene.

On Artaud’s time in a mental institution in the occupied zone during the Second World War:

To make matters worse, Ville-Évrard was in the occupied zone, which meant that the patients had insufficient rations. Stephen Barber points out that “in each of the final two years of Nazi Occupation, nearly half of the asylum’s inmates died” from starvation and related complications. Sylvère Lotringer explains that more generally that there were not many other treatments available at the time, and no psychiatric pharmaceuticals available so psychiatrists simply let their patients waste away in overpopulated psychiatric units. The incurable ones were referred to as “asylum rot.“

—

I could have been asylum rot if I’d lived in a different era. I could become asylum rot if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets his way with his health camps.

The Closet

My teacher says the penis just finds its way into the vagina, knows where to go, doesn’t need any help getting up in there. She says it goes right in the way her husband’s does. She’s pregnant, so we’re pretty sure she’s telling us girls the truth. We’re fifth graders. This is our sex-education class in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1981 at McKinley Elementary School.

We are fifth-grade girls being told the penis just finds its way into the vagina while the boys are in the other classroom with the nice teacher being told who knows what. They will squirm a lot when they come back, the boys, which will be unsettling given what we are just now learning about their penises.

Most of us barely know what a vagina is or how it’s different from the part we pee out of or the vulva as a whole or that there’s a magical subcomponent to the vulva called the clitoris. She doesn’t tell us about the clitoris. She leans back onto one of the little desks at the front of the room, probably one of the reject left-handed ones like the one I beg to use since I’m left-handed but that’s always denied to me because our teacher, Ms. Malecki, is not the nice teacher. She’s no Mrs. Brown, that’s for sure.

Ms. Malecki once left me in the coat closet as a punishment for the entire day. I wasn’t allowed to come out to use the restroom or eat lunch or play on the Big Toy outside. She turned off the lights and left at the end of the school day with me still in the coat closet. I waited at least an hour before coming out. She’d threatened me several times in front of the whole class for occasionally whimpering from the closet. The paddle. I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell the principal, all of that. The principal was related to James Garner, so of course I didn’t want him involved. It would make me uncool forever, and I was already well on my way to being uncool forever without celebrity-adjacent involvement.

I was understandably terrified of Ms. Malecki. Now, I was terrified of her husband’s penis and penises in general, things that seemed like they acted on their own and without authorization and without thought and without consequences the way DOGE will in a future I can’t imagine, one that’s completely out of alignment with the pledge of allegiance we all take every morning unless we’re one of the kids who have to wait out in the hall because their parents don’t want them saying the pledge or singing the national anthem. The scariest thing in my world thanks to Ms. Malecki was the fear that one or more penises would be up inside me all of a sudden while I was hyperventilating on the monkey bars or trying to grab an extra cookie in the lunch line.

Ms. Malecki’s still perched on the little reject desk, which makes her stomach tilt upward. Her exposed belly button gazes at the fluorescent lighting as we ask questions. How do you know if you’ve had an orgasm? You just know. What does the penis look like? You don’t want to know. Are penises going to get inside us as we walk around on the playground or sit in class next to boys? I hope not.

This is a story in which I don’t talk about the sexual abuse I was already experiencing without understanding what was happening. Because the penises stayed tethered for the most part. Because one of the men was a boy, an older boy who’d been held back in school, and I didn’t understand what child-on-child sexual abuse was, that it wasn’t play and wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened. (I mean, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening, and I begged for it to not happen, but I didn’t know what it was that was happening.) Because things didn’t get really bad until I hit puberty. Because that’s when the penises came out. But they didn’t just find their way into my vagina and mouth. They were forced in. They were forced entries. These were things nobody, not even Ms. Malecki, could have prepared me for or helped me understand. We failed to ask all the right questions. Will we be molested? Will we be raped? Will we be sexually assaulted? I imagine her answer would have been I hope not.

I lived in a closet for a long time. Too long. In so many ways, I lived in a closet not unlike the one in my fifth-grade classroom. Afraid to come out. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid that, even once the lights were turned off, the threat would still be there, waiting for me to make a move, to run.

Dreams as Reality

What if waking is just what we do because we need to survive and sleeping (and similar states) are where we actually live? I’m serious about this. We may have started out as sleeping organisms and evolved into wakefulness for practical reasons: to evade predators, to mate, to eat seeds and spread them around so whole forests could shoot up around us.

What if wakefulness is a form of survival and reconnaissance, where we gather what we need, including sensory information, memories, and emotional experiences that we can distill when we’re not awake. How can we say sleeping isn’t the ultimate reality, or at least the richest one we have access to as human beings?

I’ve thought something like this for a long time. Hypotheses jostle in my head like sugar-plums, one of which is related to states like mania and is based on my lived experience. (I think extreme shifts in mood, energy, and intellect can cause or be caused by an entanglement of sleeping and waking states, especially in folks who already have more semi-permeable membranes between the two.)

Carl Jung was right about the importance of dreams and the states they allow us to enter, including those that both extend the self and extend beyond the self. The architecture of my life draws largely on my dreams: what I learn in them, what I understand through them, and how I become and become again through them. Of course, dreaming necessitates sleeping. The closest waking approximation would be deep meditation with periods of theta- and even delta-wave activity. Those are also important states. Unfortunately, they’re the equivalent of fly-over states for many of us in the United States, who are driven away from them because our culture forces us into the quasi-democratic late-stage capitalist framework turned fascist oligarchical business government regime that demands we be “on” all the time, hence we’re routinely shifted into gamma-wave riddled states of mind.

I’m in that state of mind right now, hence that last jam-packed, convoluted fifty-two-word sentence. My theta and delta waves are quaking in fear right now. They don’t know if I’ll ever come back to them. I will, you two. I will. Here’s my commitment to them and to myself: Today, I will collect what I need for the worlds I will inhabit in my dreams tonight. I mean, I’ll do this purposefully and consciously as part of a self-experiment in which I flip the script on what being awake and being asleep mean to me and what roles they play in my life. Then I will live in deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep for eight hours or so before I wake to collect more for tomorrow night. Sleep, I’m out here doing what you need me to do. See you soon.

The Last Woman Experiments

I dreamed about a body of research that was established by the federal government called The Last Woman Experiments. They were studies conducted on women today to determine how the last woman on Earth could survive, repair the broken world, and repopulate the planet with flora, fauna, and human beings. Each experiment was designed to take the subject to the point of death. She would be pushed until she died so The Last Woman could theoretically, someday, live.

This was all a smokescreen for misogyny, for eradication of the majority of female and female-bodied people from this planet, and for giving the elite a blueprint for surviving the unthinkable: the apocalypse they are hastening because they think they can beat it and live rich, white, and large on a depopulated planet. They think it’s like a game of Legos where you build something, break it to pieces, and build it again. But they know they need women in that new world, and they’re strapping the women who survive with the responsibility of growing food, creating life, cleaning up the global messes they’ve made, and starting the human population over from numbers too small to recover from.

Who do they want The Last Woman to be? The Last Women? How many women would they sacrifice to get to the perfect model, the AI-enhanced Bionic Woman of our times, of the future, the one they need to do the work they can’t do, could never do, because they must keep four things alive in her that they don’t have, but in a controlled way: creativity, empathy, hope, and love.

I was in one of the experiments. I escaped and survived. Several women and female-bodied poets I know in real life came alongside me and supported me in telling my story and warning others. We did Zoom calls with women around the world. We got no support. The women in the calls said they needed us to be experimented on so they could survive. Stated another way, we needed to die so they wouldn’t. They told us this from their kitchens as they baked bread, from their nurseries as they rocked their children. They told us in all languages and all accents and from every country. We knew then that it was too late. Fascism had won. It had spread like a thin layer of paint all over the globe and seeped into everyone’s bodies, minds, and hearts.

They were scared, these women. They wanted to live—but at our expense. They didn’t realize they’d be in the next round of The Last Woman Experiments, that they weren’t what the powers that be wanted to survive any more than we were. So they gardened and wore the right clothes and obeyed their husbands even if they really wanted wives and prayed every day for God to make them better, to make them what they needed to be: something that could go on.

Here were some of the experiments. I don’t remember all of them.

Experiment 1: Be sexually assaulted and don’t tell anyone that it happened.

Experiment 2: Grow a child in your blown-out uterus.

Experiment 3: Repair your body when all you have to drink is heavy metal-laden water.

Experiment 4: Learn to love being tied down for days, weeks.

Experiment 5: Survive radioactive fallout without it affecting your beauty.

Midnight Dana

Bryan Johnson has a part of himself that he calls Nighttime Bryan. Nightime Bryan overeats, doesn’t sleep well, and makes decisions that aren’t in his best interest. Studies show that we all have a version of this within ourselves, and that this part usually comes forward in the middle of the night during a mid-night awakening. The typical scenario is that we wake up during the transition from deep sleep to REM sleep, which also happens to be when we’re vulnerable to things like worrying, ruminating, and catastrophizing, as well as seeing ourselves and the world through a clouded lens, one that tends to exaggerates our negative traits, minimize our sense of self-worth, anticipate the worst in every situation, and fail to recognize anything positive. I call this our Midnight Part. In myself, I call this part Midnight Dana.

Let me introduce you to Midnight Dana. She’s a little different from Nighttime Bryan in that she’s trying to help. (I actually think Nighttime Bryan is trying in his own way to help Bryan, or at least to call attention to a problem, but that’s not how Bryan Johnson characterizes Nighttime Bryan.) Midnight Dana remembers things. She doesn’t mean to. She just does. Her body remembers. She’s a time traveler who can go to any point in the past where she’s needed, and by that I mean where her memory is needed. She’s important and necessary, but witnessing her deep knowledge and attempting to communicate with her is not easy.

I woke up at 3:38 a.m. trundled from sleep into wakefulness by a disconcerting dream that involved countless rows of girls’ dorm-room beds extending into the distance behind Vince McMahon, the resident assistant, who was standing in the foreground in a light-gray plaid suit waiting for all the girls to arrive.

Midnight Dana did not like that dream. She immediately thought about the semi-private dorm room she’ll be staying in at the summer residency for Pacific University if I decide to enter that program. The thing that terrifies Midnight Dana about this situation is the shared bathroom. Bathrooms have never been safe spaces for Dana, and Midnight Dana remembers what’s happened in them. It’s as if every cell in her body knows, even the ones that have turned over countless times since those abuses occurred. Midnight Dana is part of the institutional memory of Dana Henry Martin. She lives in the decentralized array of awareness that resides within my body. She also interacts with the world around her, responding to inputs from my waking and sleeping worlds and experiences.

Still frothy with sleep, I receded and Midnight Dana came to the forefront. She laid in bed as the bathroom memories flashed like View-Master stereoscopes, but she was also running. Her heart rate was fast and erratic. She was sweating. She took quick, shallow breaths. Her head suddenly hurt like hell. Midnight Dana was in flight mode.

By 4 a.m., Midnight Dana had made a slew of decisions that started with not attending Pacific University and ended with not writing poetry anymore. Midnight Dana made a plan to do nothing but sit somewhere and listen to birds for the next thirty years or so.

Midnight Dana and I are in conversation this morning. We’re talking about ways she can feel safe at the residency and keep writing poetry. What does she need? How can I advocate for her? I want her to know I see her, hear her, and appreciate her. She’s trying to keep me safe and also keep me from walking into a situation that could be incredibly difficult and painful. She’s going to be there, too, if we go to Oregon. I need to meet her where she’s at and advocate for that part of myself so I don’t become a fear-driven organism whose only option is to run fast and hard and away.

This is the basis of the Internal Family Systems model. We all have parts, and we all need to listen to those parts and bring them into Self. Our Midnight Parts can be teachers if we let them. We can bring them into our awareness and into our hearts while ushering our whole selves to, or at least toward, safety.

Midnight Dana is both an exile and a firefighter. She’s been ignored, silenced, and shamed—even by me—and she looks for quick fixes that will allow her to avoid painful feelings. She makes sense developmentally given my past, namely my childhood. I want her to have that life of listening to birds. And I want her to have so much more than that, including poetry, which is where she sings alongside me.

Moving Mountains

Utah Senator Dan McCay, who shepherded the bill banning pride flags in Utah’s schools and government buildings through the State Senate, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to attack the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what he wrote:

“Bye Felicia. Sundance promotes porn. Sundance promotes alternative lifestyles. Sundance promotes anti-LDS themes.”

Sundance is considering leaving Utah, where it’s been held since its creation in 1978. The ban on pride flags could ensure Sundance’s departure from the state.

This is how Utah’s lawmakers are behaving these days, just a couple of years after cloaking their homophobia and transphobia in purported support for federal protections for same-sex marriage. They wanted to be seen as the good guys back then. Not anymore. What’s infected our government at the highest levels has infected Utah lawmakers and many of those who live in the state.

Almost three years ago, I contacted every LGBTQ+ organization and group in Utah to address the hatred and outright bigotry several Southern Utah lawmakers in places like St. George and Leeds were espousing through far-right groups with militia ties. The only organization that responded—the largest one in the state—told me they had decided not to address the issues with our lawmakers. They thought everything would blow over and wouldn’t amount to anything. They perceived themselves as the leaders of Utah’s queer community. As such, they were encouraging everyone else who was queer to stay quiet, too. Like me. I was told not to talk about what was happening.

I told them they were wrong. I’m from Oklahoma and have lived through this. I lived through the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan years, and more. I lived in Kansas and know the Koch brothers and their playbook, which was being carried out in Washington County, Utah, where I lived and across the country in rural areas with a couple of tweaks: guns and violence and, in the case of Southern Utah, with a post-Mormon hatred that was unbounded. I said what was happening in Southern Utah was going to spread to the rest of the state—and quickly. They didn’t believe me. They were Salt Lake City-centric and didn’t see the power lawmakers in Southern Utah had or understand what they were capable of.

I told them anti-trans legislation was going to hit them like a tsunami, and they had a responsibility to address what was happening before it was too late. Weeks later, they flew the director of the organization down to Ivins, a town just outside St. George. People with power and influence in the queer community were invited to a mansion to discuss what to do, how to move forward. It was a private event. Members of the queer community at large were not invited or even told it was happening. Stay quiet was pretty much what they came up with at that meeting. Several people who attended also discussed the past of one of the alt-right group leaders, which involved extremely inappropriate behavior with her female students. (She’d been a high-school teacher in the area at one point.) The group wasn’t talking about that publicly, either.

In a matter of months, nine anti-trans pieces of legislation were signed into Utah law by Utah’s Governor. More laws have been passed since then. Queer organizations have been hobbled and/or gutted. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enacted more hateful and harmful policies that target queer members and their families. Queer folks are being threatened, disowned, harmed in myriad ways, erased, and more—more than ever. And now lawmakers are telling everyone in the state what they really think, what they thought all along but didn’t feel they could say.

I’m not a seer. I didn’t see into the future. I’ve just seen all of this before. I’ve lived through it, survived it, and been shaped by it as someone who’s nonbinary and queer. I didn’t stay quiet like the queer organization told me to. I wrote two letters that The Salt Lake Tribune published, one of which discussed a column by Pat Buchanan that ran in The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 17, 1990. It was titled “Homosexuals Mainstreaming Satanism.” I compared that piece to what was currently happening at meetings and rallies in the St. George area. I also pitched stories to local reporters and provided background material and comments on several stores. This only served to drive a bigger wedge between me and the queer community who didn’t seem to want me or my voice to exist. Ironic? Yes. It’s ironic.

Even with everything unfolding the way I said it would, only worse than I could have imagined, I’m still not welcome in Utah’s queer circles. Last fall, I attended a Zoom meeting for members of NAMI Utah to discuss changes within the organization. That meeting was comprised primarily of queer participants. They recognized my name from the pieces that ran in the Trib, and they thought I was there to glean information about the organization and report on it in The Salt Lake Tribune. I wasn’t. I attended the meeting because I’m in training to become a peer specialist here in Arizona through NAMI, because I’m a mental-health advocate who stays informed about issues that affect mental-health care in my communities, and because I live with mental-health issues and am as deserving of support as anyone else in Utah who lives with mental health issues.

The folks in the NAMI group also believed I was a journalist because they apparently don’t understand the distinction between editorial content and letters to the editor. I’m a poet and writer who’s worked as a medical writer and health advocate. I have a degree in journalism but am not working as a journalist. I certainly wouldn’t “inflitrate” a NAMI meeting. (Please.) Or use my full name in my Zoom profile if I was trying to be sneaky.

The group moderator contacted me individually after the meeting through email to admonish me for being unethical, to insinuate I was there to undermine the organization, and to ask what I planned to do with what I learned during the meeting. It was a stunningly inappropriate communication that was never properly addressed by NAMI Utah’s interim director. She passed it off to a lower-level volunteer as opposed to addressing the infraction herself as the organization’s leader. Here were my concerns, in short: You can’t use an email list your organization maintains to gather information about a member and reach out to them to ask probing accusatory questions. Doing so is discriminatory, borders on bullying and intimidation, and jeopardizes the well-being of a fellow NAMI member who’s seeking inclusion and support.

This is where I’m at in Utah. I’m an advocate whose advocacy is unwelcome and unwanted in both the queer and mental-health communities. The fear that permeates Southern Utah and drives folks to paranoia and conspiracy theories is embedded in the state as a whole, even in the very communities many Utah lawmakers want to eradicate. Queer folks and folks with mental-health issues need to learn how to stand up for themselves and each other, how to bring in and welcome outside voices and perspectives, and how to be true advocates and allies who don’t end up doing more harm than good in their respective organizations. Rolling over, fear, othering bordering on shunning, and baseless accusations aren’t going to get us anywhere, nor is silencing queer voices in the name of queer solidarity. We need to start moving mountains more than one spoonful at a time. And we certainly don’t need to be creating more and larger mountains.

Utah has work to do. We have work to do. We need to show up. My voice isn’t going anywhere, as much as I’ve been asked to remove it from the state, even by some folks in Southern Utah’s poetry community who’ve called my work inappropriate, graphic, and pornographic (just like the Sundance Film Festival, apparently). Hell, I’ve been called a pedophile several times by my neighbors up in South Jordan and later in Toquerville, where I still live part of the year. (One of Utahns’ big go-tos is calling anyone they don’t like a “pedophile,” which is sad given all the actual acts of pedophilia in the state.)

I’ve heard it all at this point. I’m surviving it all on my own, outside of any Utah-based communities focused on support and advocacy. I hope Utah can come back from what’s happening right now. I do. I feel for folks who are being crushed by all of this. But when a bulldozer’s coming, you have to warn others and get out of the way until you can dismantle that bulldozer. You’ll get nowhere if you pretend it’s not coming or throw others from your community in its path or tell them you don’t need their help. Communities who are harmed cannot harm others within their communities. That’s just a reframing of the very paradigm that caused those communities harm in the first place.

Twin Fawns, Treats, and Sitting Right in Rooms

I dated a man who didn’t like to be touched when he ate. Never, not by anybody. Not even me. I tried a few times. It didn’t go well. He only liked square rooms, nothing with an angled or curved wall or a cutout of any kind. Cubbies were for sure off-limits. The house he was living in with his band off Gillham Road in Kansas City was one block over from serial killer Bob Berdella’s house, but that’s not what he didn’t like about it. The sitting room had cherry trim, which bothered him because the rest of the trim was oak. It was supposed to be different to indicate that the sitting room was special. That’s what they did in Victorian homes, at least in Kansas City. Architectural history didn’t matter to him. Consistency mattered, order, and not being touched while eating, which I suppose is order-enforcement of a different kind.

I’d say all of this was problematic, but at some point, I stopped being able to sit in rooms without being squared up to them. In bed, I have to lie in perfect alignment with the walls to either side of me or things feel super off. And curved rows of seating in a square or rectangular room? Floating in the space like that, maybe even with seats whose backs are to the entrance? No, thank you. I’ll find a chair against the wall or drag one there if needed, none of this organismic bacteria-esque drifting as if we’re all being observed under a microscope.

I also don’t like to eat treats when anyone’s in the room with me, namely my husband, or when the news is on or I’m reading a shitty anything anywhere from anyone. My treat time is my me time, and it has to be just right. I have a soundtrack I listen to when eating treats. It’s moody music like Eno and Radiohead. Everything I listen to is moody, or maybe I just hear it that way. Barber. Corigliano. Orff. I’m genre-drifting musically now, probably because I have treats nearby, but my fingers insist on typing this before I eat them (the cookies, not my fingers) despite the fact that my husband’s about to return home, which means there will likely be no treat time for me tonight, especially if I start in on editing this post. I also don’t eat treats while writing and editing. My brain won’t register that the eating has occurred, and I’ll get the keyboard all treat-sticky.

The guy I dated also didn’t like to read anything long, so he limited himself to short stories. Say what you will about that, but he introduced me to Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, and Kansas City poet and writer Conger Beasley Jr. I was still a music major then, as was he. I hadn’t drifted from music to literature and ultimately to poetry, where I remain a producer-consumer to this day.

The last thing I’ll say about him is he showed me twin fawns who died in their mother’s womb and had been taxidermied shortly after their death. They were on display with other preserved animal oddities at a toy store in a Kansas City neighborhood called Brookside. Years later, he bought them from the owner and gave them to his new wife, who’s an artist. They’re art now, those fawns. They live in a vitrine. The artist sells prints of a painting of them. I don’t think it was her, actually, who painted them. Someone did. The fawns were on television as part of an art-competition show. I’ve seen pictures of the artist with the twins beside her under their glass. I love them and hope they’re at peace. I hope they are loved in the real way, not any other way.

It’s hard not to feel something for a man who values taxidemied fawns and shows them to all the girls he loves. Their vitrine is round, not square. Nobody touches them when they eat. They don’t eat because they are dead. They don’t read because they are dead but also because they are fawns, and even living fawns don’t read. Somehow, this last fact makes me profoundly sad.

The Napture

Today is not my day to experience the napture, that is being transported from Earth to heaven in the midst of a fabulous nap. Apparently, I will not have any nap at all today, despite being mostly awake all night with my sweet dog, who’s not feeling well.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Fitbit thinks I’m asleep all the time for some reason, including while I was sopping my sweet dog’s vomit out of the wool rug in the bedroom while the ceiling fan—which I’d turned on accidentally in the chaos of the moment—mocked my nearly bare back with wave after wave of cold air. Maybe I really was asleep. Maybe I’m asleep now. Maybe we evolved from sleep into wakefulness, but we’re never fully awake, even when we think we are. Maybe Fitbit knows this about me, about you, about all of its wearers.

Lately, Fitbit’s also been like, Hey, your heart rate’s totally low these days, super job, which doesn’t make sense because I’m not properly executing any of my self-care stuff. I’m barely keeping up with the 57 biomarkers I routinely track, not to mention the dozen or so behaviors I monitor. I haven’t tallied the exact number of behaviors I track, which shows you how much I’ve been slacking. Data only works if you work that data, right? Can I get a high five?

I mean, I’m trying to be a data-driven lifeform, but I’m failing better day after day. I’m having carbs again this afternoon, for one thing: the no-bake cookies that are my undoing when I allow myself to be undone, that is eating an uncorseted diet that’s bound to tank my efforts at improved mental health. If I had my continuous glucose monitor on, I could see in real time what those cookies do to my glucose levels, and from that data I could infer what’s happening to my mitochondria. I could look at old data, but it’s not the same. I need to see in real time what I’m doing to myself so I’ll stop doing it.

This is serious work, and I’m messing it up, and I can’t even take a nap, which seems like it would help. Why can’t I nap? 1: Birds. They’re too loud. 2. Lexi. She’s too restless. 3. Heat. It’s 76 degrees in here, and I’m too hot, the kind of hot one feels when one is menopausal, though I’m long past those days. I’m carb-hot. I ate carbs yesterday, and it’s made me hot. Not in a good way. 4. Husband. Things with, including accusations that I said something mean in all caps when I believe I said it all lowercase. 5. Husband again. Making silly vulgar gestures at me while someone I was talking to on the phone was telling me something awful and important. 6. The awful and important thing I was told and how I can’t do anything about it and how the whole world seems like a gaping maw sometimes, not at all heavenly, not at all a place where naps can be imagined or hoped for, let alone naptures.