Month: May 2025

Shallow Water

Arizona highways are so bad that several screws on our desk vibrated all the way out and feathers wriggled through our sofa cushions. We brought an antique piece back with us that partially turned to sawdust.

Facebook just showed me an ad that says I can become a certified sound healer in just fourteen days. My first thought was: Aren’t poets sound healers? My second thought was: Doesn’t it take several decades to become skilled in the art of sound healing through poetry? My third and final thought was: YOU MEAN I COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING IN FOURTEEN DAYS AND POETRY WASN’T EVEN NECESSARY?

The thing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatening to bar scientists at the National Institutes of Health from publishing in leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet is that it totally sucks. That’s it. That’s the post. It totally sucks.

Because someone thought this, I should also think this is not a thought I think I’ve ever thought.

Tonight, I stood beneath seven common nighthawks as they caught insects midair. I’ve never seen so many at once. They were flying so low they barely cleared my head. One of them called rhythmically, as if they had an invisible tempo they had to follow and he was in charge of keeping time. A bat fluttered between them for a bit like a soloist who didn’t quite know her part. What was my part? None. I watched them because I wanted to. I did not write myself into their world or write them into mine.

I like a lot of birds together but not a lot of frogs together. I think it comes down to texture. Not the way they feel but the way they look like they feel.

With words, we make and unmake the world.

Others can debate whether poetry is therapeutic until the cows come home. I have no need. My cows came home a long time ago. They’re poems, and they don’t charge me for spending time in their pastures. More cowbell, please.

Dear moon, dear man sprawled across my bed. I wake to you and your intrusion. Now you’re gone like you never happened. I mistook you for light, not your cold body that set me spinning. I’m not a tide rising to meet you. But of course I am. Tonight, I’ll pull the shades and sleep in the dark, the near dark, while bright predators dangle in the sky.

She who typos first thing in the morning will typo all day long.

Early morning, the moon spills across my bed like it’s too tired to get under the covers after staying out all night.

I exist in two states: having just peed and having to pee.

I’m too young to be this age.

This is the first time I’ve heard my neighbor laugh since her daughter died.

My dog threw up in my hands last night. It was everything she’d eaten since her dental cleaning. If her system is still shut down this morning, we’re heading to the vet. She’s in my arms right now. We’re listening to some bird who doesn’t quite know how to sing.

One thing I dislike is a fawning AI. You’re right. I was bad. Give me another chance. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. Where is this coming from? Who taught AI to interact like this? Oh, right. Us. We did.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

Creative writing entails taking risks. That’s hard. Attacking people doesn’t. That’s easy.

I didn’t read that poem. That poem took me inside it. It became my habitat. I dwelled in it as it dwelled in me. Old ghosts, those trees, a haunting, that land. I was reading the poem, then I was in it, around it. I’m still there, floating in its waters, drinking in its waters, face to the sun, belly to the sun, toes to the sun. I almost can’t see the world I actually live in. I see it through this other cross-eyed world. World of the lost, world of thorns, world of watery devils coming closer with every ripple.

—

A response to the poem “Down in the Gully,” by Dominic Leading Fox.

Good morning. The laccolith is purple right now, the reddish-purple I always imagined the majestic purple mountains being when singing “America the Beautiful” as a child. It was hard to work that out when I was young and didn’t have a nuanced understanding of color. How could mountains be purple? It took some time to see tints and shades and anything beyond the bright colors foisted on kids in books and toys and clothing. Everything that wasn’t bright seemed to be sepia-toned, almost, including my father’s El Camero, whiskey, and mountains, which I rarely saw anyway outside the Arbuckles, since we lived in Oklahoma. But yes, indeed, mountains can be any of the colors we loosely describe as purple, namely at dawn and dusk. My laccolith is comprised of fifty-six mountains. Think about that. Fifty-six mountains purpling all at once in the blush of a new day. Tell me you could look away.

Looks like I’m graduating to shoes with a big-ass toebox.

Al-Anon needs a counterpart called AI-Anon for those who have folks in their lives with an artificial-intelligence problem.

Thanks to Chansonette Buck, I’m putting shallow dishes of water around the house for our resident spiders so they don’t get dehydrated.

One bloom at a time, two lesser goldfinches tear up the desert marigolds outside my bedroom window. They methodically toss petals onto the gravel and sandstone below like unnecessary thoughts, throw-aways. It’s safe here. No cats. No snakes. No roadrunners. Not in our yard, at least, which nestles a great surrounding wildness that seems to have no end.

The mess of spring doesn’t just happen. The wind makes it. Plants make it. Animals make it. Every living thing makes it. Things grow, fall, rot, renew. That last part is nearly invisible, but the evidence is all around in that sand, that leaf, that wing, even in you, wherever you are. Your very existence is renewal.

One of the goldfinches flies to the front of the house. The other bobs on a trio of clutched stems and sings. We are all the bird that flies, the bird that sings, the bird that feeds.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

When I was young, I didn’t think Billy Idol was hot, which is how I know I’m not entirely heterosexual.

Every time I want to love nobody, I end up loving everybody.

What music did I listen to when I was processing difficult emotions as a teenager? Samuel Barber, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Gustav Holst, Carl Orff, Led Zeppelin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Simon and Garfunkel, and Tears for Fears.

I ache for this place as if I weren’t in it.

I want to tell the rat who lives in my rock wall that he’s safe. But the snakes, I think. But the hawks and roadrunners. But the neighbor’s pesticides. But the other neighbor’s cats. The rat wants to tell me I’m safe. But the memories, he thinks. But the body. But the mind. But the others. So we do not speak. We watch each other making a home out of nothing, in a crevice, in a house, each of us building a little future, a place with a scoop of light, a dollop of air, so we can sleep and wake and build a little more, a little more, until a mouth envenomates the memory, until a wing casts shadows on the body, until poison enters the mind, until the cats or the others get hungry and become a single thing that eats.

[Do Not Read]

I woke up at 2:34 a.m. when the nearly unbearable headache I developed two days ago turned into an unbearable headache.

[Do not keep reading this. It is not interesting.]

The pain is spreading down my back now, too. I know there are bigger problems in the world, but this is my immediate problem. Tylenol does nothing for this pain. Massage, creams, ice. Nothing. Meditation nothing. Distraction nothing. Writing nothing. Sleeping nothing.

[Seriously, why are you still reading this?]

It actually gets worse with sleep, this pain, hence my no longer being able to sleep. I feel like my head weighs too much. I need flying buttresses or similar architecture to help hold it up.

[Here comes a not-so big insight.]

Oh, this is from my posture when I use my phone. I’m using my phone right now. I’m making things worse. I literally need to shape up.

[I warned you about how this boring post was going to be boring.]

I don’t wanna sit up straight. I love my bad posture. I love my phone. So pretty. So bright. Thank you for coming to my Ted Whine. It’s like a Ted Talk only whiny.

The Shame of the States

Public [psychiatric] hospitals became overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of patients. In the 1950s, there were only 26 U.S. cities whose population exceeded the aggregate population of public psychiatric institutions. The two largest hospitals each had a census that exceeded 16,000 patients. Never able to keep up with the needs of their patients, the hospitals went from awful to appalling when their workforce—from the farmer to the doctor—was pulled away to meet the manpower demands of World War II. The population at large learned of the horrors of their public psychiatric hospitals, tragedies long hidden away, through exposés such as The Snake Pit, Mary Jane Ward’s fictionalized account of her hospitalization at Rockland State Hospital (book, 1946; movie 1948); author Albert Q. Maisel’s article in Life magazine (1946) accompanied by some of the most painful pictures the American public had ever seen from Pennsylvania’s Byberry and Ohio’s Cleveland state hospitals; and The Shame of the States (1948), New York Post reporter Albert Deutsch’s opus based on research from 1944 to 1947.

Blood Work

I’m basking in the afterglow of running the gauntlet of angry Utahns waiting to have their blood work done at the draw station when none of the phlebotomists managed to report to work, so another staff member who knows phlebotomy had to step in, even though that’s not her job.

The people in that waiting room were hungry because these are fasting tests. They were sick and old and impatient. They had things to do or nothing to do that they’d rather do elsewhere than at the draw station.

One had a repairman coming. Another needed to get back to his morning gardening. A third was assessing the situation from a systems-theory perspective. Things weren’t run like this when he worked in IT for military hospitals, he told me.

A fourth tried to jump the line and complained bitterly when he was told he couldn’t do that. A fifth ran through the halls with blood dripping from her arm where the needle had been inserted for the draw.

And then there was my favorite, an octogenarian who turned to her husband and shouted, “Well, this is going to take forFUCKINGever” loud enough for everyone waiting to hear.

Also, even with all the peeing I do day in and day out, there’s one time I can’t pee. It’s when someone tells me I need to provide a urine sample and hands me a clear plastic cup.

Stack of Heads

I dreamed I was attempting to find the seat of consciousness, which I believed was perched at the top of a stack of heads that sat on my head. Each head was smaller than the one below it, so I—or rather my awareness—could walk all the way to the top like I was climbing stairs. But I had to embody the understanding of each head before I could move up to the next one.

Finally, I reached the top. This is it, I thought. What I found there wasn’t freedom or understanding or release or enlightenment. It was a glass cube. My father sat enthroned within it eating dead worms. There was a lock with an alarm on the cube’s door. It wasn’t to keep others out and keep him safe. It was to keep him in and to keep others safe. If he broke the door or smashed the glass, the alarm would go off. Then what? I don’t know. He never got out of the cube. I never stopped having to carry him with me everywhere.

One Hundred Ninety-Seven Words and Phrases Being Dumpted by Donald Trump

accessible activism activists advocacy advocate advocates affirming care all-inclusive allyship anti-racism antiracist assigned at birth assigned female at birth assigned male at birth at risk barrier barriers belong bias biased biased toward biases biases towards biologically female biologically male BIPOC Black breastfeed + people breastfeed + person chestfeed + people chestfeed + person clean energy climate crisis climate science commercial sex worker community diversity community equity confirmation bias cultural competence cultural differences cultural heritage cultural sensitivity culturally appropriate culturally responsive DEI DEIA DEIAB DEIJ disabilities disability discriminated discrimination discriminatory disparity diverse diverse backgrounds diverse communities diverse community diverse group diverse groups diversified diversify diversifying diversity enhance the diversity enhancing diversity environmental quality equal opportunity equality equitable equitableness equity ethnicity excluded exclusion expression female females feminism fostering inclusivity GBV gender gender based gender based violence gender diversity gender identity gender ideology gender-affirming care genders Gulf of Mexico hate speech health disparity health equity hispanic minority historically identity immigrants implicit bias implicit biases inclusion inclusive inclusive leadership inclusiveness inclusivity increase diversity increase the diversity indigenous community inequalities inequality inequitable inequities inequity injustice institutional intersectional intersectionality key groups key people key populations Latinx LGBT LGBTQ marginalize marginalized men who have sex with men mental health minorities minority most risk MSM multicultural Mx Native American non-binary nonbinary oppression oppressive orientation people + uterus people-centered care person-centered person-centered care polarization political pollution pregnant people pregnant person pregnant persons prejudice privilege privileges promote diversity promoting diversity pronoun pronouns prostitute race race and ethnicity racial racial diversity racial identity racial inequality racial justice racially racism segregation sense of belonging sex sexual preferences sexuality social justice sociocultural socioeconomic status stereotype stereotypes systemic systemically they/them trans transgender transsexual trauma traumatic tribal unconscious bias underappreciated underprivileged underrepresentation underrepresented underserved undervalued victim victims vulnerable populations women women and underrepresented

Nobody to Carry Me

I dreamed I was a finger puppet whose legs, at the knees, slid onto the index and middle fingers of whoever wanted to wear me around. Below the knees, my calves had been replaced by dangling tentacles. I had this dream at about noon because I was still sleeping. It was a hard day’s night into the next hard day—something you wouldn’t have picked up on if you’d seen me in what appeared to be excessive but otherwise unremarkable slumber.

I felt like an immobile creature with malfunctioning legs who had nobody to carry me around. The dream was spot on about that.

So in bed I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Until some task or hope or apparition in the watery distance set my clock going. It wasn’t love, as Plath says. Maybe it was love. Maybe everything that makes us move internally and externally is love. I’d like to think so.

When I did get up, my pallesthesia, paresthesia, and benign fasciculation were in full swing, worse even than they were while I was lying in bed. My soleuses (solei if you’re fancy) felt like they were the inside of Demosthenes’ mouth, a pride of pebbles grinding against each other as I moved. My legs gave out beneath me as I made my way to the bathroom.

This may not be the content you want from me because I am not a content creator, though I am someone who creates using words for the most part. I’m thinking here of my dearly departed friend (a Facebook unfriending, not a death) who said this kind of writing isn’t what he needs at this point in his life. I hate to disappoint. I also hate self-censorship and won’t do it. If I dream about being a finger puppet with tentacles for legs, I’m going to write about that. If my legs give out on me when I try to move around my house, I’ll write about that, too. Writing about these things means I made it to my computer and I’m writing. That’s my win. That’s what I need at this point in my life. This all informs the greater writing. By that, I mean the poems, the poems, the poems.

Nobody to Carry Me

I dreamed I was a finger puppet whose legs, at the knees, slid onto the index and middle fingers of whoever wanted to wear me around. Below the knees, my calves had been replaced by dangling tentacles. I had this dream at about noon because I was still sleeping. It was a hard day’s night into the next hard day—something you wouldn’t have picked up on if you’d seen me in what appeared to be excessive but otherwise unremarkable slumber.

I felt like an immobile creature with malfunctioning legs who had nobody to carry me around. The dream was spot on about that.

So in bed I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Until some task or hope or apparition in the watery distance set my clock going. It wasn’t love, as Plath says. Maybe it was love. Maybe everything that makes us move internally and externally is love. I’d like to think so.

When I did get up, my pallesthesia, paresthesia, and benign fasciculation were in full swing, worse even than they were while I was lying in bed. My soleuses (solei if you’re fancy) felt like they were the inside of Demosthenes’ mouth, a pride of pebbles grinding against each other as I moved. My legs gave out beneath me as I made my way to the bathroom.

This may not be the content you want from me because I am not a content creator, though I am someone who creates using words for the most part. I’m thinking here of my dearly departed friend (a Facebook unfriending, not a death) who said this kind of writing isn’t what he needs at this point in his life. I hate to disappoint. I also hate self-censorship and won’t do it. If I dream about being a finger puppet with tentacles for legs, I’m going to write about that. If my legs give out on me when I try to move around my house, I’ll write about that, too. Writing about these things means I made it to my computer and I’m writing. That’s my win. That’s what I need at this point in my life. This all informs the greater writing. By that, I mean the poems, the poems, the poems.

Flame and Ash

I’m toying with the idea that people are beings who live and die every moment, and any sense of continuity between moments is similar to the way our eyes smooth out what we see through a combination of physical and perceptual processes, such as saccades.

Memory persists to some degree between these deaths and births, though imperfectly and sometimes as complete fabrications that allow this or that narrative to earn its wings so it can soar across momentary lifetimes in order to either free us or whisk us away to ruin.

I don’t mean bodily birth or bodily death. I mean birth and death of self and of the worlds available to the self at any given time.

I don’t expect anyone to understand this or see anything of value in it. What this means, for me, is that I can only take people as they are in the moment—a moment that’s passed before I can even perceive it. It’s the best I can do.

We are flame and ash, flame and ash. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. These are fictions. Even time is a fiction.

You are a person doing a thing in a place. I’ll meet you there to the best of my ability. Tomorrow, same. The day after that, same.

Is this nonsense? Maybe. Certainly. What isn’t.

Total Mass

I dreamed the editor of a literary journal accused me of writing cover letters that were unalive notes. She said, I’m returning your fine poems until you learn to say what your work is about without making me think you’re going to jump off that bridge you describe over in La Verkin, Utah, the one you say is all the rage right now, almost a rave if death could be a rave, bedecked in flowers and notes that read YOUR LIFE MEANS MORE TO US THAN YOUR DEATH MEANS TO YOU as if that’s not just another erasure of what folks who are about to unalive are going through.

There are always lights there, layers of red like beacons of death spinning horizontally in air, a party of futility, of resignation, of despair. Not Another One Bridge. That’s what the sheriffs call it, you say, but you don’t know. Not another one. Not today. Again? Then probably something about God or his conjoined twin Jesus if they’re into that. Then the call to the rescue crew who can fetch the body from the gorge below. Another crew. Another raising of the dead from the past, that unfathomably old rocky past they’ve leapt or fallen into.

Slipped, their family will say later, you say. They must have slipped. An accident. I don’t need to read things like that in your cover letters.

Say what you have to say in your poems. Say it there. Cover letters don’t have personas. We know they’re written by you. There are rules. There have to be. Poems are relegated to a certain space. They’re part of a tightly regulated total mass, like that laccolith you’re always writing about. It’s big, sure, but the whole of Utah, the whole of the world, can’t be a laccolith. Some of it has to be gilded jets for world leaders. That’s just the way it is.

Form dictates the content and reminds us of who we are and where we come from. We come from offices. From paper clips. From staplers. From clear, concise communication that’s business in the front and business in the back. No party. No pity. No pining. No pith.

We’re from formality and words arranged with an architecture that makes sense, that’s expected. Cover letters are like animals whose legs are where they should be, and they’re just walking, not riding around on skateboards or driving little cars like those hamsters you say you also dream about. Mr. Fuzzy, was it? And Tater McGee? They belong in a poem, not a cover letter. Stop making them drive off the bridge of your imagination. Cover letters aren’t Art Noir Quizno’s commercials from the 90s.

The cover letter should not be a form of psychological spelunking. Poems can be, depending on who you ask. You should know this by now. Just say Hi. Say here are my poems. Say thank you for considering my poems. Don’t bring up parasailing or Duran Duran or the Menendez brothers or loneliness or dreams about writing cover letters. Say hi. Here are my poems. Thank you.

Use a standard font. One-inch margins. Double space if you must, but keep yourself contained like someone walking across Not Another One Bridge all the way from one side to the other without incident. Don’t let your cover letter look into the gorge. It will do things to your cover letter, the looking. You know this. The cover letter knows this. I know this, and I’ve never even seen that bridge.

I won’t respond to any more submissions with unalive notes attached to them written by hand in red ink on torn scraps of lined paper the size of Post-its with arrows at the bottom directing me from one scrap to the next to make sure I read the whole thing like some failed Franklin Covey approach to professional communication.

Just say hi next time is the last thing the editor said before I left that dream and walked into a Home Depot where the greeter was an 80-year-old rocker sitting at a drum kit. But the editor followed me in there. She followed me from one dream to another. I couldn’t shake her all night. I kept saying it wasn’t an unalive note. It was just a cover letter. She wouldn’t listen.

I called her a Karen, which is how I knew I was dreaming. I don’t call anyone a Karen in real life unless they’re name is Karen, and I don’t use an article before their name. STOP BEING SUCH A KAAAAR-EN I shrieked over the drummer, whose riffs were technically impressive but unoriginal. Everything he played was played out long ago. He was dressed in leather from head to toe. His getup was as ravaged by time as he was. He may have been famous once, but not anymore. Not in this dream version of a Home Depot in Southern Utah.

Was this dream-heaven? Dream-hell? Dream-purgatory superimposed on my sunny desert? I wanted a pen and paper so I could capture this dream in the perfect cover letter.