Month: June 2025

Plainsong

Something incredible happened today, and the only person I want to tell is my mother, who died twenty-one years ago.

The poems are too good today. I can’t take any more. I’m going to listen to devastating music now and stare into a sky heavy with wildfire smoke where things are taken and given, but they’re never the right things, only sometimes they are, which is the scrap we cling to, isn’t it, because we’re here and have nothing else. I’m sorry to break it to you. Your talon is just a hand. The scrap is what’s left of your baby blanket. It will never reweave itself. You will never fly. You are impossible. And yet.

Poems are in it. They aren’t above it, below it, beside it, behind it. They are in it.

I put water out for the wild critters who congregate in my yard.

In the drought-stricken West, fire is the four-letter word we wear like dead skin on our lips.

I looked up and saw twelve Gambel’s quail, two white-tailed antelope ground squirrels, a rock squirrel, a juvenile western fence lizard, and a butterfly on my back patio. They were either hiding from a predator or digging the shade from the pergola. Or maybe the animal uprising has begun.

Pantoums are like that weird sex thing you try once because you’re curious, but after that one time, you’re like, Naw, I’m good. I’m gonna stick with regular stuff.

I will swallow Earth whole before I write another pantoum.

I carry my father’s war in my body.

A poem can’t just be a counterpoint sung above a nonexistent plainsong. I mean, it can be, but why.

Poets, may I rise from the beautiful destruction of your work. May I live another life, another day, through your poems. Grant me the strength to be burned clean and fly like that fierce mythical bird or even to outlive ten phoenixes like one of the Nymphs—all because of your writing. May we rise through and because of each other. May that be our eternity.

He was also like rain.

We need to dispel once and for all the myth that the federal land footprint cannot be changed. — Utah Senator Mike Lee

We need to dispel once and for all the myth that federal lands are like disposable body parts that can be amputated, bagged, and sold to the highest bidder on the black market that the federal economy has become. — Dana Henry Martin

Most of what’s not in the DSM-V is what’s most pathological in our country. Those with pathologies wrote the DSM in the first place, each ever-proliferating version of it. Power and control wrote it. Normalization wrote it. Coercion. Scapegoating. Blaming. Gaslighting. It will be rediscovered in the distant future and seen as the cultural artifact it is: a testament to colonization and the endurance of colonized mindsets and systems, and as evidence of one of the myriad human-directed harms of colonization. That’s assuming the future isn’t characterized by colonization and therefore unable to see this document for what it is. The DSM says more about those who created it than those it attempts to characterize, treat, and control.

My friend Jeff said this about my work, and I love it so much:

But I think one of the great strengths of your poetry is that it does exactly that, stare the reader right in the face, in a way that is so freeing for some and so frightening for others, haha. For me, maybe only like 25% frightening.

I stole all my husband’s guitar picks because they’re colorful and sparkly. I’m officially (not) a crow (or any type of corvid because apparently their reputation for liking new and shiny things is based on myths, not science).

It’s almost light. I can almost make out my bookcase, its white shoulders, its white doors. Within, its inks are blood. Its papers are bodies. But its heart is formless, a force, an energy, the static from a balloon. Here, my eager hands. Here, my eager mind. Here, my own heart, battery-like, waiting to be charged. The birds are singing. They’re singing for my bookcase, for me, for you if you happen to be a book, for the whole damned world.

Sleep didn’t go as planned. I had a nightmare about not being able to reach the books on the bottom row of my new bookcase because my knees hurt too much to crouch or bend over. When I woke up, I couldn’t stop thinking about my new bookcase, namely the smell of it, that light, woody scent combined with hints of paper, ink, and time. My heart started racing. I’m still trilling inside. I told myself not to get out a flashlight and go look at the bookcase in the dark. I told myself to wait until it’s light out to look at the bookcase. I kind of want to go back to sleep, but I also want to watch the sun rise with my new bookcase. This is its first day in the world, the world that is on fire.

You have a mouth the shape of joy. I have a mouth the shape of despair. It’s the same mouth.

The world is our corpse flower.

I’ve never come out, but I continually come in: in to who I am and am becoming, in to my truth, in to my experience, in to my personal and family history, in to my communities, in to my survival, in to my resilience, in to my heart, in to my mind, in to my body, in to my creativity, in to my rhythms, and in to my language. Yes, in to my language.

Sell our lands, sell our soul.

Don’t thank me for helping you grow if you grew at my expense.

I don’t know what’s out there, but there are currently nine Gambel’s quail, a juvenile Western fence lizard, and a desert kangaroo rat hiding in my rock wall. Hawk is my guess. Could be cat, but I think it’s hawk. I’m glad my yard is a safe space for them.

I have all the flowering native plants, which means that, as of this morning, I have all the screaming fledglings. My blossoms bring the floofy babies to the yard.

One thing I know: The desert doesn’t need lawnmowers, but here they are in the desert.

Kitty still here.

I’m not here to be the person with trauma and mental-health issues whom folks accept without that acceptance leading to a larger investigation on their part about the ways in which they may be biased against others who live with similar issues. Accepting me needs to go beyond accepting me. I’m not here to be a token. I’m not here to be an exception because I’m not an exception. Accepting me—or engaging in what passes for acceptance, which is often self-righteous tolerance with a side of derision—doesn’t mean someone’s addressed their discriminatory thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. I’m not a one-and-done. I’m not a shortcut. I’m not proof that someone who accepts me is -ism free. I’m not interested in such psychological loitering. Folks need to do the work, all the work, not just scribble my name in a column and call it good.

Sanism and ableism make a person weaker, not stronger. They keep folks from thinking and feeling and instead allow them to slap a label on people and situations, usually while mired in hate and its correlates: anger, defensiveness, dehumanization, and even cruelty. These forms of discrimintation are accepted and even encouraged, yet they do untold harm. Hate in any form has no home on my page, not in response to my work, not in response to me, and not in response to others.

In the United States, a diagnosis is a label that, when applied, results in exorbitant medical charges.

Apparently, John Donne’s work is often analyzed through the lens of queer literary theory. (AI said so, which means it must be true.) It makes sense now, the way I was so hot for him for two years. I actually wrote a paper decades ago about his work that explored his challenges to dualities around sex and gender, but I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I was living in Oklahoma and had never heard of queer theory or queer literary theory. Queer was still a word that lived in my dead father’s mouth.

A fly lives with us now. His name is Jeff. Jeff just bit me on the calf. That’s his way of saying good morning.

Everything is fucking diagnosable.

Lesser goldfinches gather out front to eat and spread desert marigold seeds. They’re rewilding my yard, the flowers and the birds together. Who am I to stop them? I never unwilded myself. Now the goldfinches are calling, their sound the shape of a slide. Tee-oow. Tee-oow. They move into the distance. My eyes settle on the old farmhouse across the creek. It’s yellow like the birds, only less vibrant, the way they are outside of mating season. What’s here is going, is gone, cannot be gotten. Claws. Carpels. Cladding. All going, all gone.

I dreamed I was a double-basin sink in a frat house. The frat members kept shoving their fists in my drains. I didn’t have a garbage disposal in either drain, so I couldn’t stop them. I tried to scream, but my mouth was full of water. All I could do was gurgle as they queued up for their turn. When they left, it was worse than when they were there because I knew they’d be back. My baffles couldn’t relax. I just wanted to be left alone so I could be a sink and experience being a sink.

I’ve been ill the past couple of days and sleeping most of the time. All my dreams have been disturbing. The others involve my father, who I haven’t dreamed about since right after his death forty years ago, other family members, neighbors, the home I grew up in, and neighbors’ homes. Themes include abandonment, isolation, and fear bordering on terror. But the sink dream was the worst of them all.

The longer we live, the longer we live in the past.

I dreamed I invented sardines sold in jars. Their brand name was Jardine.* Dolly Parton did the jingle to the tune Jolene. She substituted the product name Jardine for Joline. It was brilliant.

—

* I decided the brand name should be Jardine, so I’m changing it to that right now, even though I dreamed it as Jarline.

A baby-sized cyst wins the prize for the strangest health news I read today. From MedPage Today: A fitness trainer from Tennessee who avoided doctors for 7 years despite unusual symptoms ended up with a baby-sized cyst extending from the left upper quadrant to the floor of the pelvis.

My husband thinks Robert Plant is the most interesting member of Led Zeppelin. I think it’s Jimmy Page. I am right. Jon is wrong.

I take my water without ICE.

IKEA is having technical issues today, so I don’t recommend ordering anything from them unless you want to find yourself rage-chugging a couple of zero sugar Cherry Cokes before 8 a.m. while talking to one of their chatbots about all the snagglefuckery.

I call him Jeff, the chatbot. Jeff says he’s a human being. Isn’t that what all the bots would have us believe? Jeff doesn’t appear to be able to read screenshots or remember what he’s already said or track with a simple conversation. Maybe Jeff *is* human.

I just misread The 10 Best Sandals as The 10 Best Anals, so that’s how my morning is going.

This country.

I’m a lot of things, but quiet queer isn’t one of them.

My dog saw a white-tailed antelope squirrel when she went outside to potty. She darted at the squirrel, who in turn jumped in the air, did a big flip, and scurried into a hole in our rock wall. Now, another white-tailed antelope squirrel who witnessed the whole thing is screaming incessantly from a nearby basalt boulder.

Yesterday, a dear friend read a poem by Charles Bukowski that moved him. He sent me the poem so I could see it. I’m touched that those I love think of me when a poem means something to them, and that we can connect across distance and time through that poem, both with the work and with each other. Such a gift, such proof that love abounds.

My job right now is to hold my silence while it screams.

Stripped of my emptiness, yet I remain empty.

This desert rain, desperate. This desert heart, wanting.

Love, like grief, can blossom.

Kris Kristofferson is my spirit animal.

“The ‘Man-Eater’ Screwworm Is Coming” is one of the best titles for a scientific feature I’ve read in a while. I feel like the man-eater screwworm is coming for all of us.

Managing my to-do list consists of moving everything to the next day.

Here in the land of erosion, time is down, not back.

The bird makes my mind bird.

It’s alarming what the very few can do to the very many.

I wish someone would steal Wax Dana and take her somewhere nice.

Mushrooms freak me out.

This wind is as my mind is.


Consciousness and the Sonnet

In The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Paul Oppenheimer argues that … the invention of the sonnet must itself be considered symptomatic of the slowly developing state of mind that we designate by the term “Renaissance.” The sonnet is so much more than a form. It marked a shift in Western thought, and what it left out is as important as what it ushered in. That’s what makes it alive and allows us to push up against its constraints. We can both live freely inside its walls and break its walls down to live free. It ain’t no pantoum, baby. That’s for sure. The sonnet exists on a whole other level.

Wildfire

Wildfire Day 9 (June 27, 2025): The Forsyth Fire and France Canyon Fire are now at more than 42,000 acres. Containment remains low. It will be hotter and windier this weekend. The CO2 levels in our house are rising despite running our air filter nonstop. In one update, the team managing the Forsyth Fire said it could potentially make its way to and cross the highway that runs right next to our home, but nothing like that has happened. They also talked about monsoon rains being on the way, but that’s not what the forecast reflects.

Meanwhile, our governor is asking Utahns to pray and fast for rain the way the Mormon settlers did when they were sent to this part of the state. That’s where we’re at, folks, here in Sunny Southern Utah. Praying and fasting and blasting our precious water at fires.

Oh, and fireworks are still legal, even in this extreme drought, and July 4 is quickly approaching. What could go wrong? Maybe nothing if we pray and fast hard enough.

—

Wildfire Day 11 (June 29, 2025): The level of CO2 inside our home continues to build up. I slept most of the day yesterday and feel lightheaded and spacey today. Too much dead tree in my lungs. Too much dead everything. I can’t imagine how wildlife and livestock feel or folks who have to be outside to work. Forsyth is still minimally contained. And growing. France Canyon is minimally contained and growing. Another day. Another breath. Another acre. Another asphyxiation. How much smoke can air suspend? More, it seems. Even more.

—

Wildfire Day 15, Entry 1 (July 3, 2025): Notes in the form of an expedition journal. CO2 level in home, 675ppm down from 980ppm. Air monitor flashes green rather than orange as I pass by it in the dark. The house fan is set to on for the next five days. New MERV 13 filters are on the way. The latest migraine, which started 3 days ago, persists. Throbbing, throbbing. How is it possible for an entire body to throb? The backs of the arms. The feet. Not just the head, which is both crushing and throbbing at once like a walnut in a nutcracker being squeezed then released, squeezed then released, never quite cracked.

My 14g immunoglobulin infusion yesterday didn’t help, though its secondary benefit is reducing inflammation. The 6mm needles felt like dull knives at every entry point. They left my arms swollen and bruised.

Sensing my movements, my fitness-tracking watch has woken itself up. It’s like an externalized inner compass helping me navigate every sleeping and waking moment. It buzzed when I received an email just now, at 2:37 a.m., from Lit Mag News, which I never read. I don’t know how that relates to health. My fitness-tracking watch is one of those things that does everything, a real Swiss army knife for whatever this is I’m doing. Living, I guess. Surviving. Checking email from my wrist at 2:37 a.m. because it makes my forearm vibrate like a new-fangled type of paresthesia.

We’ve been told to stay inside. We’ve been told to vacate the national parks and the state parks and the reservoirs in the area. We’ve been told to drive carefully if we have to go out because wildfire smoke is limiting visibility. The closest one, the Forsyth Fire, is 13,419 acres and 42% contained.

My last TSH level was 27mIU/L, 54 times what it should be for continued suppression of my thyroid cancer, and 9 times higher than the upper limit of normal. Anything outside 0.5–3mIU/L threatens my mental health. Anything north of 1.5mIU/L is generally suboptimal and works against my overall health and wellness. My endocrinologist switched me from the liquid form of thyroid replacement back to the pill I used to take, but at a much higher dose than I’ve ever taken before. I maintained my TSH levels on 94mcg of thyroid replacement in pill form for years. She prescribed 137mcg because that’s what I was taking in the liquid form that I appear to not have been absorbing well. It required ratcheting up every few months over the course of 3 years, which is how I got to such a high dose compared with the pill form I’d been taking.

I started taking the new prescription 8 days ago, which was 8 days into the wildfire. I’m hungry all the time. I’m eating right now. Almonds, a Munk bar, Oikos yogurt. Whatever I can lay my hands on in the dark. This seems to please the migraine. Less throbbing. A semi-reprieve. I laid my hands on two Tylenol and took them, even though they never seem to do anything. I laid my hands on a cold migraine head thing I keep in the refrigerator, though it only offers temporary relief, perhaps more of a distraction than anything else.

I log everything I eat in Cronometer, my master data center for the health metrics I track. The watch data ends up in there, too. Typically, this data characterizes my health. The past week, it’s characterized by my lack of health. Too much food. Not enough nutrients. Too much pain. Not enough movement. Sleep broken by pain. Pain breaking body. Body breaking down the way wood is broken down by fire.

I’m 334 calories into my midnight grazing, and I’m still hungry. I expect my hair to start falling out next, another side effect of too much thyroid replacement. I’ll call the endocrinologist later today about cutting this dose down and working up to the right replacement level. I won’t be able to travel until my TSH levels are stable. I really want to go to Oklahoma in August. I don’t have much time to get this sorted out.

The new therapist who does parts work using the Internal Family Systems framework tried to tell me two weeks ago, during another migraine, that I needed to ask my migraine what it wanted. A migraine is not a part. This is not what IFS is and not how it should be used. Framing every chronic health issue as a “part” we need to talk to and make friends with is a form of gaslighting. It’s dismissive and dangerous. I’m not going to go looking for a part that caused my genetic immunodeficiency or a part that caused my cancer. That approach is just another way to deny the realities of patients’, especially chronically ill female-bodied patients’, lives. Physical illnesses are not all in our heads or caused by what’s in our heads. Psychology needs to stay in its lane, just as medicine needs to stay in its lane.

CO2 levels are rising in the home. 713ppm. Still in the green zone. It’s because I’m sitting here breathing. Pulse rate 96 beats per minute. Watch has reported no recent body responses, meaning stress is somehow in check. Throbbing 70% better than it was when I woke up. Hydration level good. Still hungry. Can’t fix that. I’m going back to bed.

It occurs to me that this may be an apocalypse journal, not a wildfire journal. So be it. Maybe someday soon, the smoke will clear and I’ll be able to go outside. Maybe not.

—

Wildfire Day 15 Entry 2 (July 3, 2025): Notes in the form of an expedition journal. CO2 level in home, 702ppm. Air monitor flashing green. We forgot to keep the MERV 13 filtration going continuously over the weekend, and our CO2 levels reached bearly 1,000ppm, well into the orange zone. Those were the days when I was coughing. My asthma is better today, so the filtration must be working.

I have a Salonpas pain patch meant for backs affixed to my forehead. It’s not really helping my migraine, but it’s not not helping, either. I might combine it with the cold migraine head thing later. Right now, I’m eating and eating and eating because I continue to feel like I haven’t eaten in days, despite having last eaten at 3 a.m. I’m going to start drinking olive oil by the quarter cup if nothing else is satiating.

I’m going back on the liquid version of my thyroid replacement medicine. My symptoms are all consistent with thyroid hormone overreplacement, and they correspond with my change to the pill form of the medication eight days ago. Plus, my heart rate is up, my blood pressure is up, and I’m sweating excessively and incessantly.

It’s also possible that I’m reacting to the binders and other inactive ingredients used in the pill form of the medication. That’s part of why my doctor switched me to the liquid form in the first place. I tend to discount problems associated with inactive ingredients, but there’s ample evidence that they can cause issues.

People are out walking around in our community as if there’s no wildfire, no problem at all with the air quality. They’re waving, getting their steps in. You can smell and taste the air, just like in the inversions that happen in the northern part of Utah. Smoke. Gasoline. Cigarettes. Perfume. There’s an inversion advisory here because of the wildfire. We haven’t had an inversion in this part of the state since we moved down this way in 2020, in large part to get out of the inversions up north.

When I woke up with my head throbbing after getting in 2 more hours of sleep for a total of 6 hours with a corresponding sleep score of 68, I did what I always do. I turned on the little song that plays continuously from my alarm. It’s a sweet, lilting tune I started playing after my friend Dottie, who was a chihuahua, died. I played it every day in her honor while I was mourning, then I just kept playing it. This morning, it made me feel like I was in Bo Burnham’s Inside, a sweet theme song accompanying my pain, this wildfire, the terror burning through the country. The song felt like: “Look, here we go again. Doing this shit again. Another day of shit again. This shitty song again. This bullshit life again. This Every Thing — Again.”

Tra-la-la.

CO2ppm unknown. Device won’t update. 3,100 steps so far today. Resting heart rate 72 beats per minute, well above average. Current heart rate 95 beats per minute. Way too high for just sitting around. Blood oxygen 96%. Below average. Stress management score 76. Average.

Remind me to tell you about my dreams.

—

Wildfire Day 15, Entry 3 (July 3, 2025): Sun enters our home after sixteen days of wildfire smoke, which meant no clouds, no laccolith, no horses in the distance, no goldfinches flying clean through the air, and no Sun.

On this day of all days, Sun returns and says, Here I am, like nothing happened.

On this day, Sun comes in and sets my body clocks to hope the way my father’s son once did, years ago. I thought he was the son of the Sun, but only my mother was celestial. My father’s son was just my father’s son.

How dare it. How dare Sun come here and wind me up, send me out into this world whose plumage is smeared with batrachotoxin.

How dare it let me stroke such toxic beauty before I even realize what I’ve done.

—

Wildfire Day 16 (July 4, 2025): Notes in the form of an expedition journal. CO2 level in home, 709ppm. Air monitor green. Trending downward from its peak. No update on Forsyth. Acres burned still listed as 13,597. Containment still listed at 46%. Sky hazy. Haven’t been outside yet so no report on how difficult it is to breathe.

Resting heart rate the same as yesterday: 72 beats per minute, which is higher than normal. Sleep score 78. Stress management score up to 81 from 76 yesterday. Good. Body responses so far today, meaning indicators of stress: 9 minutes starting at 5:52 a.m. That was just me standing up when I got out of bed, my postural orthostatic tachycardia kicking in.

Migraine has resolved. Body pain is diminished this morning. Switching back to the liquid form of my thyroid medication seems to correspond with the resolution of or improvement in my symptoms. It will take time for my body to fully right itself.

56 minutes REM sleep. I hour 27 minutes deep sleep. Sleeping heart rate 70 beats per minutes. Too high. No dreams to report. Maybe something about a cookie or a gold coin. Or maybe it was an Oklahoma tax token from The Great Depression.

Soon, we will be able to open all the windows. The air will be clear, but I fear it will be full of hate, which moves invisibly on invisible currents. Or, these days, on currents we are all starting to see.

—

Plagiarus

I’m not making a case for plagiarism, but I am about to say it’s socially constructed and, like anything else, doesn’t exist outside of a specific context or suite of contexts. It wasn’t a concept until it was a concept, and then it took 1600 years or so to not only become a fully formed concept with a label attached to it but also to be addressed, though indirectly, through newly created copyright laws.

In other cultures and in other periods during Western culture, plagiarism didn’t exist, either as a word or as a concept. Writing something original meant writing something steeped in origins. Poets and writers shared lines and themes routinely, though too much imitation could lead to criticism. In one early case in Rome, in which a poet (Fidentinus) recited another poet’s work (Martial) as if it were his own, Martial wasn’t upset about his work being used without attribution. He was concerned about not being paid. He wanted the poet to buy the poems if he was going to perform them as if they were his. That’s not a bad idea. If I could sell my poems to another poet for a profit—well, of course I wouldn’t. (Or would I?)

What did Martial do in response to Fidentinus? He wrote a bunch of unflattering poems about the guy, in which he characterized him as a kidnapper—a plagiarus (ah!)—which Ben Johnson picked up on about 1500 years later in 1601 when he coined the term plagiary to denote someone who was guilty of literary theft. Copyright laws followed in England and the United States in the 1700s, which accompanied a shift in the concept of originality from something with origins to something wholly new, as well as greater distribution of mass-produced books, a larger body of folks who were profiting from creative works, and a desire for academicians to protect their writing.

Again, I’m not making the case for plagiarism, but I am interested in removing it from an ahistorical context and situating it in history because it’s something we came to, collectively, not something that simply exists and has always existed—just as mental-health diagnostic labels are something we’ve come to, collectively and often with great harm as a result, as opposed to things that exist and have always existed.

Our consciousness about things changes. We will things into being, and we’re sometimes wrong about what we think we see (and perceive as immutable and everlasting). The intersection between plagiarism and the assumption that someone who plagiarized must be mentally ill, particularly with one or more personality disorders, interests me because both the concept of plagiarism and the concept of personality disorders are socially constructed, have come into existence at different points in our history, and will continue to shift over time.

In the case of plagiarism, AI is causing such a shift right now. We’re coming into consciousness about that intersection and what it means for writing and writers. In the case of personality disorders, there are shifts as well, as there should be. They were almost removed from the DSM-5 because of the ongoing debate about whether they’re even mental illnesses. Borderline personality disorder in particular has come under much deserved scrutiny because it’s so broadly defined as to be unhelpful as a diagnostic framework, it’s fettered with gender-based bias, it’s dismissive of trauma, and it disregards the fact that borderline traits appear to be a form of delayed social development, not a personality disorder or form of mental illness.

Someone can plagiarize without being mentally ill. Someone can be a piece of shit without being mentally ill. We can talk about beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors without adding a diagnostic label, especially one we’re not qualified to use because we’re not licensed mental-health professionals. The DSM-5 has innumerable flaws and has always been the product of a colonized mindset, one that situates issues solely within individuals while ignoring larger factors such as institutionalized discrimination. It’s also led a not insignificant number of lay folks to label anyone whose behavior they don’t like with clinical terms they themselves don’t understand and outside of their historical and contemporary contexts, which in turn ends up harming everyone who embraces, lives with, or has had those diagnostic labels foisted on them, as well as perpetuating ignorance, fear, and stigma at all levels in our society.

Said another way, some things about being human are a feature, not a bug. We are kind of pieces of shit who do piece of shit stuff all the time. It’s not all Buddha nature up inside us. There’s some of that, but it’s not the whole thing. We are dark, and that darkness extends beyond mental illness. Bless our collective hearts.

On Plagiarism

In this piece on plagiarism, the author argues that it’s not a behavior caused by mental illness. I’ve been trying to understand the psychology behind plagiarism because a poet was recently identified as having plagiarized a number of poems that were published in literary journals, placed in or won contests, and may have been included in a forthcoming collection. Excerpt below.

—

As a psychiatrist, I do not believe primary mental illnesses (aside from the aforementioned personality disorders) cause plagiarism. Plagiarism involves an internally logical thought process, a steady hand carefully putting together portions of copied information in a linear fashion; the product pretends to be an original completed written piece. Plagiarism is difficult to detect without someone directly pointing out the absent attributions and copied words.

It seems atypical to me for this deliberate, planned, coherent act of writing to be associated with the thought disorder and flight of ideas and ramblings of someone in the throes of acute delusional psychosis or florid mania. It is also atypical of the creativity and originality well-known to be associated with some people with mood disorders (including famous artists and writers), who tend to have no trouble coming up with their own ideas and material, and if anything, seem the least likely types to merely copy someone else’s work.

Beating Back Blackbirds

I went to Storm the Mic tonight at Art Provides in St. George, Utah. This is the energy and community I’ve been looking for here in Southern Utah. Things finally aligned in a way that allowed me to attend. I also read three of my poems. It’s the first time I’ve done so in more than eight years.

It was important for me to read tonight. If I didn’t do it, I’d never do it. And poems can’t just live on the page. They live in us, through us, and between us. We have to give them breath. They move through our bodies by way of our lungs, our throats, our mouths.

Poems are like instruments. You can’t leave an instrument in its case or just open the case and peer inside at all that bright metal or dark wood. You have to get it out and say it/play it.

I left poetry and the poetry community eight years ago after an especially traumatizing situation that made it impossible for me to continue writing. I vowed to never write another poem. And I didn’t until I had a cancer scare last summer and started talking with some friends of mine, poets who never gave up on me, who kept loving me and checking in on me year after year. One night, after talking with one of those friends, I decided to write a poem to wind down before I went to sleep.

“Boys are beating back blackbirds. Houses hoard the sunrise. / This autumn is unmetered, a dream of wind and shovels.”

Those were the first two lines. I knew I was in trouble. Poems were still there, inside me, surrounding me, eager to be transcribed. Poems waited for me, too, all those years. When I returned, they weren’t even angry. They just flowed.

“This room. This rock. This rough sand. On my shoulder. / On my stutter. On my girl skull. On my hinges.”

Oh, I was in so much trouble. But it was good trouble. This time, poetry would be nothing in my life but good trouble. I could tell. I could feel it. I was home, again, in these words that twist and dance and break and stammer all around us all the time. I could catch them and engage in deep play, deep exploration.

Love. That’s what it is. Writing poetry is an act of love, an act of care directed inward and outward: community care and self-care. It doesn’t even matter what we write about. It’s all love, ultimately. Love is—didn’t Thich Nhat Hanh say this—the act of being alive not only within but also because of uncertainty and pain. (I’ll find the quote and update this post when I do.) The upshot is: What isn’t love? It’s all love.

“Night of deep crimes. Day of mirage ceilings. / During each, an orchestra of fire between my ears.”

Darren Edwards does an incredible job hosting Storm the Mic. I’m so thankful for him, for everyone who attended and read, and for Art Provides for letting folks use their space. They are literally providing for artists, poets, and writers when all three are so desperately needed.