Month: July 2025

Ostinatos

Good morning fuck everything I love you.

When I say We got a really good deal on a refrigerator through Costco, what I’m really saying is, I’m old. I give up. Where’s my print newspaper? Where’s my wall-mount phone with the really long cord that I can wrap around my neck like haha just kidding before I untangle myself right as my lips start turning blue and hey! a place for the tub of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and oh, some Zima would be great on this little shelf right here.

I dreamed I got together with some poets over Zoom, and we were all so tired we just took a virtual group nap together for an hour. I feel like this could be an actual thing.

“Rain follows the plow” was a popular but deeply misguided slogan created on the heels of the Homestead Act of 1862. The Dust Bowl proved rain did anything but follow the plow, especially when unsustainable farming practices were employed.

What misguided slogan describes the beliefs driving current actions in the United States? Equality follows oppression? Love follows hate? Freedom follows autocracy?

Little horse, little girl with no rider, little whine, little winny, little weakness.

The neverendingness of the Epstein abuses mirrors the neverendingness of trauma from such abuses. Trauma is a wound of the present. Epstein is a wound of the present for anyone who’s experienced the kinds of abuses he inflicted on so many women and girls.

I am a ghost haunting a ghost.

I’m on the lamb from poems. I don’t want them to find me. I mean lam. I mean iamb. Oh, no! Scansion found me.

Five-word argument.

Me: Quit being so loud.

Him: Dude.

I have made myself violently ill. You call it the bathroom. I call it the room of intestinal distress, of might as well be attending my own disemboweling, of oh my god how can my body possibly malfunction in this many ways all at once, of I can’t prebiotic and probiotic my way out of this, of I’d rather be sweaty corn in a Midwestern field than this human being with these innards right now, of the next time I come across melted ice cream I’d better not freaking eat it.

Meanwhile, my husband, who ate rotten meat, is outside vacuuming the gravel because nothing affects his digestive tract.

I’m not saying the past never happened. I’m saying I can’t catch up to it.



I think it’s possible to eat too much bread and drink too much zero-sugar soda.

I took a weird nap and feel strangely absent from my life.

Oh, no! I ate some really questionable low-carb ice cream last night (the whole thing), and I knew something was up with it, you know, but I kept eating it because it’s ice cream and who can quit eating ice cream, and I mean, I just sold myself on some malarky about how the company must have made adjustments to the texture or something, and I kept telling myself that even though the creamy parts all seemed to be in one lump and the air had gone out of it, so it was half the normal volume, and then just now Jon had two frozen hotdogs that he thawed in the microwave, and he thought they seemed funky, but he ate them anyway because they’re hot dogs, you know, even though I’d told him about my ice cream ordeal, and he just ran into my office in a panic, and tldr, our freezer isn’t working, and we made stupid-bad decisions around yummy food that was clearly rancid, and this is the second time this whole scenario has played out in the past year, and we are both going to die, and if we don’t, we are getting a new refrigerator.

Has the corn sweat gotten to some of y’all? I’m just asking.

According to my research, Intermountain Health here in Utah and beyond receives federal funds for behavioral health and addiction and recovery interventions. I want to know if those funds will shift to the ones described in the “Ending Crime and Disorder” executive order and if that means anyone who receives or has received related services through Intermoutain will be added to the local, state, and federal registries the EO requires.

Too many folks are celebrating this EO.

The lesser golfinches are singing. They don’t know what humans are capable of. Their news is light, song, another day.

Why does intergenerational trauma in families persist across three or four generations? In part because things happen again. Like ostinatos in music, traumas repeat themselves.

From a comment on a friend’s post: The terror in my past has come into my present (see also: our past, our present). The hatred in too many hearts has come home to roost. The ignorance and indifference of many others allowed this to happen, got us here, will keep us here. Save your thoughts and prayers. Examine your own bigotry, your sanist language and beliefs, your ableism, your classism, your othering even as you call out other forms of othering. Examine the ways you cut people like those affected by this executive order out of your lives, out of your literatures, and out of your hearts, out of your minds. Yes, out of your minds. Now is the time to get educated about what’s happening, what’s always happened in this country to entire classes of people. People like me. But way more than just me. Now is the time to act—well. To act in the name of justice, not just put earrings on the pig of injustice.

I will not go quietly.

Your empathy is hollow if it stops short of embracing those with mental-health issues. Even worse if you’re a sanist who uses those with mental-health issues as metaphorical punching bags. We need you. We’ve needed you for a long time. Shape up. See us. Stand alongside us. Fight for and with us.

The executive order I just posted about is terrifying. Criminalization of those who are unhoused. Forced indefinite institutionalization. Sweeping surveillance of anyone with a mental-health disability. Let that sink in. The worst of our history, the history most folks never had to learn about, the history that affects the most invisible of marginalized and othered people, is back. It’s here. Who is paying attention. Who cares. The ship is sinking and it’s not even a ship. It’s a coffin.

I am awake. I am not asleep. I sustained an arm injury from, waiting for it, holding my phone while talking to a friend for a few hours yesterday evening. It’s like the time I bruised my wrist in two places playing, or at least trying to play, tennis. So I am awake. I woke up hurt at 2 a.m. I’m also having an issue related to my choline supplements. I need a digestive enzyme I don’t appear to have enough of. This body. This body. So much work, this body. Mind is even more work than body.

Also, we have to work at changing bigger stories, cultural stories. We are at once within ourselves and also in the world at all times. Narratives exist at all levels and are often invisible because they’re taken as universal truths. Marginalized folks are in a unique position to help bring about these changes in stories, in storytelling, just by being storytellers. Living with a mental-health diagnostic label and having lived experience with extreme states is something that necessarily marginalizes us, but we have power, individually and collectively.

I was thinking the other day about how those who haunt. The way haunting exists in our culture is almost always a form of othering. It’s never rich white dudes who are doing the haunting. It’s always someone oppressed, marginalized, different. There are a lot of stories about hauntings around the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked. People use ghosts to discriminate against the dead, against whole classes of people. That’s clear. There’s also an empowering haunting, or at least one that’s seemingly empowering. The narrative of someone who can do in death what they didn’t do in life. But I’m with you or at least your speaker here: We don’t win by haunting others. But the haunting often occurs in the others, in their unresolved feelings about how haunts and how and why.

OMG, my sleep score was a 92! Personal best. Was dreaming in poems what made my score so good, or was my score so good because I was dreaming in poems?

The poet energy is strong today. Do you feel it? I can already tell by your posts, comments, and private messages.

Lines that appeared as I moved from dreaming into wakefulness this morning:

Sometimes / we need to be / a vast wild land
To burn / and burn in turn, pinyons / and more
pinyons, fire and more / fire

In the game eat, marry, kill, I am all three.

Maybe we burn our bridges so we can learn how to swim.

There’s always one cicada here in the desert who’s like, “I DID IT! I MOLTED ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZ!”

I dreamed I chewed up and ate my own teeth. Just now. I fell asleep and dreamed that. The fillings went down hard.

My mother was my home. My father was my grave.

Remember that 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan with the nude centerfold of Burt Reynolds? My mother had that issue. She put it on a shelf in a bookcase my father built before he died in 1985, right beside her copy of the DSM-3 and some of the books she had as a child.

My father idolized Reynolds. He wanted to be an outlaw just like Bo “Bandit” Darville in Smokey and the Bandit. That centerfold was my mother’s way of letting my father know he was no Burt, not even close. That dis is so flaming-hot to this day. My mother’s side of the family knew the fine art of the burn.

Seven-word argument:

Him: You’re too angry.

Me: You’re not angry enough.

I saw my therapist this afternoon. We talked about Andrea Gibson the whole time. In the last sixty seconds of the session, I almost started bawling. I got to my car and drove to a nearby store. I started writing a poem in my head, something inspired by Andrea. It started with the lines: “I used to think a soft man / was safer than a hard woman. / I was wrong.” A Journey song came on the radio, “Don’t Stop Believing” or whatever. I pulled into a parking spot and lost it. I just lost it. Big Ugly Cry as People Walked Past the Car lost it. May we all inhabit our lives. May the lines between where we want to be and where we’re wanted intersect over and over and over like tightly braided sweetgrass. May the rain keep falling. May love conquer all. Goodnight.

I dreamed that a human being is a consequence, not a personality or identity or instance of individuation. A consequence, often of war in one form or another. I dreamed that war is a consequence, not an inevitability or glory or necessity. A consequence of humans in one form or another. There was more to the dream than that, but humans as a consequence of wars and wars as a consequence of humans are the parts I remember.

My face is all don’t eff with me, but my nose is all put a red ball on me so we can do clown stuff.

Imagine loving others so much that your love sustains them even after you’re gone. That’s what Andrea Gibson did for those she loved, those she created worlds with, those she never met, those who made a home in her heart and in her words. Some folks think of Jesus and the love he gave human beings. Why not think of someone who walks among us now or so close to now it might as well be now? Someone like Andrea.

Yesterday, I came across my birth announcement in The Norman Transcript. The announcement has both my parents’ names and says I’m their “daughter.” I wasn’t their daughter. I was her child and his object. I weighed nine pounds when I was born—a real don’t mess with me weight that I still carry to this day.

If you feel like you don’t belong, create spaces where you and others belong.

I dreamed God’s name was Plumplum. We were supposed to give Plumplum plums. We gave Plumplum everything but plums.

The world is a dumpster fire, and Midnight Facebook is telling me to pull my belly button in.

The Keep Utah Wildfire Free messaging on the socials is ironic, given that Utah is anything but wildfire-free right now.

Midnight Facebook: Hey, do you wanna see a video about getting rid of a senile wart using two pieces of dental floss?

So many of the jokes folks with mental-health issues make are at our own expense and reflect our internalized self-loathing and oppression. I don’t know how we can empower ourselves and each other when we’ve bought the othering, dehumanizing narrative hook, line, and sinker.

My thermometer said it was 115 degrees while I was out today. We may be in a severe drought here in Southern Utah, but there’s plenty of moisture IN MY CROTCH. Just call me Dana “Wet Nethers” Henry Martin for the rest of the summer.

This morning, my husband said we are in the youth of our old age and need to have fun while we can, then he gave me a MIDI drum machine you play with your fingers because he knows how much I like making musical noise.

If money’s being poured into it, it’s not good for humans, for all living beings, or for the environment. Especially these days. We are what’s being bought and sold. The whole damn planet is at an endless auction called the Live Earth Market, soon to be the site of the Dead Earth Memorial.

A forced march toward cultural death gussied up as a parade: Microsoft and OpenAI announced yesterday that they would spend millions on a new program that will train teachers to use artificial intelligence. It’s part of a bigger push by tech companies to get their chatbots into schools.


When I say it took me five years to love Southern Utah, what I mean is 320,000 canyon-equivalent years and 125,000,000 cliff-equivalent years.

Every year of your life translates, roughly, to 64,000 years in canyon time and about 2,500,000 years in cliff time.

You have taken more than 1,653,600 breaths this year. Keep breathing.

Because he loves us, President Trump threatened to impose up to 200% tariffs on pharmaceutical products imported into the United States.

Woke up on the wrong side of a hyperrealistic dream that revealed too much about the world, and about me, to me.

I dreamed that everyone is born an infant each day and grows into their current age over the first two hours of wakefulness. This kept us in touch with our own changing bodies and minds and eliminated our hatred for each other because we could all literally see the child inside each of us, the scared teen, the idealistic young adult, and so forth.

If he lived in our times, Percy Bysshe Shelley would have written The Trump of Death rather than The Triumph of Life.

Once, my sister asked me if I remembered a dog my family had before I was alive. That was before I was born, I told her. I know, she said. I just thought you might remember anyway.

The words that appear most frequently in my manuscript Crude are you, me, water, and mother.

Water is just a form of ice, and it turns ice into water. In the game of Rock, Paper, Ice, where Rock is riveting power, Paper is a papering over, and Ice is ICE, be water. Water always wins.

I’m reading an account of a dusky grouse who attacked two hikers up in Park City, Utah. The bird ran toward them with his ruff and tail up and started pecking at their legs. He followed them for a long time before retreating. This is probably because there were chicks nearby, but I’d like to believe wild animals are just done with humans, especially the ones who can afford to be up in Park City.

I pledge my civil disobedience to the hate symbol of the Divided States of Unmerica, and to the pugnation for which it stands, Shitnation under GOP, divisible, with no liberty or justice, just gall.

The ignorance of others will not govern and inform my life.

Some folks are so othered that they are othered by others who are othered.

The hand is a sign if you use it to speak.

—

From my marginalia in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco Poems, which I had with me when I spent three days in a psychiatric hospital Littleton, Colorado, in 2023.

So when will the flag be added to the global extremist symbols database? Asking for the Americans who are being targeted in this country’s new tactical playbook.

I’m not a nevernude, but I do live in neverenude-adjacent territory. A one block over kind of thing, the way our home is a block from La Verkin, a former hub for two national white-supremacy groups here in Utah, one of which claimed Zion National Park was the white homeland. OK, not like that. Just like preferring cute jammies over sleeping with nothing on. Also, spell check tried to change white supremacy to white-tailed deer. How darling. If only it were possible to spell check all our troubles in this country away.

I didn’t mean to have a big neuroqueer coming out party today, but that’s how things unfolded. It’s the best spontaneous action response I could muster on this dirge that is the 2025 Fourth of Why in these No Longer United States of America.

I realize my attempts to be seen as human will lead many folks to see me as less-than human. If that’s what you take from my stories and poems, so be it, and bless your heart. I’m going to keep at it because these attempts aren’t just for me. They’re for my mother. For poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. For everyone who’s been disregarded, dehumanized, and pathologized based on a mental-health label.

Like, I dunno. I see a bird and think, Maybe we can go on.

I didn’t mean to have a big neuroqueer coming out party today, but that’s how things unfolded. It’s the best spontaneous action response I could muster on this dirge that is the 2025 Fourth of Why in these No Longer United States of America.

I realize my attempts to be seen as human will lead many folks to see me as less-than human. If that’s what you take from my stories and poems, so be it, and bless your heart. I’m going to keep at it because these attempts aren’t just for me. They’re for my mother. For poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. For everyone who’s been disregarded, dehumanized, and pathologized based on a mental-health label.


I feel like the dog in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” 

Don’t be fooled. All forest roads lead to logging.

Flying bats seems redundant. Are there some who just walk everywhere?

I imagine a future in which humans are “de-extincted” by beings who are humanlike but not human.

Did we really think we were going to die pretty?

Every time I see the word migration, my eyes conspire with my mind to rearrange the letters so I see what I want to see: my mother’s name, Mignon.

Averse Wind

We have been carefully guarded by kind and zealous instructors from every averse wind of thought and every taint of evil to be met in a world of action just beyond us. Now our hands are unclasped; sorrowfully we separate to go our different ways, to live the lives to which we shall be called, no longer as a class, but as individuals. — Merry Mignon Thonton

—

From my mother’s high-school valedictory speech given in Headrick, Oklahoma, in 1950, when she was sixteen years old

Glurb

Welcome to this episode of My Stomach Hates Me. I’ve eaten nothing, taken no supplements, done absolutely nothing at all today other than breathe and walk and sit and put pants on, but stomach here has decided to glurb around inside me like the noisy, mischievous little monster with smelly feet in the children’s book Adopt a Glurb.

Adopt this Glurb: my stomach. Trade me for one of y’all’s. Any takers? Any givers? Anyone? Anyone?

Don’t miss out on this chance to have your very own Glurb.

Meanwhile, my husband is in the kitchen eating more of the rancid meat from the other day, and his stomach couldn’t care less. His reasoning? It’s expensive, and he doesn’t want to waste it.

Maybe he’ll trade me. This seems like one of those for better or worse situations: worse being my stomach, better being his.

Cough-Vomiting

Have you ever tried to swallow a pill but you have to cough suddenly at the same time and you end up choking on the pill and the water and then sort of cough-vomiting all over your new refrigerator and then you get a bronchial cough for the rest of the night that feels like aspiration pneumonia setting in but you think it’s just irritation from all the choking and cough-vomiting so you drink a bunch of zero sugar soda that the new refrigerator is keeping really cold oh so cold but it’s not helping with the cough so now you’re just wired and tired and mad at everything, especially your poems and somehow also the refrigerator, which didn’t even do anything? Me, neither.

Ancestry

I just renewed my Ancestry subscription, and the first new piece of information about my father and his brother is that they performed in blackface in a show called the “Red Shirt Minstrel” in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, November 12, 1946, directed by Maybelle Conger. There are photos. There is a list of “character” names that includes some of my father’s favorite racial slurs. He would have been seventeen years old. He and his brother are listed as “Gentlemen of the Chorus.” I am screaming. I can’t stop screaming. He is in the photos. I shared a fraction of the image in the comments. I couldn’t bear to share the actual photos of the event.

Brackish

I’m not going to tell you how my arms are tingling and why, how a patch on the back of my head is tingling, too. It was the dream. The dream would have been enough. But it was also the nightmare. I won’t let the dream become words yet. I won’t let the nightmare become words yet. They are both doing their work inside my body as crickets or something like crickets sing outside my windows in the Southern Utah desert.

The crickets sing on the other side of a world taken by humans, wrecked by humans, a brackish world like parts of Lake Texoma where nobody ever drowns except those who do.

In the dream, a girl felt pure love and lived for the first time. The girl wasn’t me. She was me. In the nightmare, children are gathered around my dog Fifi at my fifth birthday party. Ruthie is there. Her brother. Sara. Lola. Corey. I am there holding a stuffed bird who sings “Fly Me to the Moon.” I am dancing with the bird, spinning in circles. Sara is petting Fifi. She looks bored or scared or both. We all do. Fifi turns into my father. He’s doing karaoke. He’s drunk, gaze untethered above his mouth and nose. He’s looking down at us, on us, at whoever’s holding the camera. My party father. My gilded father. I want us kids to scatter like balls on a pool table. I want us to glide across the table and fall into pockets where we can hide. We don’t. We’re stuck, frozen. I wake up, leaving the other children there. I wake up tingling.

My nightmare is three photos from three different times. The birthday party. The bird. My father. The last one was taken long before I was born. It was another party, different children. Maybe no children. I’ll check the photos when it’s light out, when the crickets are quiet and the world has been returned to the living. These are the dead hours. They are for and of the dead. Too many dead. Too much unnatural death. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. My country ’tis not of me. Saccharin land of incivility. False freedom blings.

Rumprot

Content warning. I dreamed the leader I call Rumprot invented something called IUEDs, which stands for intrauterine explosive devices. He was booby trapping us, and he had a monstrous way of both placing and checking for these devices, which he passed off as absolutely necessary for national security and which he joked was like enacting a reverse breach birth. When he tried to check me for an IUED, I startled from the dream with an abrupt, layered utterance like a baby grand piano dropped from a penthouse the moment it hits the pavement. My strings are taut. They’re still vibrating. Good morning.

Walks Close to Whining

In this collection you are saying something that needs to be said and you are saying it in language that cannot be ignored or hidden from. The truth told with a very sharp knife. Yet part of this truth is that women allow this shit to go on. Do we not allow men to have the power you describe? It seems to me that as you rip men a new one—the same needs to happen to women. What in the hell are we doing—why do we let our power go? Without this emotional component the collection walks close to whining (in my opinion) which always occurs from a place of weakness. Yet this collection would seem to be aiming at a recognition of the power imbalance between men and women and the way men frequently force their will on us—and then a turn toward a new balance. But the only way that will happen is if women acknowledge their complicity in the imbalance.

The publisher of one of my collections, which dealt with CSA, including my own experiences and those of my best friend when I was young, made the comment above about it in 2011 after soliciting the work from me. I never should have allowed them to proceed with publishing the collection. I just came across the comment again while searching for something else in my email. That publisher was a woman, and it wasn’t Juliet Cook or Margaret Bashaar. It speaks to myriad ways in which some women and female-bodied poets who believe they’re empowering themselves and others can be misguided and do harm. It’s not just men in poetry who harm others and the community as a whole.

Through her lens, my work about CSA walked close to whining and needed to discuss power dynamics that don’t apply to children who are being harmed, including dynamics forced into the strict binary of male and female, one that’s oppositional, not dialectical. The speaker and others who inhabit the poems aren’t even male or female. That isn’t called out ever. As a nonbinary person (who was publicly identifying as trans at the time), it’s not how I envisioned them.*

And this was from someone who wanted to publish and ultimately did publish my collection. Again, I should have yanked it. She ended up quietly removing the collection at some point without telling me or preserving the files in any way. It was a digital collection with custom artwork. I would have liked to have had it, even just for myself. I believe I know why that happened. In any case, it was another form of erasure of me and my work.

Also, to those who say things like, Your work just isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK, please see that this assessment isn’t about the work, nor was that the case with the poet I just had the dreadful, unwanted interactions with. It’s fine for work to not be right for someone. These kinds of interactions go deeper than that, so please quit uncoupling literary assessment (which isn’t even what this kind of thing is) from personal attacks and assessments that go far afield of the work.

* The word nonbinary wasn’t yet in use, and trans felt like a better fit than saying I was bisexual. I knew gender was involved, not just sexuality, and the binary nature of the word bisexual wasn’t a good fit for me anymore, either. I knew both gender and sexuality were on a continuum. I was trying to find the language for my place on those continua as language was evolving to be more inclusive and less oppositional. Also, people can move around on these continua over the course of their lives. For instance, I’m asexual at this point, which used to be the last letter in LGBTQIA+, though it has largely been truncated away, along with the interior T, which has disappeared for political reasons. I never would have identified as asexual in my 20s or 30s. But bodies change, minds change, and age changes, which changes a lot of things about body and mind—in my case sexuality, hence my move to the term queer, which covers the waterfront where gender and sexuality are concerned. More specifically, thanks to a friend, I’ve started using the term neuroqueer because it’s not only inclusive of all my forms of neuroatypicality, it also suggests a relationship between my neuroatypicality and my sexuality and gender. For me, that relationship is real and meaningful.

The one thing I agree with in this publisher’s assessment is that I should not have allowed her to frame my work the way she did. It was a great publishing company. I didn’t think I’d ever get an opportunity like that again. I sold myself, my work, and my values, and I fawned at her the way I learned to in order to survival the unthinkable as a child. That will never happen again. I’d rather live in one of DT’s camps than live a life that’s bought and sold, one in which I’ve been bought and sold.

I will add this one last thought: I recognize that some of the same forces that shaped me in my life may have shaped this publisher in her life. I realize she’s been through it, probably for decades now, the way women, those who are female-bodied, and other oppressed and marginalized groups have been and continue to go through it. But she was still wrong in this instance. She foisted a huge thing on me and my work. Anyone can be misguided. I understand that more when someone isn’t coming from a place of completely (or at least largely) unexamined privilege. That means I do have empathy for her. I still shouldn’t have published with her.

Angles

A poet asked to see my manuscript Crude after praising my writing and telling me I should write a whole collection about my family history. (That’s exactly what Crude is.) After I sent it to them, they asked me if I wanted feedback on the collection. I told them I did not.

But they couldn’t resist giving me feedback they knew I didn’t want. Today, I received an email with the subject line felt like I had to give SOME kind of a response. They led by saying they were almost sorry they asked to read Crude. They then infantalized me using an image from the collection, characterizing me as a little girl who’s always ready for a fight, suggested I rewrite the collection as poetry alternating with prose, said I should add a poem about my father’s death, provided instruction about where to put that poem in the collection, and, as a capper, shared a poem they wrote based on my life and experience, titled “Oklahoma Crude,” I guess to show me how it’s done, since I apparently don’t know how it’s done.

Some of you really don’t see what you’re doing, do you? How you’re coming across? What impulses you can’t contain and how much you’re reacting to your own anima, not the women and female-bodied folks around you, who you confuse for that anima. You really think we’re just super upset out of nowhere all the time for no discernible reason, which is proof we are like children, not adults, not fully grown women or female-bodied humans. To you who see us this way, we are, as this poet said in their email, Silvia Plath [sic] drowning in Lake Texhoma [sic]. *

No we aren’t. We aren’t any of that. I’m here as a witness and as a testament to the fact that you have us all wrong and always have and always will. As long as there is past and future, you will have gotten and will continue to get us wrong.

We deal with this shit from you all the time. All the freaking time. We are tired. I am tired.

So that’s the other part of how my day is going. The first part is the extermination order directed at those who are unhoused, have mental-health issues, and have substance-abuse issues. I mean the executive order. My bad. Incarcination and institutionalization aren’t extermination. At least not yet.

Here’s the thing: You don’t get to angle to move a conversation from a public to a private space using the false pretense of wanting to read my poetry collection, use that privacy to say things that are inappropriate, then claim that private space is privileged and protected and that what you say within it can’t be called out or shared. That’s not how things work. You certainly don’t get to frame me as doing something even worse to you than what you did to me or pressure me to remove your name from my assessment and commentary about what you did. And I didn’t share what you did with friends. I shared it with our mutual writing and poetry community because it’s important for people to know what men like you are doing within that community. They can make up their own minds about you, as I have.

—

* It’s Sylvia and Texoma.

The July 24 Executive Order

From the ACLU. This is appalling. Link in comments: President Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing states to criminalize unhoused people and institutionalize people with mental health disabilities and substance use disorder.

The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” directs the Justice Department to expand indefinite forced treatment for people with mental health disabilities or substance use disorder, and those living on the street who “cannot care for themselves.” The order also purports to eliminate federal funding for evidence-based programs, like harm reduction and housing first, that save lives, and directs federal funds toward cities and states that criminalize substance use disorder, punish people for sleeping outdoors, or enforce other laws targeting unhoused people.

The order also calls for sweeping federal data collection on unhoused people and those with mental health disabilities, raising serious concerns about surveillance, privacy, and how such data could be used to justify further criminalization. Instead of funding services or support, the administration is prioritizing profiling and control.

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Headlines about the executive order and the name of the order itself are misleading. It’s going after those with mental-health issues AND those who are unhoused, not just those who are unhoused and also have mental-health issues. Both scenarios are noxious, but the latter is even more noxious. The EO encourages the involuntary commitment of “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public” and does not specify a time frame for such commitment, only that it be “appropriate periods of time.” It also provides funds for state and local governments to implement this plan, meaning round up folks with mental-health issues. All of this should terrify you, enrage you, and be distilled as outrage that, when intersected with love, allows you to act.

The EO also requires those receiving funding to “share such data with law enforcement authorities in circumstances permitted by law and to use the collected health data to provide appropriate medical care to individuals with mental health diagnoses.” In other words, a registry of those with mental-health issues that must be created at the local and state level and shared with the federal government.

This is a criminal state criminalizing those harmed by the criminal state.

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The executive order applies in part to those with mental-health issues who are deemed unable to care for themselves. You want to know one of the things that makes folks with mental-health issues unable to care for themselves? Overmedication, especially with high-dose neuroleptics or polypharmacology that leaves folks living inside clouded, plodding bodies and minds.

This approach to treatment is exactly what the EO will reward local and state entities for foisting on people with lived mental-health experience. It will create a cycle that justifies continued institutionalization for the rest of people’s lives. This kind of overmedication is sometimes called chemical restraint. It’s basically moving the architecture of control and coercion inside the patient rather than having it surround the patient within a facility.

This EO wants both: chemical control and coercion, as well as external control and coercion. Look who will benefit from this dual approach. It’s not those living with mental-health issues. It’s not their families. It’s not their loved ones. It’s not our communities. It’s not our institutions. It’s not our arts. It’s not our places of worship. It’s not our spiritual centers.

It’s business, big business. We are what’s being manipulated, destroyed, within big business. And, oddly, within a government that’s getting bigger and bigger under this newfangled Republican rule. Police states are always big. They have to be.