What I said from another body in a dream: What I’ve brought to the new art is my name, known only by its syllables.

Said to me in a dream last night: Everyone is a draft of curses.

I figured out the pet bathroom spider I give water to every night is a desert recluse, so I now have a pet backyard spider.

I’m tired of barely treading water while folks laugh from the shore. My whole life, this water. My whole life, that shore.

I’m renaming the Pouch of Douglas the Pouch of Dana. Deal with it.

My sleep score was an all-time low of 65, so I’ll just be over here getting crushed to death by air.

Because so many folks conflate the vagina and vulva, I’ve decided to start calling the whole kit and caboodle the vavu.

I’m gonna organize all my cabinets, drawers, cubbies, and other things like that now. My dopamine levels are rising in anticipation of this undertaking.

My face is always an overinflated balloon or an underinflated balloon. The days of my face being a properly inflated balloon are behind me.

I just untangled all my husband’s cords, CLR’d the limescale-encrusted fixtures in his shower, and used a razor blade to cut through and remove the soap scum from the ledge where he keeps his bar soap. What else will I discover while he’s away?

My husband left for three days. He has a work thing at his company’s headquarters. This means I’m alone here in Utah, which scares me far more than being alone in Oklahoma. That’s saying a lot, given that most of the traumas I’ve experienced happened in Oklahoma. It’s still a safer place for me emotionally than Utah. We’ll see what happens. This may be immobilizing.

The word trauma can actually be a problem, too, in part because it shifts what’s happened from something that’s external to something that’s internal.

Them: I’m a huge supporter of the Constitution.

Me: Quote any of it.

Them:

I dreamed I was a dodo on the island of Mauritius twerking on the beach to the song “Chris Jennings Is My Blood Boy.”

Half awake, I misread something as: Our President is an orange BarcaLounger.

Lines from a dream:

because toys die outside
of graves and there are no
burials for childhood

I wrote a blurb and filled my soap dispenser and rage-purchased six fuzzy animal hats and washed my hair and body all in the same day. Huzzah.

Somehow, I’ve written a song titled “Scott Jennings Is My Blood Boy,” and I rather like it.

Only DEVO will get me through this panfuckalypse.

Those sirens I heard last night were in fact fire trucks rushing to a nearby fire. Someone in Leeds tried to remove the weeds in their yard by burning them. They set their house on fire. Don’t burn anything during a drought. Just don’t.

One year ago today. I mean it even more now. Sanist culture, too: Ableist culture, go fuck yourself.

When I met the woman who knew my mother, I felt like I was with my mother through her and she was with my mother through me. That energy was powerful, and the experience was profound. We live on through those who know us, see us, remember us. My mother didn’t die when she was 71. She’s still with us at 92. She’s not trapped. She’s not a ghost. She’s not suffering. But she’s not dead, either, and won’t be until the last person who knew her, saw her, remembered her is dead. That might be me. I will be lonely when there’s nobody else on Earth other than me who knew her, who loved her.

Another flower and card were left on the bridge yesterday near my home, the one people jump from into the river below. A hot spot, the media calls it. A s______ hot spot. The flowers and cards are attempts by local teens to give folks a message that might keep them here on Earth another day, a message about being loved, about belonging, about their lives having intrinsic meaning. We need to think like those teens every day and in every interaction we have with others, especially here in Utah. Telling people they need to change, to hide who they are, to conform, to cloak themselves in guilt and shame, doesn’t make them want to live. Telling folks they should die—either literally or figuratively through being disowned or by saying they’ll lose their eternal life with their family if they continue to be the way they are—also doesn’t make folks want to live. Don’t make young folks do this heavy lifting alone. Follow their lead.

Nothing in the universe is stupider than a human being who has forgotten human beings are part of the universe.

I dreamed I went into a forever poetry residency in a strange building in Kansas City that looked small from the outside but whose floors each opened to a different continent. Not a rendering or ensmallening of a continent. The actual continent. I liked the floors where I could access deserts.* There was a secret floor that was the moon. A woman was there who seemed like God. A man was there who seemed like an old man. He gave me paper so I could print my poems. He gave me a wrap so I wouldn’t go hungry.

* That’s all the floors, by the way, but I didn’t realize that in the dream.

I watched videos all day of foxes eating carrots is how I am.

When belonging is dependent on self-censorship and self-effacement—on weaving someone else’s shame and guilt into fabric and wearing it like a garment—it’s not belonging.

The old dump is on fire near our home. That sounds about right.

True pathology is systemic.

I don’t burn bridges, but I know when they’re on fire.

There’s not a room I can enter here in Southern Utah that is safe, welcoming, and accepting of me and folks like me.

Somehow, my mother has inflated around me and is keeping me afloat, along with Oklahomans and a few poets who know who they are.

I’m really starting to think love is not enough. Not now. Not in this world. Not in Utah. When you break someone’s will to love, you’ve broken the whole world. I refuse to be broken. I will keep loving you, even if all you know of yourself is hate. I will not hate you. I will not hate you. I will not hate you.

Back to Utah. Back to psychic death.

You know how people’s compassion has limits? I live beyond those limits. I can tell when folks realize their compassion doesn’t extend to me. It’s an awful feeling.

I expect few to be kind, even fewer to be supportive, and next to none to be understanding.

I followed my intuition today. It led me to a woman my mother trained at Central State Hospital in 1966. We talked for a long time. It was incredible. I found out something about my mother that I never knew before, and I literally walked the same hall she walked during her last hospitalization for mania, which was right before she started taking lithium. I didn’t know before today that she was hospitalized at the same community mental-health center she’d opened.

Dear Utah: You know what’s really lonely? My time on this Earth with you.

So W— said to me, they said, “You could cut someone’s head off with a shovel and almost make it look nice.” I’m going straight to them if I ever need a book blurb.

Y’all, I have both Oklahoma fever and Oklahoman fever. I love Oklahomans. They have smarts and gusto. Some might say moxie.

You broke me Utah. Congratulations. I’m done.

I don’t have money, but I have moxie, which should count for something, but sadly does not.

There is a TOWN in MISSOURI named LITHIUM? Why don’t I live there?

Nothing makes me feel safer than a local man with a Confederate flag for his profile photo in my friend suggestions on Facebook.

Watching a video of someone meticulously cleaning their home and vibing hard on it is how I am.

Memes: stereotyping those with mental-health issues since the invention of memes.

Ranking my body fluids by viscosity is how I am.

Who’s playing all these sad songs oh I am is how I am.

I divide the world into two parts: vitriol and love. They’re like curtains, these parts, both heavy. I stand between them. Which one I touch is up to me. Which one you are is up to you.

My eyelashes are too heavy is how I am.

Listening to Alphaville is how I am.

Eating a block of cheese is how I am.

It is always Black Sunday in my ancestral lungs.

I smell like salt if salt smelled like fear.

I should write a collection titled Unwanted because I am. I would dedicate it to Utah or to poetry or to the United States of America or to my brother and sister.

I am seriously unhappy in poetry right now. The culture, the barriers, and the othering are destabilizing and threaten my well-being. I may get over it, but a pattern is emerging that is quite literally nauseating at times. My body wants me to run.

I have to find a cute name to call my husband so he’ll go get zero sugar soda for me right when he wakes up. How about Soda Daddy?

Sometimes, a poem is just telling you something you didn’t know but should know.

Too many Substacks!

When I read your poems, today is yesterday is always.

Another day, another erasure by the poetry community, this time the local community. I feel like my heart’s in a grinder.

I could sit up in bed so I don’t spill zero sugar vanilla Coke on my chest when I take a sip then have to sop it up with my tank top in order to avoid getting out of bed like a functional adult and properly cleaning myself up, but why? This seems fine. Just fine.

We need to decolonize our language. — Nawal El Saadawi

And we need to decolonize, decapitalize, depoliticize, and debiomedicalize our language around mental health. Some schools of thought maintain that language creates thought, so changing language changes thought. I would argue that bringing language into awareness rather than simply using it unexamined leads to thinking, an active process we need to live meaningfully, not just exist, perpetuate, survive.

Describe your relationship in two words.

Me: Romantic companionship.

Him: Huggy baby.

Upon waking.

Me to Myself: Good morning. Let’s have a great day!

Also Me: [begins sobbing]

How it’s going.

Me: Give me the strength to get through this Monday.

Him: It’s Friday.

There’s a juvenile house finch who appears to believe she’s a lesser goldfinch. She’s hanging out with about a dozen of them, doing everything they do, or at least trying to. Some of the stems they land on aren’t strong enough to hold her. (She weighs more than the goldfinches.) I love this house finch so much — who she believes herself to be, how she’s trying to fit in, the way she’s somehow surviving without any other house finches around. Who am I to tell her she’s not a lesser goldfinch? I’m going to name her Lesser Goldfinch.

I dreamed someone in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, was either trying to create or destroy the world.