Month: March 2026

Water Cracking Air

Happy Trans Day of (Indi)Visibility.

I just saw an ad that read: Turn Your Expertise into Jerome. I was like, Who is Jerome? It actually said Income, but I’m dyslexic and the font was swashy.

The yellow-throated warbler is the happiest of all warblers, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

I put a bird in a box
so it wouldn’t be hurt
by the wind

I put myself in the wind
so I wouldn’t be hurt
by the box

—

Inspired by an Oklahoman who put a native sparrow in a box on a windy day because she thought the wind would harm the bird.

I dreamed Bill Knott’s mind had been transferred to millions of pieces of paper. They were lying all around me in a vast room, each one folded like an origami prayer boat meant for a memorial ceremony, but there was no water anywhere on Earth for them to float in.

(ツ)_/¯ I guarantee my reasons for not liking our former sheriff are very different from our local alt-right extremists’ reasons for not liking the former sheriff. ¯\_(ツ)

This public speaker was being interviewed, and he kept saying co-creation, but I heard it as procreation. Imagine my confusion when he said he wanted to co-create with his partner, his co-workers, his friends, his family, and his children.

I’m doing the floss this morning along with a little song I wrote called “Our Shitty Fucking Sheriff Resigned” because our county’s shitty fucking sheriff resigned suddenly and without explanation. I had several frustrating interactions with him when I was dealing with complex PTSD and bipolar issues in 2023. He was unhelpful, clueless, patronizing, and demeaning.

Our shitty fucking sheriff resigned. Our shitty fucking sheriff resigned. Sing it with me now.

Oh, and he resigned on International Bipolar Day. Even better. What a gift. How thoughtful of him. And all I got him in return was this victory dance.

Someone from my weaving group is getting rid of four styrofoam heads, so Styrofoam Heads keeps showing up in my inbox. It’s weird. I love it.

Our little town has gathered to watch a rattlesnake climb the wall of a neighbor’s house. It feels like very olden-times entertainment. The life partner is down there with everybody. I am here with myself confronting the snake that is automated AI results embedded in the Yahoo search that’s somehow made itself my preferred search engine.

Evening, a sun-drenched power line is a whip of water cracking the air.

I just misread breaking news as heartbreaking news, and that should be what all breaking news is called these days.

I’m rage-eating gummy bears is how I am.

I’m threatening my nasal cavity with a neti pot is how I am.

Based on my last couple of Facebook posts, people appear to like poetry thirty-five percent more than they like bacon.

I just misread a beacon of hope as a bacon of hope is how I am.

I ate bread in the shower is how I am.

These days, getting to the end of a roll of toilet paper is exciting. I’m like, achievement unlocked. I literally say that.

I had to buy bigger underwear is how I am.

As an Oklahoman, I want to apologize for Markwayne Mullin.

I am dyslexia strong.

Book title, free for the taking: Plastination.

It could deal with the literal plastination of the body or the figurative turning of a country into something as caustic and inorganic as plastic.

I just misread donor organ as donor orgasm is how I am.

Oklahoma is like one of those relationships you just keep finding yourself in again.

If I didn’t have a spine, I would feel like I was one with everything. It’s this skeleton that makes me feel like a soul clinging to bone, something separate from, not part of, something that will one day break.

You know that feeling when you suddenly have to poop right after you take a shower? That’s how Monday feels.

Alex LaMorie

Poems may be forgotten, but they shouldn’t start out as forgettable.

My history is a burning history in a burning world.

If you don’t care about Oklahoma after reading my work about Oklahoma, then I haven’t done my job as a poet, as an Oklahoman, or as a storyteller.

It’s so windy here in Toquerville that I feel like I’m in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. Wind like this makes me cry. It is whatever my mind is, as Gertrude Stein observes. I am as my land and air is, as my cracking and straining house is, as raw as I felt the moment this wind hit my back in a dream and stripped the veneer of reason from me in one clean and somehow profound motion. I sit in the dark shaking, my heart beating like a wild nestling’s.

Something good happened and I can’t talk about it so I’m just eating a bunch of gummy bears is how I am.

Whenever I have something I want to tell the life partner, he’s like, Is it about gender or poetry or trauma, and it almost always is about one or more of those things.

Systemic issues don’t have individual solutions and can’t be offloaded to individuals who must then bear the burden for the systemic issues. We can’t self-love our way out of abusive, harmful systems or the attitudes they encourage and reward.

Some folks drive like they have donor organs in their cars.

What are these words, even?

Me looking at my own writing.

I worked on the new manuscript more today. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What do you do when you have two manuscripts with presses for their contests and open reading periods? You finish a third one and send it out, too. That’s what you do.

Every time someone attacks me, I just eat dark, leafy greens and grow stronger.

I’m placing a bowl heaped with disco balls in the light and leaning over them, my face cracked across a thousand mirrors, is how I am.

My neighbor is killing weeds with a blowtorch connected to a propane tank.

Flirting with the life partner by showing him my new spreadsheet is how I am.

I smell like barf for some reason is how I am.

I got immunoglobulins all over myself today doing my immunoglobulin infusion is how I am.

I fell into an agave twice after thinking Don’t lose your balance and fall into that agave is how I am.

No Manifesto

It’s haunting to read the “No Manifesto” poem from Chicago Review ten years after it was published. It came out thirteen days before I left poetry because I experienced some of the very issues this poem addresses. It’s situated in a time and place, or rather places, but is also timeless in that too many of the lines could be written today and still be applicable. What a mess we’ve made of poetry. I want better for it, for us. I wanted better for myself.

This is actually the first time I’ve seen the poem and this issue of Chicago Review, which includes a forum on “Sexism and Sexual Assault in Literary Communities.” The “No Manifesto” poem begins on page 221 of the linked document. The poem is 13 pages and 271 lines long.

We’ve been fighting this fight for a really long time. I can’t even see who’s been fighting alongside me. What I see is who didn’t, who hasn’t. When my loneliness leaks into the fissures left by poets and their complicity, it feels like the time I poured salt on a gash in my hand under the magnolia tree in my backyard on a sunny, blank day. I was a kid then. I didn’t know what pain was but wanted to. I’m an adult now and have no need for this pain that won’t stop seeping.

Tall Tales Turned Titillating Truths

I found a document that my paternal great-grandfather dictated for the Indian and Pioneer Historical Collection in 1937. It turns out that side of my family also took part in the 1892 Land Run.

On my mother’s side of the family, I found a news story about one of her uncles dying after being shot four times in the back by a pool-hall owner in Headrick, Oklahoma, over the sum of fifty cents. My mother told me my great-uncle was shot while walking down the street, but I thought it was a tall tale. Turns out, she pretty much told the truth about everything.

Also, I found a portrait of my fourth great-grandmother on my father’s side. She looks like the botched Ecco Homo restoration.

Image: The Altus Times, July 16, 1914, with a front-page story about my great uncle being shot to death outside Garrett’s Pool Hall in Headrick, Oklahoma, by the establishment’s owner, Bud Garrett.

Word-twisping

That was fast. All fifty of the copies of No Sea Here that Moon in the Rye Press gave me are spoken for. I’m now digging into the copies I purchased at a discount, so I’ll be pivoting to a pay-what-you-can model. I hope that model will allow everyone to have a copy regardless of their ability to pay. I also love trades of all kinds, so that’s always on the table.

I’m mailing the first fifty copies out tomorrow, which means I get to visit the Toquerville Post Office, one of my favorite places in Utah. It sits beneath a steep hill festooned with chunks of basalt the size of economy vehicles. None of them have dislodged and killed anyone, at least not yet. Death by igneous rock is on my list of preferred ways to shed this mortal coil, which I always say in my head as cortal moil the way I used to call my friends who were dating Sherry and Jelly when their names were actually Jerry and Shelly.

This word-twisping is not something I try to do. It’s one of the ways my dyslexia makes itself known. Dyslexia is my mischievous little language friend who never fails to entertain me. It’s wearing a cute devil costume right now, kind of an inside joke. Dyslexia is such a comedian.

In other news, I’m happy to report that some poets are still people. I almost typed pets, which would also not be awful. Poets are sometimes people, sometimes pets, and sometimes a pestilence. I said what I said. Mostly, I was riffing on the sounds of the words. Mostly. Let me have some fun, OK? I’m going on day three of a migraine, which is in turn causing my centralized pain syndrome to flare. This is what I get for being in a body. My body doesn’t know how to have fun. Even my dyslexia can’t make it laugh.

‘No Sea Here’ Is Here

My chapbook No Sea Here is finally here, thanks to Moon in the Rye Press, Lisa Bickmore and Jem Ashton, and funding by the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.

I received fifty copies as part of this micropress project and plan to give those to folks who have already generously shared their work with me, who have helped with the collection, and who have, dare I say it, made me a better poet and person.

After the first fifty copies are gone, I’ll have additional copies available that I purchased at a discount. For those, I’ll use a pay-what-you-can model to help offset my costs, including postage, while also making sure anyone who wants a copy can have one. If there are any profits, I’ll donate them to a social or literary nonprofit.

Images: 1. No Sea Here in the afternoon light. 2. An interior page from the collection. 3. Fanned-out copies of No Sea Here. 4. The back cover of the collection with the Moon in the Rye Press logo.

Spring in Salt Lake City

Spring in Salt Lake City and my collection No Sea Here from Moon in the Rye Press in hand.

Images: 1. Lisa Bickmore giving me my copies of No Sea Here in Salt Lake City. 2. Along the Jordan River Trail near South Jordan, Utah. 3. Another view along the Jordan River Trail. 4. The life partner, Lexi, and me at Gardner Village in Midvale, Utah.

Like Him

Like father, like daughter is the most terrifying thing anyone could say to me. I was raised as a daughter. I was raised as his. Whenever someone catches me doing something he would do, or when I see those similarities myself, I feel like the floor of my life is dropping out from beneath me and I have to hope I’ll keep spinning until there’s a floor to stand on again. I used to say my biggest fear wasn’t death, it was living with my father for eternity. Even worse would be living as him for eternity. Even a second is too long to move through the world the way he did.

For Kelly

My friend never lost her way with nature. Months before her death, Stellar’s jays landed on her arms when she was still well enough to stand in her backyard. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw the photos her husband took. I don’t mean those AI fabrications everyone’s sharing. I mean real arms and real birds and real sky and real ground. This is what grounded her. When she learned that a study showed bees play, she called me to say, Of course they do. By that time, she wasn’t going outside anymore. She was closer to death and to the dead than she was to the living. I’m not sure what that made me. I landed on her arms. I ate from her hands. I tried not to fly away, ever, but I was still alive and so I had to.


The Naming, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto

The Naming is a reconciliation: with the personal, the familial, the ancestral, the spiritual, the terrestrial, the institutional, and the political. It is a world that is being created over and over again because of and through the past, one in which the speaker finds himself in time and place but also outside time and place with the help of his father’s fathers.

I feel deep history and deep love in this work. It’s the kind of collection that makes me think, I’ve been doing it all wrong, and by that I mean living—in the here and now, without calling my ancestors in close, my mother and my mother’s mothers. The Naming points at history to find out where it hurts the most, but it also points at us to show us how we can begin to heal.

Images: 1. The collection on a stand with a pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. Interior pages from the collection alongside the pomegranate.