A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.
I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.
Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.
This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.
This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.
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.
It’s not easy to write about some of the situations I’ve encountered in poetry. I do it because most people don’t talk about their experiences. Certain things happen and happen again and happen again without anyone knowing what’s happening or that it could happen to them. Or something similar has happened to them, and they feel alone in that experience, unnecessarily so because they are not, in fact, alone. Silence just makes them feel that way.
I support poets and poetry and presses of all kinds, including small presses. I will also continue to advocate for myself and my work. Part of that means speaking out when necessary about problematic situations and encounters. I hope my accounts will help others navigate their own situations and know they aren’t alone if something similar happens to them.
I dreamed I was in Kansas City and was back in school as a flute performance major. A poet and I were sharing a dorm room. It was great at first. I had the room done up like a little Hello Kitty store, full of the kinds of snacks and supplies we’d need, all presented vending-machine style. The poet was funny like he is. It was all good.
One evening, I went to a party in the library. All the conservatory students sneaked in after hours. It was getting late, and everyone was falling asleep in a tangled pile on some of the vinyl furniture we’d pulled together to make a giant sleeping pod. I decided to go back to the dorm room. When I got there, the poet started screaming at me, reconstructing the past in ways that didn’t reflect reality, accusing me of things I hadn’t done, and calling me sanist.
I left and went to a bedazzled cube suspended at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. The cube rotated slowly on a horizontal axis, the moon coming in and out of view as it spun, like a restaurant called The Skies that’s no longer open in Kansas City.
There was a woman in the cube, my flute professor. She told me we could stay together if that’s what I wanted. I said it was.
Can I tell everyone, I asked.
I’d rather you not, she said. I want you to be my secret.
Secret. Othering. Erasure. Being hidden. The same old story, only this one suspended in time for all eternity.
That’s not what I want, I said as the cube started free-falling, heading toward Earth. This is the end of times, isn’t it, I said.
Yes, she replied, adding that I knew that on some level. You must have known.
Send me back to Earth, I said. I want to be with the planet and all living beings when the end comes, not here with you.
But here it will be painless. You will continue, she said. And there are humans there.
I know, and I am of them as they are of me, I replied. I belong with them, not you.
With this, John Lithgow appeared. He explained that, like the woman, he was God, who is distributed across everything but is also one thing. He would take me back to Earth because that was my wish.
As we floated down, he said, There’s going to be fire, heat. Stuff like that. Hot and not in a good way. Do you still want to go? The cube is very comfortable.
I still want to go.
Fine. Have it your way.
When we got to Earth, it was peaceful. It was beautiful. It was like I was seeing everything for the first time. Birds. Lizards. Water. Sand. No heat, no fire, no end of anything.
I went to my dorm room, and the poet sat up in his upper bunk. He said, Everyone is a draft of curses, before lying back down.
I woke up, recorded those words, then fell asleep and lucid-dreamed the whole dream again because I knew it contained important lessons my mind was working out.
After replaying the dream, a woman appeared in the dorm hallway. She was dressed like a Weeble Wobble and came over to me. I recognized her as me and me as her because each human is distributed across all bodies but is also one body.
She said, What I’ve brought to the new art is my name, known only by its syllables.
Day. Nuh. Day. Nuh. Or any syllables. Yours, for instance, dear reader. There’s no difference, not since that first name was recorded: Ku Shim. Ku Shim. Kushim. 𒆪𒋆
I woke up and called out to my husband. It was time to stop dreaming, though I could have gone on in that state all day. Such dreams are alluring, but they also call us back to the Earth and to all living beings.
My sleep score was a 90. I won’t lie. With that dream sequence, I was hoping for 100.
In a place that’s lacking in diversity, one that doesn’t cultivate an inclusive mindset at the individual and collective levels, broad-based cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy will falter. That’s what it comes down to for me as I look at Southern Utah through the lens of systems theory.
The cultural literacy here is concentrated in teachings and the culture of the LDS church and influences everything and everyone, even those outside the church. That focus leaves those who aren’t members out of social events and social support systems while tending to reinforce small-minded and small-hearted views, at least in this part of the state, about those whose identities aren’t accepted, aren’t represented, or have been historically misrepresented in and by the church. If you don’t believe that, ask me when slave day stopped being celebrated at the local schools. Ask my why it ever existed here in an area folks still insist on calling Dixie. Ask me about the Confederate flags folks fly and display on their trucks.
The selective cultural literacy here is why I experienced no fewer than twenty-seven frictions when attempting to participate in a local literary event, from five different folks centrally and peripherally involved in that event, on seventeen different occasions. Those frictions rose to the level of discrimination in eight cases. The others involved invasive questions about my gender and sexuality, othering, negating, trans erasure, and trauma erasure. The forms of discrimination included ableism, sanism, and gender- and sexuality-based discrimination.
Nobody here can see what happened. They literally can’t see it. The lack of cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy is what allows folks to feel entitled to probing about my gender and sexuality as if I owe them an explanation, to treat me like I’m scary because I have bipolar, to tell me talking about my trauma isn’t appropriate, and more. These attitudes and behaviors also have the effect of expunging me and folks like me from local events, from the local university, and from the area as a whole.
But they really don’t see it. They have no idea. To them, I’m a troublemaker, a problem, someone who’s just hastily making assumptions, not responding to a suite of valid experiences and real erasures that have been occurring for eight months and, outside this event, for five years, which is when my husband and I moved to Southern Utah.
It won’t change. This place won’t change. But what’s happening here underscores why we need more understanding, not less. More inclusivity, not less. More cultural literacy outside of one specific culture, not more of the same. We need these things across the country, but Southern Utah is where their effects are felt earlier than in other places and more painfully and more deeply and more consistently, all outside of a larger supportive community. There is no larger supportive community here unless you believe those intent on gaslighting you into thinking there is or that there is no issue here that isn’t all in your head.
I’m thinking about the kinds of frictions marginalized folks experience in the literary community, namely when participating or attempting to participate in things like events, readings, residencies, and literary programs. It occurs to me that things other folks might miss or not understand or not be able to “see” can be experienced very differently by those in marginalized groups and can make spaces unwelcoming, othering, invalidating, and even hostile.
One example from my recent personal experience is the trans erasure associated with someone dropping the letter “T” from the acronym LGBTQ+ and instead saying “LGBQ.” That act changed the way I see the university where I planned to study writing and creative writing at the graduate level because the person who dropped the “T” is affiliated with the institution. Along with other frictions I’ve experienced, I no longer feel welcome at that school. Someone else might not notice an omission like that, or they may think it’s no big deal, but as someone who’s queer, that erasure is both obvious and painful.
I’m interested in the kinds of frictions others have experienced and the disproportionate ways frictions tend to aggregate, not only within one type of marginalization but across various forms of marginalization.
Now, Hope Hall is an empty and quiet place, one where footsteps echo down tunneling hallways. Bob McDonald, who once stayed in an open barrack on the campus, said “the noise level was huge” when patients were “warehoused” in the mental health ward, back in the 1980s and before. Their cries reverberated throughout the building, he said, and patients pounded on their doors. Some had only an eyeball-sized peephole to the outside world.
And more important, perhaps—the patients had little or no treatment for their illnesses. They were the castaways from generations that didn’t understand them. They were locked up and kept out of sight.
—
From a story about Central State Hospital / Griffin Memorial Hospital, where my mother worked for thirty-five years. We need to seriously evaluate where mental-health care is headed under the July 24 executive order. It’s headed back, not forward. Back to the days of warehousing human beings like sacks of grain. Story link in comments.
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.
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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.
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
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From my mother’s high-school valedictory speech given in Headrick, Oklahoma, in 1950, when she was sixteen years old
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.
Dana Henry Martin 