Author: Dana Henry Martin

Nobody to Carry Me

I dreamed I was a finger puppet whose legs, at the knees, slid onto the index and middle fingers of whoever wanted to wear me around. Below the knees, my calves had been replaced by dangling tentacles. I had this dream at about noon because I was still sleeping. It was a hard day’s night into the next hard day—something you wouldn’t have picked up on if you’d seen me in what appeared to be excessive but otherwise unremarkable slumber.

I felt like an immobile creature with malfunctioning legs who had nobody to carry me around. The dream was spot on about that.

So in bed I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Until some task or hope or apparition in the watery distance set my clock going. It wasn’t love, as Plath says. Maybe it was love. Maybe everything that makes us move internally and externally is love. I’d like to think so.

When I did get up, my pallesthesia, paresthesia, and benign fasciculation were in full swing, worse even than they were while I was lying in bed. My soleuses (solei if you’re fancy) felt like they were the inside of Demosthenes’ mouth, a pride of pebbles grinding against each other as I moved. My legs gave out beneath me as I made my way to the bathroom.

This may not be the content you want from me because I am not a content creator, though I am someone who creates using words for the most part. I’m thinking here of my dearly departed friend (a Facebook unfriending, not a death) who said this kind of writing isn’t what he needs at this point in his life. I hate to disappoint. I also hate self-censorship and won’t do it. If I dream about being a finger puppet with tentacles for legs, I’m going to write about that. If my legs give out on me when I try to move around my house, I’ll write about that, too. Writing about these things means I made it to my computer and I’m writing. That’s my win. That’s what I need at this point in my life. This all informs the greater writing. By that, I mean the poems, the poems, the poems.

Flame and Ash

I’m toying with the idea that people are beings who live and die every moment, and any sense of continuity between moments is similar to the way our eyes smooth out what we see through a combination of physical and perceptual processes, such as saccades.

Memory persists to some degree between these deaths and births, though imperfectly and sometimes as complete fabrications that allow this or that narrative to earn its wings so it can soar across momentary lifetimes in order to either free us or whisk us away to ruin.

I don’t mean bodily birth or bodily death. I mean birth and death of self and of the worlds available to the self at any given time.

I don’t expect anyone to understand this or see anything of value in it. What this means, for me, is that I can only take people as they are in the moment—a moment that’s passed before I can even perceive it. It’s the best I can do.

We are flame and ash, flame and ash. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. These are fictions. Even time is a fiction.

You are a person doing a thing in a place. I’ll meet you there to the best of my ability. Tomorrow, same. The day after that, same.

Is this nonsense? Maybe. Certainly. What isn’t.

Total Mass

I dreamed the editor of a literary journal accused me of writing cover letters that were unalive notes. She said, I’m returning your fine poems until you learn to say what your work is about without making me think you’re going to jump off that bridge you describe over in La Verkin, Utah, the one you say is all the rage right now, almost a rave if death could be a rave, bedecked in flowers and notes that read YOUR LIFE MEANS MORE TO US THAN YOUR DEATH MEANS TO YOU as if that’s not just another erasure of what folks who are about to unalive are going through.

There are always lights there, layers of red like beacons of death spinning horizontally in air, a party of futility, of resignation, of despair. Not Another One Bridge. That’s what the sheriffs call it, you say, but you don’t know. Not another one. Not today. Again? Then probably something about God or his conjoined twin Jesus if they’re into that. Then the call to the rescue crew who can fetch the body from the gorge below. Another crew. Another raising of the dead from the past, that unfathomably old rocky past they’ve leapt or fallen into.

Slipped, their family will say later, you say. They must have slipped. An accident. I don’t need to read things like that in your cover letters.

Say what you have to say in your poems. Say it there. Cover letters don’t have personas. We know they’re written by you. There are rules. There have to be. Poems are relegated to a certain space. They’re part of a tightly regulated total mass, like that laccolith you’re always writing about. It’s big, sure, but the whole of Utah, the whole of the world, can’t be a laccolith. Some of it has to be gilded jets for world leaders. That’s just the way it is.

Form dictates the content and reminds us of who we are and where we come from. We come from offices. From paper clips. From staplers. From clear, concise communication that’s business in the front and business in the back. No party. No pity. No pining. No pith.

We’re from formality and words arranged with an architecture that makes sense, that’s expected. Cover letters are like animals whose legs are where they should be, and they’re just walking, not riding around on skateboards or driving little cars like those hamsters you say you also dream about. Mr. Fuzzy, was it? And Tater McGee? They belong in a poem, not a cover letter. Stop making them drive off the bridge of your imagination. Cover letters aren’t Art Noir Quizno’s commercials from the 90s.

The cover letter should not be a form of psychological spelunking. Poems can be, depending on who you ask. You should know this by now. Just say Hi. Say here are my poems. Say thank you for considering my poems. Don’t bring up parasailing or Duran Duran or the Menendez brothers or loneliness or dreams about writing cover letters. Say hi. Here are my poems. Thank you.

Use a standard font. One-inch margins. Double space if you must, but keep yourself contained like someone walking across Not Another One Bridge all the way from one side to the other without incident. Don’t let your cover letter look into the gorge. It will do things to your cover letter, the looking. You know this. The cover letter knows this. I know this, and I’ve never even seen that bridge.

I won’t respond to any more submissions with unalive notes attached to them written by hand in red ink on torn scraps of lined paper the size of Post-its with arrows at the bottom directing me from one scrap to the next to make sure I read the whole thing like some failed Franklin Covey approach to professional communication.

Just say hi next time is the last thing the editor said before I left that dream and walked into a Home Depot where the greeter was an 80-year-old rocker sitting at a drum kit. But the editor followed me in there. She followed me from one dream to another. I couldn’t shake her all night. I kept saying it wasn’t an unalive note. It was just a cover letter. She wouldn’t listen.

I called her a Karen, which is how I knew I was dreaming. I don’t call anyone a Karen in real life unless they’re name is Karen, and I don’t use an article before their name. STOP BEING SUCH A KAAAAR-EN I shrieked over the drummer, whose riffs were technically impressive but unoriginal. Everything he played was played out long ago. He was dressed in leather from head to toe. His getup was as ravaged by time as he was. He may have been famous once, but not anymore. Not in this dream version of a Home Depot in Southern Utah.

Was this dream-heaven? Dream-hell? Dream-purgatory superimposed on my sunny desert? I wanted a pen and paper so I could capture this dream in the perfect cover letter.

Another Poet Mindfuck

Someone just left this comment on one of my pieces on Facebook:

This kind of writing has poetry and genius and many legit things to say but, I have to say, that while it may be therapeutic for you, it’s deeply disturbing for me and I don’t need that at this point in my life. Maybe you should think about that. If you see your writing as a struggle against emotional/ mental issues, maybe you should keep in mind our struggles as well and what you’re saying to us. Some kinds of therapy should be gone through with a professional trained to deal with personal hells. Rather than FB. It’s not too late to find a way of writing that’s healthier for all of us. I hope you will take this for what it is and not take it the wrong way. I feel it has to be said.

Well, he said it.

I’ve blocked him, since he doesn’t have the agency to stop reading what he states he doesn’t want to be reading.

The odd thing is, he recently solicited my work for a chapbook. He said my writing was lyrical and eloquent, and he’d love to showcase excellent work like mine in a collection he curated. What a mindfuck.

The piece he was responding to in his comment above wasn’t about death or dying. It was about life and living, and it was based on a dream, which is where a lot of my creative work originates. The piece wasn’t therapy, nor is any of my writing. It wasn’t me foisting anything on anyone or trying to make anyone uncomfortable. But I do talk about things in my poetry and prose, even in my discussion of political issues that are important to me, that aren’t always easy.

Nobody has to friend me or follow me or read me. This is my writing space, my discovery space, and a space that’s important because it allows me to connect with other people who are creative, insightful, compassionate, complicated, interesting, delightful, and more.

I don’t need anyone telling me what I should think about, write about, say, or do in this world, certainly not someone I don’t know who appears to be projecting his own issues onto me, my writing, and whatever dynamic he thinks exists between us. (There is none.)

And the mandate that I find a way of writing that’s healthier FOR ALL OF US? Please. That would be a misguided, Sisyphean task, and that’s assuming there’s an all of us who’s reading my work. (There isn’t, and he doesn’t speak for the few who do.)

Memory Presists

I’m toying with the idea that people are beings who live and die every moment, and any sense of continuity between moments is similar to the way our eyes smooth out what we see through a combination of physical and perceptual processes, such as saccades.

Memory persists to some degree between these deaths and births, though imperfectly and sometimes as complete fabrications that allow this or that narrative to earn its wings so it can soar across momentary lifetimes in order to either free us or whisk us away to ruin.

I don’t mean bodily birth or bodily death. I mean birth and death of self and of the worlds available to the self at any given time.

I don’t expect anyone other than Matt Jasper to understand this or see anything of value in it. What this means, for me, is that I can only take people as they are in the moment—a moment that’s passed before I can even perceive it. It’s the best I can do.

We are flame and ash, flame and ash. Who we are today is not who we were yesterday or who we will be tomorrow. These are fictions. Even time is a fiction.

You are a person doing a thing in a place. I’ll meet you there to the best of my ability. Tomorrow, same. The day after that, same.

Is this nonsense? Maybe. Certainly. What isn’t.

Frisson

Yesterday, as an associate at the Washington County Library scanned each poetry collection I’d put on hold and laid them one by one in front of me in an ever-growing stack, I got all-over body chills. This happened not once, but each time a collection was added to the stack and I saw the author and title upside down, the cover design, the colors, the typography, the book’s size and thickness, and the way they each looked—as if they’d never been opened.

I could be their first reader, I thought, chills continuing to wash over my skin. The first to touch their pages, not just their covers. The first to want to know what they had to say as opposed to simply cataloging them or shelving them or facing them when it was time to tidy up the stacks.

I’m getting chills again just writing this. I knew I loved books, but I had no idea until yesterday how much poetry curated in the form of a printed collection could affect me.

Free Poem Fodder

Before the churn of factories and the tang of coal smoke came to dominate modern life during and after the Industrial Revolution, the smells of daily life were intensely organic, shaped by proximity to animals, bodies, plants, and decay. Urban and rural environments offered distinct olfactory experiences, but both were pungent, earthy, and changed with the seasons.

Once industrialization and modern sanitation systems had taken hold in the industrialized world by the mid-1800s (following a transformation that lasted about a century), the smells of waste, sewage, manure, and other organic materials were significantly less common, even in rural areas. Changes in agriculture, the decline of small cottage industries, and advances in chemistry also pushed scents away from earthy and toward synthetic. But understanding these historical odors offers a visceral glimpse into how people once experienced the world — as they say, “the nose knows.”

A Birdless Island

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

A Birdless Island

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

T4 Centers

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s language about people with autism in some ways parallels what Nazis said about Germans with physical disabilities and mental-health issues in 1939. Useless eaters was how the Nazis referred to this group. More than 70,000 asylum patients were killed in gas chambers called T4 centers before the death camps were in operation. These centers served as a model for the camps that were built later. Though the T4 program, as it was known, formally ended in 1941, the murders directed at this group didn’t stop. By the end of the war, 230,000 people with physical disabilities and mental-health issues had been killed between the T4 centers and the death camps.

Their gold teeth were extracted. Their brains were removed and sent to German physicians to study their “congenital idiocy.” Their ashes were sent to family members without regard for whose ashes were whose, along with notes that covered up what had happened. Murder was never the cause of death. Being gassed, often by one’s own doctor, was never the cause of death. Families were told the cause of death was something physical, unavoidable, like pneumonia or pulmonary tuberculosis. Some families weren’t notified at all and continued sending money to pay for their loved one’s expenses.

One of the main factors in deciding who lived and who died was how many hours a patient was capable of working each week. Think about that as you consider Kennedy’s comments about those with autism never holding a job or paying taxes. Think about that when you consider the implications of a database that’s tracking those with autism and potentially using information those patients and their families haven’t provided consent to use. Think about that when you decide if he’s really trying to help those who have autism or if he has darker motives, not just misguided ones.

The Nazis kept a record called The Hartheim Statistics as part of their T4 program. It was an account of the money saved by killing those 70,000 patients as opposed to maintaining their lives for one decade.

Think about that. Think about how much money this country would save if people like me didn’t exist and how little concern some people would have about our no longer existing.

Am I saying that’s where we’re headed today in America? Extermination? No. But I am saying we’re seeing the same dangerous collective mindset now, here in the United States, that we saw in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany.

People are not worthless if they don’t work or work enough or do the right work in this world. (I would argue that much of the right work to be done in this world is unpaid, and that those with physical disabilities and mental-health issues do that work in spades every day. The healing work. The loving work. The accepting work. The teaching work. The work of helping people see what it means to be human, which allows everyone to be more humane.)

People are not entries on a balance sheet or a way of saving money. We should not have treatment forced on us or be refused treatments we need. We are not things to be catalogued and monitored and followed and corralled into health camps (i.e., institutions we may never emerge from) or whatever else Kennedy conceives of. We are not participants in one big experiment that we didn’t even ask to be part of.

Kenney’s language is dangerous. His ideas are dangerous. His actions are dangerous. His power is dangerous.

The first people killed in the T4 centers were children. A father wrote to Hitler asking him to kill his deformed infant. That’s what inspired Hitler to start T4. I’ll repeat: He started with children.

We must protect our children. We must protect our adolescents. We must protect our adults. We must protect our seniors.

We must all protect each other. We must not look away.