Author: Dana Henry Martin

The Last Woman Experiments

I dreamed about a body of research that was established by the federal government called The Last Woman Experiments. They were studies conducted on women today to determine how the last woman on Earth could survive, repair the broken world, and repopulate the planet with flora, fauna, and human beings. Each experiment was designed to take the subject to the point of death. She would be pushed until she died so The Last Woman could theoretically, someday, live.

This was all a smokescreen for misogyny, for eradication of the majority of female and female-bodied people from this planet, and for giving the elite a blueprint for surviving the unthinkable: the apocalypse they are hastening because they think they can beat it and live rich, white, and large on a depopulated planet. They think it’s like a game of Legos where you build something, break it to pieces, and build it again. But they know they need women in that new world, and they’re strapping the women who survive with the responsibility of growing food, creating life, cleaning up the global messes they’ve made, and starting the human population over from numbers too small to recover from.

Who do they want The Last Woman to be? The Last Women? How many women would they sacrifice to get to the perfect model, the AI-enhanced Bionic Woman of our times, of the future, the one they need to do the work they can’t do, could never do, because they must keep four things alive in her that they don’t have, but in a controlled way: creativity, empathy, hope, and love.

I was in one of the experiments. I escaped and survived. Several women and female-bodied poets I know in real life came alongside me and supported me in telling my story and warning others. We did Zoom calls with women around the world. We got no support. The women in the calls said they needed us to be experimented on so they could survive. Stated another way, we needed to die so they wouldn’t. They told us this from their kitchens as they baked bread, from their nurseries as they rocked their children. They told us in all languages and all accents and from every country. We knew then that it was too late. Fascism had won. It had spread like a thin layer of paint all over the globe and seeped into everyone’s bodies, minds, and hearts.

They were scared, these women. They wanted to live—but at our expense. They didn’t realize they’d be in the next round of The Last Woman Experiments, that they weren’t what the powers that be wanted to survive any more than we were. So they gardened and wore the right clothes and obeyed their husbands even if they really wanted wives and prayed every day for God to make them better, to make them what they needed to be: something that could go on.

Here were some of the experiments. I don’t remember all of them.

Experiment 1: Be sexually assaulted and don’t tell anyone that it happened.

Experiment 2: Grow a child in your blown-out uterus.

Experiment 3: Repair your body when all you have to drink is heavy metal-laden water.

Experiment 4: Learn to love being tied down for days, weeks.

Experiment 5: Survive radioactive fallout without it affecting your beauty.

Midnight Dana

Bryan Johnson has a part of himself that he calls Nighttime Bryan. Nightime Bryan overeats, doesn’t sleep well, and makes decisions that aren’t in his best interest. Studies show that we all have a version of this within ourselves, and that this part usually comes forward in the middle of the night during a mid-night awakening. The typical scenario is that we wake up during the transition from deep sleep to REM sleep, which also happens to be when we’re vulnerable to things like worrying, ruminating, and catastrophizing, as well as seeing ourselves and the world through a clouded lens, one that tends to exaggerates our negative traits, minimize our sense of self-worth, anticipate the worst in every situation, and fail to recognize anything positive. I call this our Midnight Part. In myself, I call this part Midnight Dana.

Let me introduce you to Midnight Dana. She’s a little different from Nighttime Bryan in that she’s trying to help. (I actually think Nighttime Bryan is trying in his own way to help Bryan, or at least to call attention to a problem, but that’s not how Bryan Johnson characterizes Nighttime Bryan.) Midnight Dana remembers things. She doesn’t mean to. She just does. Her body remembers. She’s a time traveler who can go to any point in the past where she’s needed, and by that I mean where her memory is needed. She’s important and necessary, but witnessing her deep knowledge and attempting to communicate with her is not easy.

I woke up at 3:38 a.m. trundled from sleep into wakefulness by a disconcerting dream that involved countless rows of girls’ dorm-room beds extending into the distance behind Vince McMahon, the resident assistant, who was standing in the foreground in a light-gray plaid suit waiting for all the girls to arrive.

Midnight Dana did not like that dream. She immediately thought about the semi-private dorm room she’ll be staying in at the summer residency for Pacific University if I decide to enter that program. The thing that terrifies Midnight Dana about this situation is the shared bathroom. Bathrooms have never been safe spaces for Dana, and Midnight Dana remembers what’s happened in them. It’s as if every cell in her body knows, even the ones that have turned over countless times since those abuses occurred. Midnight Dana is part of the institutional memory of Dana Henry Martin. She lives in the decentralized array of awareness that resides within my body. She also interacts with the world around her, responding to inputs from my waking and sleeping worlds and experiences.

Still frothy with sleep, I receded and Midnight Dana came to the forefront. She laid in bed as the bathroom memories flashed like View-Master stereoscopes, but she was also running. Her heart rate was fast and erratic. She was sweating. She took quick, shallow breaths. Her head suddenly hurt like hell. Midnight Dana was in flight mode.

By 4 a.m., Midnight Dana had made a slew of decisions that started with not attending Pacific University and ended with not writing poetry anymore. Midnight Dana made a plan to do nothing but sit somewhere and listen to birds for the next thirty years or so.

Midnight Dana and I are in conversation this morning. We’re talking about ways she can feel safe at the residency and keep writing poetry. What does she need? How can I advocate for her? I want her to know I see her, hear her, and appreciate her. She’s trying to keep me safe and also keep me from walking into a situation that could be incredibly difficult and painful. She’s going to be there, too, if we go to Oregon. I need to meet her where she’s at and advocate for that part of myself so I don’t become a fear-driven organism whose only option is to run fast and hard and away.

This is the basis of the Internal Family Systems model. We all have parts, and we all need to listen to those parts and bring them into Self. Our Midnight Parts can be teachers if we let them. We can bring them into our awareness and into our hearts while ushering our whole selves to, or at least toward, safety.

Midnight Dana is both an exile and a firefighter. She’s been ignored, silenced, and shamed—even by me—and she looks for quick fixes that will allow her to avoid painful feelings. She makes sense developmentally given my past, namely my childhood. I want her to have that life of listening to birds. And I want her to have so much more than that, including poetry, which is where she sings alongside me.

Moving Mountains

Utah Senator Dan McCay, who shepherded the bill banning pride flags in Utah’s schools and government buildings through the State Senate, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to attack the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what he wrote:

“Bye Felicia. Sundance promotes porn. Sundance promotes alternative lifestyles. Sundance promotes anti-LDS themes.”

Sundance is considering leaving Utah, where it’s been held since its creation in 1978. The ban on pride flags could ensure Sundance’s departure from the state.

This is how Utah’s lawmakers are behaving these days, just a couple of years after cloaking their homophobia and transphobia in purported support for federal protections for same-sex marriage. They wanted to be seen as the good guys back then. Not anymore. What’s infected our government at the highest levels has infected Utah lawmakers and many of those who live in the state.

Almost three years ago, I contacted every LGBTQ+ organization and group in Utah to address the hatred and outright bigotry several Southern Utah lawmakers in places like St. George and Leeds were espousing through far-right groups with militia ties. The only organization that responded—the largest one in the state—told me they had decided not to address the issues with our lawmakers. They thought everything would blow over and wouldn’t amount to anything. They perceived themselves as the leaders of Utah’s queer community. As such, they were encouraging everyone else who was queer to stay quiet, too. Like me. I was told not to talk about what was happening.

I told them they were wrong. I’m from Oklahoma and have lived through this. I lived through the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan years, and more. I lived in Kansas and know the Koch brothers and their playbook, which was being carried out in Washington County, Utah, where I lived and across the country in rural areas with a couple of tweaks: guns and violence and, in the case of Southern Utah, with a post-Mormon hatred that was unbounded. I said what was happening in Southern Utah was going to spread to the rest of the state—and quickly. They didn’t believe me. They were Salt Lake City-centric and didn’t see the power lawmakers in Southern Utah had or understand what they were capable of.

I told them anti-trans legislation was going to hit them like a tsunami, and they had a responsibility to address what was happening before it was too late. Weeks later, they flew the director of the organization down to Ivins, a town just outside St. George. People with power and influence in the queer community were invited to a mansion to discuss what to do, how to move forward. It was a private event. Members of the queer community at large were not invited or even told it was happening. Stay quiet was pretty much what they came up with at that meeting. Several people who attended also discussed the past of one of the alt-right group leaders, which involved extremely inappropriate behavior with her female students. (She’d been a high-school teacher in the area at one point.) The group wasn’t talking about that publicly, either.

In a matter of months, nine anti-trans pieces of legislation were signed into Utah law by Utah’s Governor. More laws have been passed since then. Queer organizations have been hobbled and/or gutted. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enacted more hateful and harmful policies that target queer members and their families. Queer folks are being threatened, disowned, harmed in myriad ways, erased, and more—more than ever. And now lawmakers are telling everyone in the state what they really think, what they thought all along but didn’t feel they could say.

I’m not a seer. I didn’t see into the future. I’ve just seen all of this before. I’ve lived through it, survived it, and been shaped by it as someone who’s nonbinary and queer. I didn’t stay quiet like the queer organization told me to. I wrote two letters that The Salt Lake Tribune published, one of which discussed a column by Pat Buchanan that ran in The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 17, 1990. It was titled “Homosexuals Mainstreaming Satanism.” I compared that piece to what was currently happening at meetings and rallies in the St. George area. I also pitched stories to local reporters and provided background material and comments on several stores. This only served to drive a bigger wedge between me and the queer community who didn’t seem to want me or my voice to exist. Ironic? Yes. It’s ironic.

Even with everything unfolding the way I said it would, only worse than I could have imagined, I’m still not welcome in Utah’s queer circles. Last fall, I attended a Zoom meeting for members of NAMI Utah to discuss changes within the organization. That meeting was comprised primarily of queer participants. They recognized my name from the pieces that ran in the Trib, and they thought I was there to glean information about the organization and report on it in The Salt Lake Tribune. I wasn’t. I attended the meeting because I’m in training to become a peer specialist here in Arizona through NAMI, because I’m a mental-health advocate who stays informed about issues that affect mental-health care in my communities, and because I live with mental-health issues and am as deserving of support as anyone else in Utah who lives with mental health issues.

The folks in the NAMI group also believed I was a journalist because they apparently don’t understand the distinction between editorial content and letters to the editor. I’m a poet and writer who’s worked as a medical writer and health advocate. I have a degree in journalism but am not working as a journalist. I certainly wouldn’t “inflitrate” a NAMI meeting. (Please.) Or use my full name in my Zoom profile if I was trying to be sneaky.

The group moderator contacted me individually after the meeting through email to admonish me for being unethical, to insinuate I was there to undermine the organization, and to ask what I planned to do with what I learned during the meeting. It was a stunningly inappropriate communication that was never properly addressed by NAMI Utah’s interim director. She passed it off to a lower-level volunteer as opposed to addressing the infraction herself as the organization’s leader. Here were my concerns, in short: You can’t use an email list your organization maintains to gather information about a member and reach out to them to ask probing accusatory questions. Doing so is discriminatory, borders on bullying and intimidation, and jeopardizes the well-being of a fellow NAMI member who’s seeking inclusion and support.

This is where I’m at in Utah. I’m an advocate whose advocacy is unwelcome and unwanted in both the queer and mental-health communities. The fear that permeates Southern Utah and drives folks to paranoia and conspiracy theories is embedded in the state as a whole, even in the very communities many Utah lawmakers want to eradicate. Queer folks and folks with mental-health issues need to learn how to stand up for themselves and each other, how to bring in and welcome outside voices and perspectives, and how to be true advocates and allies who don’t end up doing more harm than good in their respective organizations. Rolling over, fear, othering bordering on shunning, and baseless accusations aren’t going to get us anywhere, nor is silencing queer voices in the name of queer solidarity. We need to start moving mountains more than one spoonful at a time. And we certainly don’t need to be creating more and larger mountains.

Utah has work to do. We have work to do. We need to show up. My voice isn’t going anywhere, as much as I’ve been asked to remove it from the state, even by some folks in Southern Utah’s poetry community who’ve called my work inappropriate, graphic, and pornographic (just like the Sundance Film Festival, apparently). Hell, I’ve been called a pedophile several times by my neighbors up in South Jordan and later in Toquerville, where I still live part of the year. (One of Utahns’ big go-tos is calling anyone they don’t like a “pedophile,” which is sad given all the actual acts of pedophilia in the state.)

I’ve heard it all at this point. I’m surviving it all on my own, outside of any Utah-based communities focused on support and advocacy. I hope Utah can come back from what’s happening right now. I do. I feel for folks who are being crushed by all of this. But when a bulldozer’s coming, you have to warn others and get out of the way until you can dismantle that bulldozer. You’ll get nowhere if you pretend it’s not coming or throw others from your community in its path or tell them you don’t need their help. Communities who are harmed cannot harm others within their communities. That’s just a reframing of the very paradigm that caused those communities harm in the first place.

Twin Fawns, Treats, and Sitting Right in Rooms

I dated a man who didn’t like to be touched when he ate. Never, not by anybody. Not even me. I tried a few times. It didn’t go well. He only liked square rooms, nothing with an angled or curved wall or a cutout of any kind. Cubbies were for sure off-limits. The house he was living in with his band off Gillham Road in Kansas City was one block over from serial killer Bob Berdella’s house, but that’s not what he didn’t like about it. The sitting room had cherry trim, which bothered him because the rest of the trim was oak. It was supposed to be different to indicate that the sitting room was special. That’s what they did in Victorian homes, at least in Kansas City. Architectural history didn’t matter to him. Consistency mattered, order, and not being touched while eating, which I suppose is order-enforcement of a different kind.

I’d say all of this was problematic, but at some point, I stopped being able to sit in rooms without being squared up to them. In bed, I have to lie in perfect alignment with the walls to either side of me or things feel super off. And curved rows of seating in a square or rectangular room? Floating in the space like that, maybe even with seats whose backs are to the entrance? No, thank you. I’ll find a chair against the wall or drag one there if needed, none of this organismic bacteria-esque drifting as if we’re all being observed under a microscope.

I also don’t like to eat treats when anyone’s in the room with me, namely my husband, or when the news is on or I’m reading a shitty anything anywhere from anyone. My treat time is my me time, and it has to be just right. I have a soundtrack I listen to when eating treats. It’s moody music like Eno and Radiohead. Everything I listen to is moody, or maybe I just hear it that way. Barber. Corigliano. Orff. I’m genre-drifting musically now, probably because I have treats nearby, but my fingers insist on typing this before I eat them (the cookies, not my fingers) despite the fact that my husband’s about to return home, which means there will likely be no treat time for me tonight, especially if I start in on editing this post. I also don’t eat treats while writing and editing. My brain won’t register that the eating has occurred, and I’ll get the keyboard all treat-sticky.

The guy I dated also didn’t like to read anything long, so he limited himself to short stories. Say what you will about that, but he introduced me to Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, and Kansas City poet and writer Conger Beasley Jr. I was still a music major then, as was he. I hadn’t drifted from music to literature and ultimately to poetry, where I remain a producer-consumer to this day.

The last thing I’ll say about him is he showed me twin fawns who died in their mother’s womb and had been taxidermied shortly after their death. They were on display with other preserved animal oddities at a toy store in a Kansas City neighborhood called Brookside. Years later, he bought them from the owner and gave them to his new wife, who’s an artist. They’re art now, those fawns. They live in a vitrine. The artist sells prints of a painting of them. I don’t think it was her, actually, who painted them. Someone did. The fawns were on television as part of an art-competition show. I’ve seen pictures of the artist with the twins beside her under their glass. I love them and hope they’re at peace. I hope they are loved in the real way, not any other way.

It’s hard not to feel something for a man who values taxidemied fawns and shows them to all the girls he loves. Their vitrine is round, not square. Nobody touches them when they eat. They don’t eat because they are dead. They don’t read because they are dead but also because they are fawns, and even living fawns don’t read. Somehow, this last fact makes me profoundly sad.

The Napture

Today is not my day to experience the napture, that is being transported from Earth to heaven in the midst of a fabulous nap. Apparently, I will not have any nap at all today, despite being mostly awake all night with my sweet dog, who’s not feeling well.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Fitbit thinks I’m asleep all the time for some reason, including while I was sopping my sweet dog’s vomit out of the wool rug in the bedroom while the ceiling fan—which I’d turned on accidentally in the chaos of the moment—mocked my nearly bare back with wave after wave of cold air. Maybe I really was asleep. Maybe I’m asleep now. Maybe we evolved from sleep into wakefulness, but we’re never fully awake, even when we think we are. Maybe Fitbit knows this about me, about you, about all of its wearers.

Lately, Fitbit’s also been like, Hey, your heart rate’s totally low these days, super job, which doesn’t make sense because I’m not properly executing any of my self-care stuff. I’m barely keeping up with the 57 biomarkers I routinely track, not to mention the dozen or so behaviors I monitor. I haven’t tallied the exact number of behaviors I track, which shows you how much I’ve been slacking. Data only works if you work that data, right? Can I get a high five?

I mean, I’m trying to be a data-driven lifeform, but I’m failing better day after day. I’m having carbs again this afternoon, for one thing: the no-bake cookies that are my undoing when I allow myself to be undone, that is eating an uncorseted diet that’s bound to tank my efforts at improved mental health. If I had my continuous glucose monitor on, I could see in real time what those cookies do to my glucose levels, and from that data I could infer what’s happening to my mitochondria. I could look at old data, but it’s not the same. I need to see in real time what I’m doing to myself so I’ll stop doing it.

This is serious work, and I’m messing it up, and I can’t even take a nap, which seems like it would help. Why can’t I nap? 1: Birds. They’re too loud. 2. Lexi. She’s too restless. 3. Heat. It’s 76 degrees in here, and I’m too hot, the kind of hot one feels when one is menopausal, though I’m long past those days. I’m carb-hot. I ate carbs yesterday, and it’s made me hot. Not in a good way. 4. Husband. Things with, including accusations that I said something mean in all caps when I believe I said it all lowercase. 5. Husband again. Making silly vulgar gestures at me while someone I was talking to on the phone was telling me something awful and important. 6. The awful and important thing I was told and how I can’t do anything about it and how the whole world seems like a gaping maw sometimes, not at all heavenly, not at all a place where naps can be imagined or hoped for, let alone naptures.

HK

Three needles in my left arm deliver the immunoglobulins that I don’t make on my own. They used to come in little glass vials, which I loved because they were old-timey. Now, they come in big plastic syringes packed in more plastic with stoppers and plungers that are all plastic. Plastic is too much with us, and we’re moving toward it rather than away from it. Ah! But fungi can eat ocean plastic! Problem solved. Make more plastic. Empty barges full of it right into the water. Set off in your boat full of sachet packaging and throw it all overboard. No worries. The fungi got you. They got you.

It’s overcast today, windy. My neighbor’s roof vent is clanking every few seconds, its head spinning indecorously. Someone is backing up as evidenced by their truck making two discordant beeping sounds in the round. mleh MLEH mleh MLEH mleh MLEH. I want to walk through the world sounding like that, letting people know how I really feel. MLEH fucking MLEH MLEH mleh MLEH. I think I might already be doing that. I wonder what wild animals think of those sounds and if they’re as irritated by them as humans are or at least as this human is.

I’m looking at something round on my desk, now something octagonal, now something rectangular. I like the shapes of things and how they morph into shapes that aren’t tidy and that don’t have a name and that require calculus for analysis. I used to be able to do that. I could find the area of an irregular shape. I could rotate and translate shapes. I loved it because I loved my calculus teacher, who’s dead now: Lenny Gibson. He invented the abbreviation HK for who cares. I say that to this day. I give no shits about people understanding the reference. Mr. Gibson was a lot like the comedian Steven Wright. Who’s Steven Wright, you ask? HK, you’re probably thinking.

What’s the equation for loss, for memory, for a circle turned into a gaping mouth turned into a nightmare or a crime scene or a missing person report or an AWOL marriage? What’s the equation for who gets an immune system and who doesn’t? For who receives whatever’s being backed into their driveway? For who has a driveway? For who gets to keep existing.

Where’s the equation for dead water and dead forests and dead humans. I mean living humans who are effectively dead, who want death, who would come up with an abbreviation for killing everything in sight and say it proudly. Something that goes beyond WWG1WGA or 14 Words. Something unthinkable, unimaginable, until it’s seen and heard and cannot thereafter be unthought or unimagined.

This Ink Is a Suture

I showered and put on my pantaloons and corset as a form of self-care. Also, Donald Trump is a fucking monster.

Uniformity and exclusion are as shit in poetry as they are in our institutions and communities.

Dana Henry Martin is out of order. There is no handyperson coming to repair Dana Henry Martin. Please enjoy what’s left of Dana Henry Martin before she becomes rancid. Be careful: Parts of Dana Henry Martin have already spoiled.

Sometimes, we just need to be with each other.

Thank you to those who make me feel like I belong—in poetry, in my communities, and on this planet.

Poetry can be a matter of life and death, even for the poet whose work you don’t admire. Some things are more important than anyone’s precious standards, namely human life.

I spelled tyranny incorrectly yesterday, but that won’t happen again. I was dealing with all caps, which is always disorienting. Plus, I haven’t had to use the word much until now.

A power outage just ended here. Everywhere I’ve lived, folks can’t go outside when the power’s on and can’t stay inside when the power’s off.

I’m going to put googly eyes on this two-liter of Cherry Coke and call it my best friend

The present we remember as the past is the future.

This body remembers democracy.

Me: Do not start the day crying. Do not start the day crying. Do not start the day crying.

Oh, menfolk, jump into my life and save little old me, said me never.

When I wear a corset, I’m not bound like a woman, which I am not. I’m bound like a book, which I am becoming.

I just adore a beautiful font.

Creating is resisting. Create. Resist. Repeat.

Jocelynn Rojo Carranza

Unpopular opinion: Some songs hold up better than some poems.

Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.

If you think the now-famous male mandarin duck and male mallard hybrid pair here in Arizona are just friends, you’re living in a hetero fantasy world.

I call them Adam and Steve.

Blessed are the newscasters for they shall usher in fascism.

There’s a tiny “museum” of art on the moon that contains six drawings. The first is a penis by Andy Warhol. The second is a line drawn by Robert Rauschenberg. The third is a black square with thin white intersecting lines by David Novros. The fourth is a template pattern by John Chamberlain. The fifth is a geometric variation on Mickey Mouse by Claes Oldenburg. The sixth is a computer-generated drawing by Forrest Myers.

highly irregular = totally illegal

The sanist diaries: Some of my closest friends are sanists.

The sanist diaries: Nothing brings folks together like sanism.

Dear supporters of all this bullshit: Have fun in a world without us. Have your fucking fun after you chain us up, drive us out, imprison us, intern us, force-labor us, dehumanize us, and make living not at all viable for us. Have all the fucking fun in the world. It’s yours now. Even the birds will hate you.

Note to self for a future essay: amygdala regulation by time-stamping events in our lives through and with writing and art.

Tell me you’re a female-bodied Gen Xer with trauma without telling me you’re a female-bodied Gen Xer with trauma: A young man once told me I was too pretty to have an asshole, and I was like “I have a great asshole, Asshole,” then I had a bunch of boring sex with him because I didn’t know how to do better and also because I wanted to have sex with his girlfriend but she didn’t like me so he was as close as I could get.

I’m pretty sure our leader sees a dead American as a profit and a living American as a loss.

We remember. We are rendered.

The oilbird’s diet is so high in oily fruits that the chicks were once collected and rendered for lamp oil.

I dreamed we had to wear vinyl records as hats.

I dreamed I used my thighs to choke a ten-foot-tall man who represented the patriarchy.

I just misread a jumble of headlines as “Trump Gives Musk Tuna.” I wondered what tuna was code for and if they’d both need penicillin shots.

Thanks to inflation, it will now be more expensive to eat the rich.

Why do I write about Oklahoma? Because Oklahoma is eternal within me. No Masonic or Hermle clock governs its presence in my body. The trauma—that first trauma and the countless ones that followed—has no timestamp. The Red River is as it was then. The bullfrogs are as they were, plentiful and at times inconvenient, especially when they flooded the road flanking the river. The moon lowering and lowering until it meets the sandy riverbed and shimmers like an arched doorway to heaven or hell or maybe just to someplace better, someplace where pain might exist but suffering isn’t manufactured faster than mobile homes and oil pumpjacks.

In my dream last night, I invented yambushing, which is pretty much what it sounds like: ambushing people with yams. I was eight years old in the dream and had to fend off my bullies. They did not see the yambush coming.

I dreamed I made millions writing Mormon erotica.

𒆪𒋆

That translates as Kushim and is the first known record of a person in writing.

The largest known human coprolite is 1,200 years old. It’s 20 centimeters long and 5 centimeters wide and was discovered in 1972 in an ancient Viking settlement in York, England.

It’s weird how old some things are, like murder.

Tonight, a fellow writer asked why I write about Oklahoma and my family’s history there, as if writing about the past and the place that made me who I am is of no value. It’s 2025, and you live in Utah, he said. I write about the present, too. But poets have pasts, and those pasts matter. They inform the present and the future. We live in many worlds and many timelines. Not everything is now, though then becomes now when we breathe life back into it.

I just learned that some canaries were kept in cages with oxygen tanks so they could survive after warning miners about dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.

And this ink is a suture. And this paper is a body. And this poem is a prayer for healing written one stitch at a time.

Will Journavx make me feel like I’m still living in a democracy?

In this light, ink on paper looks like sutures in skin.

I have no words to meet this moment.

Do whatever you need to survive. — My Mother

The Deconsolidation

I dreamed there was a mass psyche-extinction event in the United States called The Deconsolidation. It scrambled people’s memories, jumbled our understanding of time, and decimated our sense of self. In an effort to reverse the damage, a government project known as The Reconsolidation was launched. People were taken, one by one, into a room that looked like the interior of a moving train. There was a window with a table and two short booths in front of it, all under a warm spotlight.

Each participant was seated across from the interviewer, who asked simple questions with simple answers. The participants listened and responded as fake hypnotic landscapes whizzed by the fake window. The interviewer was kind, his voice low and reassuring. The interchange was designed to make us feel safe and bring our minds back online.

When it was my turn, I recognized that we were on a set, that there was no train, no scenery, that the world had been deconsolidated along with our psyches. I could see the dark corners of the space, where everything trailed off to nothing. I was one of the few who had not been successfully deconsolidated for whatever reason, so I saw through all of it. Why were they bringing everyone back, our minds back, to a world that was gone?

Our belief. They needed our belief in them, in ourselves, in what was, so they could keep taking and taking and taking everything from us. They wanted to keep their precious power even in an illusory world. They would turn the whole planet into a Potemkin Village to get it. We, the villagers, dazed and wandering, were their only hope.

Mary Ruefle’s ‘Lapland’

Mary Ruefle created a powerful moment for the audience here in Tucson when she read at The Poetry Center last fall. I was there and will never forget what she did. She read her poem “Lapland,” which she wrote fifty years ago. Then she read an essay about how the word Lapland is not offensive, but now it is offensive to use the word Lapp to describe the people in Lapland. She ended her essay by saying that although the poem’s title is “Lapland” and it’s set in Lapland and the word Lapp appears twice, it’s not about Lapland. Then she uttered this sentence, which enveloped the room:

“And if you don’t understand that, then I would go so far as to say you don’t understand poetry.”

Then, in the tradition of several poets who’ve come before her, she read the entire poem again without comment. So that we would hear it. So that, with our hearts and minds adjusted, we could hear it or have the hope of hearing it.

It was powerful. It was incredible.

Click on the image below to experience Ruefle reading “Lapland,” then her essay, then “Lapland” again. The recording of the entire video is on the VOCA Audiovisual Archives. I’m just sharing the section that contains “Lapland” so you can have the experience attendees had that night at Ruefle’s reading.

My Relationship with Language in a Nutshell

Wikipedia: In dentistry, the posselt diagram is a diagrammatic representation …

Me: *swoons at the very mention of a diagram*

Wikipedia: … of a sagittal view …

Me: *nearly faints because saggital is such a yummy word*

Wikipedia: … of maximum mandibular movement.

Me: *gets heart palpitations from maximum mandibular movement because it’s like a waltz turning into a march and uses consonance as a mechanism for smooth forward movement*

Wikipedia: But wait. There’s more.

Me: *wonders if she can handle any more*

Wikipedia: Posselt postulated that in the first 20 millimeters …

Me: *trills at the mention of a specific unit of measure*

Wikipedia: … of opening and closing …

Me: *tears up at the visual of opening and closing, an essential motion in nature that’s layered and evocative*

Wikipedia: … the mandible only rotates …

Me: *loves the constraint the mandible is showing here, which kind of makes it like a poem if a poem could be a horseshoe-shaped bone*

Wikipedia: … and does not simultaneously move downward and forward.

Me: *puts on nerdy reading glasses to impress Wikipedia* Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. How interesting. *touches own mandible gingerly*