We’re heading back to Tucson in the morning. We’re just watching the day’s eyes close slowly here in Southern Utah. We’ll leave when the world wakes tomorrow.
Does Earth dream, too? Of course it doesn’t, but I hope it does. I want Earth to have a lucid dream about its own beauty and wake startled into itself the way we feel when we realize we’re more beautiful than we think we are.
Who’s that whistling down the street? A whistle is a bell and a bell is an angel.
Angel of the sandstone. Angel of the desert. Angel of this dry land we curse and pray to and live in and die for.
Angel of sage. Angel of globemallow. Angel of creosote. Of saltbrush and buckwheat and prickly pear and rabbitbrush.
Angel of the bell, of the child’s whistling mouth, of who the child is, where he came from, and where he’s going.
Cloud angel in the sky tatted like a mourner’s black lace.
Laccoloith angel who I’ve seen burn red as fire.
Farm angel with its sweet cows and shy horses.
Illumination angel steadying a light above a herd of cloned white bulls who shine like stars.
Goodnight, Toquerville. Sweet dreams. See you tomorrow, Tucson.
I’m here to share. I’m here to learn. I’m here for joy, surprise, and to feel awe shoot through me like sudden light. Every one of you is a purveyor of awe. Here, now. Then, again. Always.
When light enters a certain way, it feels holy. Our eyes are wired for light. Our hearts. Our minds. We are vitreous chambers with the wisdom to let light through unimpeded, unquestioned. So flower can be flower. So sky can be sky. So love can have a body with pores and wrinkles and folds. A body that, in the right light, becomes light. Nothing but light.
I’m waiting for you in spring. Make your way to me through winter.
As you sit on winter’s hard ground, remember that you may be someone’s spring.
And just like that, a poem brings me back to the world.
Poems are not office memos.
January 18: Fell asleep to a dog barking. Woke to wind howling. Inside it, the dog continues to bark, but all the desert slopes repeat now is wind and more wind.
I want to wallpaper my writing room with scenes from Days of Heaven and then write like that movie. That’s what my manuscript Crude is supposed to be. It’s supposed to sound like the narrator from Days of Heaven and look like everything in Days of Heaven.
Leonard Peltier. Fuck yes.
Curve-billed thrashers woke me up this morning. The sun stared me down through our patio door. Saguaros threw up their arms, exuberant as always. Coffee tastes better here. Reading poems is better here. My keyboard sounds better on my Mesquite writing desk than it does on my IKEA desk in Utah. Music is more immersive here. Love gets bigger and bigger here. You can’t even find its edges or measure its volume or figure out its overall shape because it has no shape. Love is in everyone and everything, more evidently here than in other places I’ve lived. (Kansas City may be the exception.) I love Tucson because Tucson is love as incarnate as I’ve ever experienced it. Imagine the fruit of the prickly pear cactus as my watery heart laid bare between spines. That’s me on Tucson, baby. Good morning from the Sonoran desert.
Last night, I dreamed I was produce. I was in a cardboard box with a head of leafy green lettuce and an unwaxed cucumber. We all came from the organic farm and were part of a CSA delivery. I don’t know what, exactly, I was. Maybe a red bell pepper. I was trying to work that out in the dream when I turned into the cardboard box the produce was in. Before I could fully experience being a box, I was cut apart, folded flat, and loaded onto a barge for “recycling.” Me and all the other recyclable materials—nut-milk jugs, tin cans, egg cartons, and all kinds of plastics—jiggled and jingled our way to a nameless atoll that was packed with other recyclables. We were all just trash, really, part of some scheme to offload us with minimal effort where nobody would find us. I spent my final days there being broken down by salt and water until I didn’t know what I was anymore, or who, if ever I was a who at all. Parts of me stayed on the island. Parts of me floated farther and farther into the ocean, above the dead coral, where I met bits of other recyclables that were indistinguishable from me, if I could even call myself a me.
I know less about existence than twin fawns who died inside their mother days before she would have given birth to them.
I was listening to the Twin Peaks soundtrack when I learned David Lynch died. I met and interviewed him for a feature story for UWTV and ResearchChannel. He was at the University of Washington for a talk about Transcendental Meditation. He also talked about living in a sea of creativity and dissolving the suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity in order to have freedom. “The pain and suffering should be in the art, not the artist,” he said in the talk. That stuck with me. We sometimes get that backward. To the stars, David.
House sparrows aren’t sparrows. They’re weaver finches. (And that is how poets tell you the news.)
After all everybody is as their coffee maker is. Everybody is as the maker is quiet or loud. Everybody is as there is maker or no maker. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of brew, their kind of viscosity, their bitterness and their aftertaste, and their pouring and their sipping and their drinking. — Gertrude Carafe
Yesterday, I saw an ad for a ceramic Baby Jesus being sold on Etsy, but the swaddled body looks like a vulva, and Baby Jesus’s head looks like an oversized clitoris. I can show you the photos if you don’t believe me. Good morning.
There’s a poem in my throat. I don’t want it there. I don’t even want it there.
Love is coming at me from every direction. That’s how I know we’re all dying.
My husband is up. He sounds like rain.
There was a time in my life when the answer to everything was poetry. It’s still that time.
I hydrated, styled my hair, put on lotion, lifted weights, sat by my light box, color-coordinated my outfit with my jewelry, reading glasses, and handkerchief, and put on some sick tunes. Now I’m going back into my poetry database, where I will stay all day hyperfocusing on the task at hand: consistently formatting every poem, adding appropriate metadata, and moving every post from classic mode in WordPress to the blocks format.
See you on the other side. If I don’t make it out, bury me in poems. Good ones.
I organized my poetry database all day long. I got pretty obsessive about it, and now I can’t shake the buzzing feeling inside me that is screaming, “Organize more things, STAT!” My hands are vibrating. My feet are vibrating. I’m covered in fake butter because I ate popcorn while I worked. My pen is buttery. My keyboard is buttery. I haven’t brushed my teeth for hours. I didn’t bathe. I didn’t style my hair. I didn’t exercise. I just sat here typing and formatting and labeling and blah blah blah blahblahblah. There are more than one thousand poems in the database, and that’s not counting collaborative work I’ve written with various poets over the years. It’s so many poems. It’s too many poems. I think I might be pretty obsessive about writing poems, not just organizing them.
I’m embarrassed about how much fun I used to have in poems.
It’s hard, but not impossible, to see a man as a hook.
New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” makes me feel a certain way about my childhood, like I’m back in it. Not only that, but that I love it, that past, exactly as it was because every transcendent feeling I had was only possible because of the dirt I lived in, because of my Oklahoma crude family, because of the everything of everything. My body hummed. It sang. It insisted. My terror had nothing on my joy. How I trilled at being alive, my roots growing down, my crown hitting the sky.
On a thousand islands in the sea / I see a thousand people just like me / A hundred unions in the snow / I watch and walking, falling in a row / We live always underground / It’s gonna be so quiet in here tonight — New Order
No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. — Carl Jung
New Year’s Goal: Write poems that make readers blister.
I just learned that white-tailed deer chase Canada geese. My friend Kelly would have loved knowing that.
I just got a nice rejection from a literary journal. The editor wrote, I’m grateful to have read your work, especially “Persephone.” The last stanza is perfect. God. Damn.
I feel like Mike Birbiglia is in my digestive tract right now throwing himself around on an improvised stage he’s set up on my pyloric antrum.
Last night, I dreamed octopuses who could no longer live in our polluted oceans. They devised a scheme that involved attending open houses, sneaking off to the bathroom, running a bath, throwing in some salt and rocks and stuff, and taking up residence for as long as possible. If they did this toward the end of the open house, chances were the home would sit vacant for at least a few days if not longer, especially in a bad housing market. They’d have it made. And it wasn’t that hard to drain the tub and hide during an unexpected showing. I happened upon a pair of octopuses at an open house. They were mating. The male’s hectocotylus was rammed way up in the female’s siphon. Startled, I shouted, “Get an aquarium!” But I knew what they needed was an ocean, a clean ocean.
It’s interesting how love expands when we’re scared but contracts when we’re angry, which is also just being scared.
Coming off the sudden stress of the past few days, I’m in a space that’s part relief, part surge of emotion. This means I may tell every single one of you that I love you—and mean it.
Some poems are like passivation layers on exposed aluminum. They protect the poet from vulnerabilities beneath the surface, maybe reader, too.
I’ve been watching a looped video of a hydra every day for months and thinking about hydras’ many arms reaching, feeling, without thought, without the conjoined burdens of meaning and purpose—planted, going nowhere, wanting for nowhere. Hydras are completely embodied. They don’t have brains. We have brains attached to hydra bodies that make us yearn, strive, interpret what our bodies are doing, usually incorrectly.
Some poems feel like de-icer.
Jon and I were driving into town this morning and going over our lists of things to do if the other one dies. Things like cremate body, inform relatives, get death certificate, alert life insurance, and so forth. For the scenario where I die before him, Jon suddenly blurted out—wait for it—call Oliva Munn. I’ll allow it. I might even make him an Olivia Munn playlist in case he needs it. Just music I think she’d like.
Some poems feel like licking an old sofa.
The light is moving. Slowly, slowly, the light.
Writing is breath. As breath, writing is life.
Did you know tin cries when it’s bent? That’s because its crystals are twinned, meaning two crystals grow into each other and share points along its lattice structure. When bent, the crystals rub against one another, creating a pressure wave we hear as a cry or a squeak. The phenomenon is known as deformating twinning but is commonly called the tin cry.
There’s a poem in there somewhere, but I can’t find it, at least not today. Maybe you can. I know the poem’s title: “The Tin Cry.”
Slowly, the sky turns violet, its true color. Suddenly, the laccolith turns coral, as if to say: “You had your night, sky. The day is mine. Give it here.” A common raven flies between the two, a glossy witness, all ink and no page. Both the sky and the mountain turn gray.
I feel kind of bad about my perfect-poet post yesterday, my future-husband post, like I’m betraying E.R. Fightmaster.
I hear the stars hidden in the blanket-swaddled sky. I hear them beating.
In my dream last night, I’d just finished a poetry manuscript. It was an exquisite thing heavy with history, like a body that’s lived several lives. I bound it with ribbon, placed it in the passenger seat of a new Cadillac, and pushed the car off one of the cliffs here in canyon country. Someone tried to stop me. What are you doing, they asked, laying a hand on my left arm. You wouldn’t understand even if I explained it to you, I answered before giving the car one final shove.
Just enough light these days to give thanks to darkness.
I picked out my next husband. I showed photos of him to my current husband. He’s a poet who looks like a cross between my husband, Prince Harry, and someone who’d nail a guy’s hand to a table if the situation warranted doing so. In other words, he’s perfect. My next husband might be a wife, though, or I might just marry myself. I have a friend from high school who did that. She had a ceremony and everything. She’s very happy together.
Note: I would only go with another husband or wife if Jon’s been dead for at least ten years. Maybe twenty.
It’s super quiet now in the ER. I’m weirded out.
I can’t believe I got all gussied up for this CT scan.
A wallpaper-installation company whose slogan is We’ll help you get it up.
The dead have a way of killing the living, as do the living. That’s what I woke up thinking at 3:30 a.m. when my rodeo neighbors flew their helicopter over my house and the walls vibrated and the bed vibrated and I vibrated.
I’ve been dead and alive for months now, maybe years. Maybe since I learned about the sex trafficking in the communities my father moved in and moved me around in.
Maybe since I learned that [REDACTED]. They’re rotting aspens, my family, carved with graffiti and missing bark, their leaves falling dead to the ground. All dead. All hollowed long ago but still demanding their remaining branches reach the sky somehow. For what? A sun that heals? A sun like a dead god who will help them forget how they’ve lived, if you can call it living. What do you call all that fluttering in the air above rot?
Definitely since my brother-in-law began dying from early-onset colorectal cancer last fall. Definitely since then.
Then there’s the call of the living who are dying or think they’re dying, the living I love, the call I will answer whenever it comes, even if it comes in the dead of night like a helicopter tangling the desert sage as it passes over. Or in the form of my husband. Or in my neighbor in Tucson, whose eyelashes are gone from chemo, and more, and more.
I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. In Tucson and elsewhere, Indigenous people are being detained and told they aren’t citizens. And that’s just one atrocity that’s been happening over the past week. You can read about it in the news. I’m not the news and don’t want to be the news. I’m barely a person right now and am certainly in no shape to be reporting on anything.
Last week, I got the results of an extensive genetic test back. I’m not viable. That’s the bottom line. Yet here I am. I’m in the 99th percentile of fucked or fucked up on just about everything that matters. But genes aren’t everything. We know that. Whatever keeps me going isn’t my genetics. I’m in the 99th percentile for atherosclerosis, so yesterday I had the interventional cardiologist review the CCTA he ordered for me in 2022 when I was having heart issues. The test wasn’t done to determine how much soft or hard plaque I have in my arteries, but the cardiologist was able to pull it up and interpret the results. Jon and I stood in the exam room as he scrolled through the images from the test as if my interior was one of those flip books children make. Nothing. No plaque anywhere. My first thought was great. My second thought was why not me, why him. Him being my husband.
Risk doesn’t mean you have disease, the cardiologist says.
It’s good to know risk, but what we want to know is if you actually have disease or are on your way to having disease.
In this case, I’m high risk, no disease. Jon’s low risk, disease. Fuck risk factors. I mean, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. Just fuck maybe.
I had a dream two nights ago that took the form of a prose poem. Trump had dismantled the EPA and shut down all environmental cleanup sites, telling builders contamination won’t matter once the sites are developed.
It’ll be buried, Trump said. The waste will be buried. Just bury it. What’s buried can’t hurt anyone, almost as if he was talking about his own father, as if dead family can no longer do harm. I’m here to tell you they can. Look at my father in his grave, nothing now but bones caving in, obeying gravity like a falling apple only rotten all the way to the seed.
In the dream, I thought of Midvale, Utah, and the outrage locals felt in the 1990s when more than ten million cubic tons of toxic slag by the Jordan River were haphazardly covered in plastic with no lining underneath, vented, and later turned into commercial and residential developments. Folks in Utah wanted the EPA to do more, not less. They fought hard for more to be done but lost that battle. What would they fight for today? Less? Little? Nothing? Probably nothing. Just cover it up. Abolish the EPA. Who needs them. Who needs water and soil and air and viability for living beings.
In real life, not in the dream, we lived on that slagged land when we first moved to Utah, just down the street from Overstock, which was owned by the now-infamous Patrick Byrne, whose round concrete building with a peace sign on the roof was also on that land. Byrne got a deal on it, and he liked a deal. Jon worked for Overstock and for Byrne. This was right as he, Byrne, was transitioning from being a three-time cancer-surviving neuroatypical genius to whatever he is now. Maria Butina. Voting machines. Deep state. Trump as savior. Bars of gold and hunks of cheese stashed in Utah caves so he could feed and pay his employees in the event of an apocalypse. All of that. We’ve seen a man move from brilliance to chaos. We know what that looks like. We recognize it in others. I recognize the potential in myself. I certainly have the genes for it.
I’m afraid of myself. I feel like I’m full of slag, like my teeth and mind will loosen and fall out any day now. I don’t know how the Trump thing was a prose poem in my dream, but I know my mind was telling me to write. For me, writing is the way through, the only way through. Through to where, I don’t know. That’s the thing. What are we. Where do we start and where do we end. What is starting and ending, even? Some way to explain why we taper into fingers as slender as unlit candles that continually graze what is not us, or so we believe.
Almost as soon as the helicopter made the house rumble, it was quiet again. The house, I mean. Also the helicopter, which had landed on the neighbors’ helipad. But I was still quivering, my organs like china on a glass shelf in a display case nobody can open or illuminate other than a doctor who uses a mouse to drive through me one image at a time showing me how perfect I am, how goddamned perfect I am, despite everything. Proof of viability. Proof of life, at least for now. Proof of something.
You are also something. I can tell you that much. It’s all the news I can muster.
I’m reading Justine Chan’s poetry collection, Should You Lose All Reason(s). It’s based on her experience of a Southern Paiute myth she told over and over when she was working as a park ranger in Zion National Park, which is just a few minutes from our Utah home. I found the collection in the Springdale, Utah, library the day Jon and I drove out that way.
Chan lives in Washington state, where we lived for about a decade. Somehow, that makes her work resonate even more deeply for me. I’ve always felt a connection between Eastern Washington and Southern Utah. Where the land is concerned, I mean. The wildlands and the wildlife and how human consciousness is informed by both in ways they might not be elsewhere.
These poems are enveloping. They’re somehow a deep dive that feels like wading slowly into a welcoming body of water. Some parts remind me of Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin. Others remind me of a pillow book, namely the poems Rebecca Lindenberg has written in that spirit.
These poems speak to place, to identity, to what it means to live in a larger, natural world — or to live away from nature. Of who we are and how we become and how we continue. The speaker, I mean. The speaker, but also all of us. Also me, as a reader. (And maybe you if you choose to read this collection.)
Chan writes this place, Southern Utah, in ways that are image- and sound-driven without sacrificing authenticity, vulnerability, or accuracy:
You will get used to never seeing the full red sun as it rises or sets. You will see peregrine falcons and turkey vultures circling overheard, but never the condors.
None of the pictures you take will be quite right. Not in focus. Or the light’s not right. Or there is just too much.
You will bask. You will burn.
The bark of the spruce on the rim will always smell sweet and fresh in between its flaky scales.
The people will forget there was ever blanket poisoning of the public lands. That there are bounties for pairs of hacked off ears. That less, to rescind, must mean more.
Most of Chan’s lines are impressively long, like someone trying to stretch their arms as wide as the mouth of a canyon. The book is actually much wider than it is long to accommodate those lines. (It’s designed to look like an oversized postcard.) Her approach is somewhat experimental: at times bivocal, at times hugging the right margin or drifting cloudlike down the page, at times interspersed with dates and facts, and frequently breaking into song. (She quotes lyrics from sixteen songs throughout the book.)
I hope folks take the time to read this collection. Because. Just because.
Because the air is so hot, full of rasping. The land so full of landmarks and stories you can’t even begin to know.
Because you feel some part of you was / is / will always be secret.
Because the crickets are madness, a roar that fades to silence / if you forget / to listen.
They don’t know it, but the birds are competing to be the last bird I see in 2024.
Poems aren’t looking for advice or solutions. They don’t want to be told to see a therapist. They don’t give a rat’s ass about shaping up or shutting up or being shut down. Don’t treat poems like people, not even like the poets who wrote them, about whom you know little to nothing. The poems aren’t telling you all about the poet, not exactly (if at all). Poems are telling you about the poem. That’s what poems care about. Being poems.
My body’s resisting action, resisting thought. It’s off in the worlds Justine Chan creates, and that’s where it wants to stay. There are things she does in her poetry that make me think about how my poems operate, how they mean, how they exist. But I don’t want to move into the writing now, not yet. I want to listen to music and remain painlessly, effortlessly pried open.
Today has a stagnant-water vibe that I don’t particularly mind.
Oh, Jimmy Carter.
How do you not see that everything is everything?
At least my vomiting and diarrhea are being polite and taking turns.
I die and live, marking my days divined and madmade. This stoma of life strickens me. I am mummified.
(Trying my hand at some of the techniques Catullus uses in “Odi et Amo.”)
Love woke me today thinking about love. The cow love bought who gets to spend the rest of her life in the pasture. The tunnel love carved under a house that serves as a way out. The milk in the breast and bread in the mouth. An arm held close but not too tight. Branches tinseled with sudden ice. The stunned finch taken back by unbroken sky. Two old horses eating fresh hay. The dead in their humble pioneer graves. The broken fever. The cast spell. Dead words alive on the page. The prayer in the breath. The breath in the asking. The love of pleading, of desperation. Love of body, of cell. Love inside passing time, within lapsed memory. Those fettered by love who love even when they don’t want to love. Those shackled by fear who hear love mooing low in the distance.
It really hurts to write about dead people and dead birds and dead lands.
It’s gonna be a long night.
My job right now is to hold my dog while she dreams.
I dreamed I was dead but didn’t know it because my husband used petrification to preserve me perfectly. I looked like I was still alive. I couldn’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel, but I thought I could. I experienced the world as if I was still part of it, not realizing my husband was carrying me everywhere: from the bed to the sofa, from the sofa to my desk, from the desk to the car for long drives in the wildlands.
The angel’s in the details, too.
This poem says you belong.
I dreamed words were written on my back, but I couldn’t read them because I didn’t have a mirror.
Awake again. I feel like a helium-filled balloon that drifted from the party, got snagged in a tree, deflated, was eaten by a bird, and is now killing the bird slowly by blocking its intestines. Or maybe I feel like the bird. Or the tree. I definitely do not feel like the air or the rising helium or the child wailing about the lost balloon or the parent trying to distract the child with hand puppets. Maybe I feel like the hand puppets who know it’s all fun and games until they get wadded up in a drawer for another year and eventually stop coming out at all because the kid’s into 3D modeling and AI and sustainable farming, her days of being entertained by balloons and hand puppets long behind her.
I woke up early. I feel like warm Dr Pepper.
May we all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
I just got ageismed by a cashier at Lin’s Fresh Market in Hurricane, Utah. And they didn’t even have the one thing I wanted that nobody else carries, which is the only reason I didn’t go to Davis Food and Drug in La Verkin where everyone is super nice and never ageisms me.
I will get your attention, and when I have your attention, I will speak.
The world is bad enough that my poems make sense in it now.
Dr Pepper was once served as a warm drink with lemon. It was called Hot Dr Pepper. Hot Dr Pepper sounds like something that would pair nicely with winter hiking.Dr Pepper was once served as a warm drink with lemon. It was called Hot Dr Pepper. Hot Dr Pepper sounds like something that would pair nicely with winter hiking.
Other dreams last night, each an extension of the psyche dream: 1. A metallic spiderlike creature with telescopic presentation pointers for legs was singularly focused on continually mending the surface of the personal unconscious. 2. In the collective unconscious, I saw the face of a person who had eyes that were also a nose and a mouth, a nose that was also eyes and a mouth, and a mouth that was also eyes and a nose. These elements were randomly smooshed together rather than consistently arranged. I don’t think I was supposed to see that person. I don’t even think that person was a person.
Muse it or lose it.
I have a muse. It’s me.
Winter hiking sounds as awful as floor sleeping or day working.
The cow with a face like a skull is up on one of the steep rock formations near our house. Someone let her and the other cows I visited last week out to graze. I saw what I thought was an oddish set of brown and black rocks against the pale-green scrub. When I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look, the cow with a face like a skull was staring in my direction. What a surprise.
I dreamed I had talons for feet. Incredible talons.
Every day, I break for this world and want to be broken.
I’m thankful for anyone who will sing me away from this world when the time comes for me to leave.
My earlier years should have been happy but weren’t. My later years shouldn’t be happy but are.
I’ve decided that I can write my way into belonging here in Southern Utah. If I write this place, I will be part of it. I insist that this is possible.
I dreamed I was dead but didn’t know it because my husband used petrification to preserve me perfectly. I looked like I was still alive. I couldn’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel, but I thought I could. I experienced the world as if I was still part of it, not realizing my husband was carrying me everywhere: from the bed to the sofa, from the sofa to my desk, from the desk to the car for long drives in the wildlands.
Everything I sensed was a vivid memory, not reality. I’d mined these memories to invoke the aroma the meals my husband cooked, the feeling of his hand holding mine, our dog’s fur tickling my shins, and dawn’s light glinting off vast cliffs and deep canyons while ravens flashed their oiled bodies and I turned to face my husband so I could say “I love you, I love you.”
We went on like this for months or perhaps years. Maybe nearly eternity. I had no concept of time. Every day seemed like past, present, and future all at once until, for whatever reason, I realized my body was a tomb that I was locked inside. I was dead and I knew it, but how could I know anything, even knowing I was dead?
Once I knew I was dead, I could no longer imagine I was alive. The dream of me was on the other side of an inescapable enclosure. Did my husband still carry me around? Did he prop me up next to him so we could watch movies together? Did he take me out to see birds? Where was our dog? Our house? The wildlands? The world?
When would my knowing leave, whatever vestiges of awareness this was? How long would I refuse to vacate this cold black thing where my mind was a fly frantically hitting every ceiling, every wall?
Dana Henry Martin 