The house has been doused with gasoline. (You’re welcome in it.) The floor of the house is littered with matches. (Take your shoes off.) The house has no fire alarms. (Have a seat.) The cops don’t respond to house fires in these parts. (Kick your feet up.) The house is on fire now. (Be a love and close the door to save the rest of us.) The house burned down. (We wrote you a loving obituary.)
The loving obituary: We adored them. For some reason, they always looked uncomfortable around us. We did everything we could to make them feel right at home. They died before their time. Sometimes, [insert adjective here] people aren’t meant for this world. We will always remember them fondly.
—
I wrote this July 12, 2023. It’s about how we treat people we want to exclude while they’re alive versus how we talk about them once they’ve died. I was thinking specifically about how queer folks and those living with trauma and/or mental health issues are treated—and the ways in which the very people who exclude those folks from their homes, lives, families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, communities, and societies take no responsibility for their eventual, often untimely, deaths. There wasn’t anything we could have done is a common refrain. Really? Nothing. Not one thing?
I was also thinking about how it felt for me to live as a queer non-Mormon person with trauma and mental health issues here in Southern Utah, where I was routinely excluded and reviled even in literary communities. The poets who run two separate chapters of the Utah State Poetry Society told me they’d close their chapters down if I ever attended them because my work was inappropriate. I was a member of the USPS at the time and had every right to attend any chapter meeting in the state. Their issue was with my gender and sexuality, not my writing, which they hadn’t read.
I’ve thought about this post a few times since the election, so I decided to share it again. We need to bring the way we talk about the dead and the way we treat the living into alignment.
2009. A prominent poet in Seattle agreed to work with me on my poetry. Before the appointment, he googled (from his IP address) the words “married” and “naked” in combination with my name. He then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. But he didn’t stop there. He created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems. He later told folks associated with a book publisher in the area to ignore and disregard me.
2015. In front of a large group of poets, a prominent Kansas City poet screamed that I wanted to take him behind a dumpster and fuck him. This occurred after months of what I thought was meaningful friendship and seemed to be spurred, at least in part, by the fact that I was close friends with a more prominent Kansas City poet. The outburst occurred in front of that poet. Eight years later, he would tell me that I’m the one who harmed him because I’m a reminder of who he was at that time, and he doesn’t want to think about being that person.
2023. A talented poet who’s part of a tight network of poets outside Kansas City interacted with me for months as he was healing from a serious health issue. I was going to be in the area, and he asked if we could meet. I planned to give him the rare Japanese printing press I’d recently purchased so he and his friends could use it to make chapbooks. Before I left for the trip, he sent me a postcard with a poem of his on the back about how he never gets the girl, then he blocked me on Facebook. I still don’t understand what the hell happened there, but I know it’s bullshit.
2024. A Seattle poet I’ve known since 2009 decided to attack and threaten me yesterday after fifteen years of friendship and poetry camaraderie. We both lived in Seattle for years and spent time together in person on numerous occasions. Yesterday, he told me (and many others) that I’m cheating on my husband with him. That is not the case. I’ve posted screenshots of his accusations and the conversation he’s referring to because he threatened to out me publicly. For what, praytell? There’s nothing to out other than his unacceptable behavior.
2009. A poet who was my mentor sexually assaulted me en route to my MFA program in 2009. I’ve discussed that situation at length, including in a fifty-thousand-word essay on my website that was published for more than five years. I managed to stay in poetry until 2015—through my fear and my shame and my lost faith in poets and poetry—then I left for seven years.
I returned to poetry in 2022 with one vow: to never let anyone silence me again, threaten me again, terrify me again, or defame me again. This is a hard commitment to make, but I’m doing it. My responses will be swift when abuses occur, like the one that happened yesterday.
May nothing like any of the above happen again. May poets live up to what they are attempting to do in and through poetry. May poets who are women, female-bodied, queer, and otherwise marginalized find safety in poetry and among poets. May poets stand up for each other when it matters rather than adding ha-ha emoticons to posts in which poets are harassing and threatening other poets. May we find ourselves. May all these things come to pass.
Love yourself. Love your body. Trust yourself. Trust your body.
Put yourself in the world and know that you belong there. The world is bigger than people with power.
Find the exits. Know the exit routes. Plan your exit. Then enter.
See clearly, even what you don’t want to see. Bear witness. Take notes. Synthesize. Learn. Speak. Sing. Recite. Remember.
Write more poems. Stronger this time, more sure-handed, until metal strikes against metal.
Pay attention but do not seek attention. Turn your attention into a Mobuis strip that moves inward, then outward, then inward again with no beginning and no end.
Read people’s bodies more than their words, unless they’re poets, then read their bodies and words together.
Call bullshit bullshit unless it’s meant to be bullshit, then let it be what it is without calling it out. We need a little bullshit, now more than ever.
Read poems. Learn to move in and out of their white space. Listen and respond, listen and respond. Breathe through the lines. Inhale poems, exhale poems.
Believe in poems and their power. Don’t give up on poems.
Write more poems. Softer this time. Less heavy-handed, until the weft of each poem is as strong as churro wool.
Fawn if needed for survival but only for survival. Try not to freeze or flee. Remove the “r” from fright and fight if that’s the only available option.
Be ready to run. If needed, run. But circle back. Never leave. Draw an arc around the threat from a safe distance. Make that arc smaller every day. Remember: You belong.
Know when you’re with someone who’s hostile. Know that anyone can be hostile.
Be hostile if needed. Be loving as much as possible.
If you don’t write poems, instead do whatever you love, whatever keeps you alive.
My mother and I closely fit the archetypes of Demeter and Persephone, which is why I write about both in my poetry. I’m more like Hecate now that I’m older, or at least I’m getting there. My mother began the process of becoming Hecate as well. But first, she had to protect me the way Demeter eventually did by saving me from what she was partially responsible for.
That happened in 1985 when she risked everything to keep one of my father’s friends away from me. I remember that day. She saw his golden-bronze El Camero pull into the drive and told me to run and hide in my bedroom closet, quick. So drunk she could barely stand, she screamed at him to leave, every word she uttered a plosive, a bomb in his face. “SHE’S. NOT. HERE. R—.”
Anything could have happened. He was larger than her, stronger than her, and hellbent on getting access to me. She had no help from anyone in the family or the community. It came down to the two of them. She blocked his path to me by standing between the kitchen peninsula and the dining room table, interposing herself bodily, or at least that’s how I imagined it. I could only hear them from where I was hiding.
Her ferocity was derived from her own trauma, which prepared her for this moment. Trauma is often generational and repeating. It may not be optimal to live with trauma on a daily basis, but when you’re mother sees a moment for what it is and responds accordingly, her embodied trauma can provide the means for freeing you and your body from further trauma.
After that day, the path was cleared for my mother to become Hecate. She didn’t quite get there for complicated reasons, but I saw enough of Hecate in her to know the route. She stacked the cairns for me. Now, the journey is mine to make.
My mother and I are the original triple goddess, as are many traumatized women in traumatized families and traumatized communities in this traumatized world.
A man died last night in Toquerville where the bypass road construction is underway. He had just robbed Lin’s Fresh Market up the road a few miles and threatened to kill one of the store’s employees. He fled the scene and drove our direction. He crashed in the bypass area, was ejected from his vehicle, and was found dead by the police.
All the poems like woolen lovers.
I want to be the Marybeth Taylor of poetry. I went to middle school and high school with Marybeth. She was kind to everyone. Everyone. Not nice but genuinely kind. If I can manage to be her, someone needs to be her. All the kids in school needed her back then. Poets need someone like her now.
Oh, no. Woody Guthrie supported the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland that occurred that same year.
Those who’ve been shaped from birth by trauma sense what’s coming in the world, in the country, in the state, in the county, in the city, in the town, in the neighborhood, in the home, and in those around us. We can feel it rumbling inside us long before others do.
My job is to navigate these exterior and interior entanglements, to learn how to interpret and translate them without being subsumed by them, and to stay balanced in the most unbalanced of times. My balance doesn’t need to be perfect, but I have to recognize my center of gravity and anchor myself to it.
We have to survive what’s happening. We have to. The we is I that is also the we. The we of me. The I of you.
Poems are wild creatures. We need to treat them as such. They haven’t been bred over generations to prefer the warmth of our laps or trained to mimic everything we want them to say. Let poems roam. Feel their hooves shaking the ground. Watch them sleep in branches and devour each other in rivers and lakes. Don’t brand them, whatever you do. They aren’t yours. They never were.
I recoil when the language of power and control enters a conversation, then I grieve for what that language has extinguished.
We are in deep shit. All of us.
In my experience, nothing good happens behind closed doors. Everything unaccountable happens there.
I do not suffer gladly.
The more time I spend with poetry, the more faith I have in poetry. The more time I spend with poets, the less faith I have in poets.
I often wonder if we live in a post-community society. Now, I’m concerned that we live in a post-poetry community society.
Do not let fear nettle your heart.
My dog is trying to get inside my shirt.
Die by starvation or aspiration. Those are the choices modern medicine has given my brother-in-law. That’s his hospice plan.
And the foolish shall mow the earth.
I gather the fat bumblebees my neighbor has killed with his pesticides. They fall off his bushes and land in our yard this time of year. When I have enough, I’ll show him what he’s done without meaning to, but he won’t listen, especially not to a city girl who doesn’t belong in these parts. I’ll keep the bees so they’re not forgotten, add them to my cabinet of curiosities that already contains a rat’s skull my husband found on the back tier, a tiny moth who still stands with her wings erect as if death caught her off guard, a chunk of sandstone with an iron band running through it like a broken timepiece set to two hundred million years ago, wings from the hummingbird hawk-moth the bats devour on summer nights from the dark comfort of our unlit porch, and half of a kangaroo rat’s skeleton that I cleaned myself and placed in a jar, some of the bones smaller than plastic seed beads. The little size of dying Anne Carson talks about doesn’t get much littler than this. Even the bumblebees, gigantic by bee standards, die so small most folks aren’t even aware they’re dead.
A fallen soldier was on one of Jon’s flights. His family was there when he was taken off the plane. His grandmother sat in a wheelchair clutching a photo of him. This would be emotional under any circumstances. For Jon, today, when he’s on his way home to his dying brother and his veteran father who both survived and did not survive Vietnam, it hit deep, about as deep as anything has in his lifetime.
The last word Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book is the German word “moglichkeit,” which in English means possibility.
The wounded are the ones who can walk among the wounded.
Think about earthspan, not lifespans.
The healing that’s in our cells, our genes, our families, finds its way into the world.
He takes all the girls to see taxidermied two-headed animals.
Now that it’s snowed, the winds have come, the white-crowned sparrows are here singing raspily in the shrubs, and the dark-eyed juncos have arrived to bauble in the trees, my transition to winter is complete. I don’t even have to rookie my way through this season. I’ve got the pros here by my side to guide me.
The dark-eyed juncos are here for the winter! I just saw half a dozen of them in my honey locust. I know their range map says they’re found year-round across Utah, but they really don’t hang out down in Southern Utah, or at least this part of Southern Utah, until it gets too cold for them in the northern part of the state. When they come down this way, they show up in large numbers.
Stunned, I walk toward a blue father I mistake for the moon.
Trees look better up close than faces.
The trauma in the world finds its way into our families, our genes, our cells.
When the rock is exposed, time is exposed.
I know I’m not having an actual conversation with my honey locust tree, but I feel like it’s saying that it’s happy to endure the wind because wind brings rain and rain means life.
I looked at a wind map this morning hoping Toquerville and Tucson’s winds were connected. They aren’t.
I just accidentally ate a stick.
Even in Toquerville— doing whateverthefuck— I long for Toquerville.
— Dana Henry Martin after Issa
My neighbor gave me two pomegranates from her tree last night. They’re conjoined, stacked one on top of the other. They’re the pink variety, so they look a little unripe to my eye, but what do I know. I don’t grow them or know anything about them, really, other than Persephone ate three seeds from one, according to one version of the myth, and that’s why we have winter.
I was once two.
I think my dog’s sleep schedule is entrained on the phases of the moon and not on dusk and dawn. She was up earlier this morning than she should have been. That means I was up earlier this morning than I should have been. It was a big-moon night, no doubt about it. And it lingered. Moonset wasn’t until 7:57 a.m. here in Toquerville, Utah. (That’s 6:57 a.m. Tucson time.) I’m going to have to make sure she sleeps under the covers or her blanket until the moon settles down.
May the last thing I write be nothing.
A dozen house finches just silently dropped into my sage bush like that paratrooper scene in Red Dawn as if they had no bodies at all and were therefore immune to the effects of gravity. Now they’re in the locust moss acting like house finches again.
You could live all your life in a cold desert and think it’s paradise. But you don’t know the warm desert. You may never know the warm desert. I know the warm desert. I almost know it. I’m learning it like a new language or a new instrument or a new key. I will weave the warm desert as I’ve woven the cold desert. I will write the warm desert, but first I must write the cold desert. I’m writing the cold desert now. I’m trying. It wants me to write it. I have to believe this or I won’t write it.
It’s hard to change times if you’re in the wrong time. But I believe it can be accomplished through poetry—without running headlong into the future or clawing your way back to the past. At its core, poetry is time travel. Let’s go.
What’s dying is already dead before it is dead.
What living is already living before it has lived.
What’s brewing has already brewed before it has brewed.
I was, too, once.
The white-crowned sparrows have returned for the winter.
We’re back in Utah until late November. It’s so beautiful here. Our home is situated in an ecotone where not two but three ecological communities meet. There are no words for these lands, this place. I would stay here for the rest of my life if I had adequate healthcare, acceptance, understanding, support, community, a sense of belonging, and a welcoming and vibrant poetry and arts community.
Birds are so sweet. I don’t belong on the same planet as them.
Early morning, dreams wash past into the present. Halls of unlocked doors.
I was lonely last night, so I asked AI to tell me some facts about Cooper’s hawks.
Morning Prayer October 3, 2024
Good morning. I hope to be as enthusiastic about this day as the Gila woodpecker in my yard who just found a tasty berry to eat and was moved to announce his glorious find in all caps: CA CA CE CE KI-KI-KI-KI!
May you all CA CA CE CE KI-KI-KI-KI at least once today, preferably when you’re alone and in public.
There should be a literary journal called Crouton.
During the Southern Utah Book Festival, poets Paisley Rekdal, Danielle Dubrasky, and Simmons Buntin led the workshop “Real Locations, Imagined Selves,” whose focus was on defining a sense of place through words and documenting a place through poetry.
The conversation was much more far-reaching than expected. Poetry of place tends to focus on physical places, as in Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town or Wendell Berry’s poetry, which is closely tied to the specific farms he’s played in and worked on over the course of his life. Both Hugo and Berry’s approaches to place seem to be consistent with James Galvin’s notion of what a poet of place is, which is someone who situates himself in place in order to lose himself in it.
Rekdal discussed something similar to Galvin’s concept in the workshop, but she also talked about many other layers of writing about place—ones that augment and challenge the notion of place itself. She used the term palimpsest to describe places and our experiences of them, noting that places are layered in terms of their geographies, histories, uses, cultures, and more. Other layers include the ways in which places inform us psychologically, mentally, and politically.
The question implicit in this discussion is this: How can we begin to examine the layers of a place in order to more deeply know it, each other, and ourselves?
Partway through the workshop, an attendee said his body feels like a place, one that’s being politicized and treated like a territory. This was a powerful moment. The idea of the body as a place, one that can not only be inhabited by the self but also invaded, in a sense, by others, is disconcerting. When that type of invasion occurs in a physical space (someone’s community, their school, their place of worship, and so forth), body and space intersect, making both feel less safe. Here, we see layers of place building up and around the human body within the social, political, and physical elements of a place.
Rekdal says much of how place is defined is through bodies, and much of how bodies are being called into or excluded from a place is racial. She then discussed how the Chinese in the West could become white or reject becoming white depending on whether they wanted to be part of the United States. The idea she touched on is that, like places, race isn’t static. Bodies aren’t static. They’re all processes that are in flux and that meld into or layer over one another—and that sometimes collide with each other.
(I want to add that bodies are also excluded from places because of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, age, national origin, and sex.)
Place is not just where you inhabit. It inhabits you, too, Rekdal said as the conversation began reaching toward the ineffable. I sometimes think about places as hauntings, she added.
She notes that we can be drawn to places we’ve never been before, perhaps because something inside us may be encoded to seek out a place and call it home. Or perhaps we seek out a place and immediately feel the atrocities and suffering that occurred there, such as at the Topaz Internment Camp Museum in Delta, Utah, where Rekdal gives tours as the director of the American West Center.
Whatever the reason, humans seem to have the capacity to carry a sense of place within us that’s larger than life and longer than the human lifecycle.
Nothing natural but made in the beauty of this place. To create a home, we imported trees and water, we slashed and burned to excavate a state where nothing lived, nothing ruled us, and yet in all this nothing we were subject to the rules nothingness demande
Those lines are from Rekdal’s poem “Soil,” which appears in West: A Translation. She says places create relationships and help us develop empathy for each other. The forging of community from hardship is evident in the lines above and is part of the universal human experience.
The takeaway is that places can’t be places in any human way of understanding and experiencing them without our presence in them: the communities we build, the bonds we create within and because of place, and the ways in which we come to know place.
Wendell Berry says we’re losing our connection with place because our use of our places is greatly reduced from what it was in the past. Of course, he means literal places and a very specific type of past use of those places.
Perhaps Berry’s not imagining place as broadly as possible. As Buntin pointed out at the end of the workshop, imagination itself is a place. Imagine that. If what we imagine is a place, then the products of those imaginings, such as poems, are places. We really can create worlds out of words.
I wonder what you all think about where we are with regard to our relationships with places in any or all senses of the term? Is our understanding of places—like places themselves—a multidimensional process rather than a half-static relationship in which only human understanding changes, not the very idea of what constitutes a place?
Asked another way, are we as deeply connected with place as ever, even if we haven’t quite identified all our places as places: interior, exterior, past, present, analog, digital, elemental, philosophical, built, imagined, and so forth?
For the past few days, I’ve written things down about my brother-in-law and my husband’s family. Writing is how I experience the moment, how I express what I need to express, and how I heal. I removed that series of posts after a commenter and fellow poet implored me to see a therapist. That’s not the response I’m looking for when I share my creative work.
Given the fact that thirty percent of folks have negative experiences with therapy and most therapists operate within oppressive frameworks, it’s not a modality that should be blanketly recommended to everyone who’s dealing with the harder parts of life that we all experience or will experience.
It’s not someone’s place to tell another person what to do, and it feels like a form of bypassing on the commenter’s part, like they don’t want to engage in the subject matter or they want the person to shut up and talk about their issues behind closed doors.
This response undermines me and my experiencing while silencing my voice and imposing a framework of shame on my way of navigating the world. It’s a form of ab-normalizing that leads me to feel what I’m doing isn’t normal and should be hidden away because there’s no value in it, either in my life or as writing.
This is my page and my open journal. I’m in the present when I write here. Read my posts or don’t read them. Engage or don’t engage. Stop following me if you don’t like how I use this space.
But don’t tell me to see a therapist. That tells me you know little about me, what I’ve survived, how I continue to survive, and all the elements I’ve put in place that support my healing and wellness, including not one but two therapists and not one but two psychiatric providers. (I have providers in both Arizona and Utah.)
I also removed a number of additional posts, including most of my recent selfies from my Utah bathroom series. I feel self-conscious here. I feel unsafe here. I feel unwelcome here, on my own damn Facebook page. How fucked is that?
Don’t even get me started on how I feel about the poetry community right now, namely the poets and poetry organizations that are too big for their britches and don’t care about each other or their communities. Do what you want, dudes, but I don’t know why anyone would spend their life in poetry if it’s not to cultivate community on all levels—beyond poets and poetry—rather than focusing on yourself and whatever precious accolades you cling to or hope to receive. Maybe y’all should see a therapist.
I just want to reiterate how nice it was to read your poem and actually feel something. I have been pretty much dead inside to poetry this last year so your poem was a great gift to me. I love your poetry and your interior world. So many people do not seem to have interior landscapes and I am always so grateful and honored to interact with people who do.
You are the best, Dana. A brilliant writer and observer. I think it is just really hard to be a person who sees.
—
My dear friend sent this to me just over a month before she died. I miss her, her voice, the way she thought, the way she loved, and the way she wrote. She’s right about it being really hard to be a person who sees. She was right about everything.
Poetry is empty without her. Half of why I’m still writing is to write for her, to connect with her through language. She helps me see the world in a way I never could on my own. She helps me survive. She was a hell of a poet and a hell of a person.
I feel this sadness spreading across the time capsule of my body. My cells remember this sadness and pull toward it like iron beads to a magnet hovering above them a little too high for them to fly into the air but not high enough to keep them from vibrating against each other. I don’t mean any sadness. I mean this sadness. I mean how this dying connects with all the dying I’ve experienced.
I see the honey locust against a darkening sky. I see the laccolith darkening before everything else I see. I see the edge of the pasture where Curley, Friday, and Jet live. I see a hummingbird zipping up and over the house.
I hear the dishwasher busying itself in the kitchen. I hear the bulb in my desk lamp buzzing. I hear the cars on Highway 17. No, not the cars: the tires. I hear my tinnitus, especially in my right ear.
I smell mildew from the dish towel I just wiped my hands on. I smell my berry-flavored Eos lip balm. I smell my hairspray even though I didn’t use it today. I smell cloves from my aromatherapy kit.
I taste the olives I just made myself eat. I taste salt because I’m part salt. I taste whatever taste arsenic-laden Toquerville water is. I taste the skin on the inside of my mouth.
Correction: I feel the skin on the inside of my mouth. I feel my wet hair tightening into curls against my face. I feel the balls of my feet pressed against the windowsill. I feel the raised lettering on my keyboard.
I’m forgetting how to spell words like waist (waste?) and buzzing (bussing?) and sarong (which I didn’t even use in this post) and, in a minute here, tranquilizer (tranquelizer?). I’m forgetting words entirely, like laccolith (la- something) and desk lamp (light on table surface) and aromatherapy (smell healing).
This sadness feels like being shot with a horse tranquilizer. At least, that’s how I imagine it feels. I’ve never been shot with a horse tranquilizer, but I’ve been sedated for surgery, which quickly turned into sugary, just as the doctor who performed my surgery, Ryan Cooley, quickly became Dr. Floovr and remains Dr. Floovr to this day.
Language is leaving me. Dyslexia and working memory impediments are taking control of me in ways that aren’t fun or creative or surprising. I want to tell you about the sky now, how it’s the perfect ombre, about the bats fluttering above my street, about the honey locust and how it’s so dark that it looks like it’s gone beyond black. It’s the darkest maroon you’ll ever see. Something like that. I want to tell you something like that.
Dana Henry Martin 