Author: Dana Henry Martin

Neonatal Pig

Wood rats are the hamsteriest of all the rats. We have one who uses our rock wall like a little cubby-filled highway. We watched each other for a long time yesterday as she darted in and out of openings making her way up to our neighbor’s house. I’m going to leave some trinkets out for her, things she might like for her midden.

Traffic was at a standstill on the highway through Toquerville this morning. Two sheriffs and an animal shelter officer were trying to capture a pig who was on the loose.

I moved a cobblestone in the yard and found a western fence lizard attempting to stay warm on this chilly morning. I carefully replaced the stone and apologized for the intrusion.

If you can love a chicken, you should be able to love a human being, but things aren’t always that simple.

I describe my complexion as neonatal pig.

Upheavel and Loss and Despair

I heard stories of fear growing up, stories of anger, stories of upheaval and loss and despair. The aunt who was poisoned by her husband who was also the man who molested my mother when she was a child.

The great aunt who drowned in pills, who scraped her throat raw trying to force the pills back up after regretting what she did in the moment, in the moment. Before that, the way she waded into a lake and tried to drown herself but someone saw her and fished her out to face the blessing and curse of another day.

Stories of fish on the line, writhing, all muscle and intent. Streams of urine flowing like fountains into the red-tongued water. Who stole watermelons again? Who was chased by a landowner with a shotgun? Father, father. It was father. The urine was him, too. The fish was everyone he touched, everyone who wanted to break free from his hold.

Father and his women and his girls and his parties and his CB radio and his handle and the handle he gave me when he made me talk to truckers on one of the biggest sex-trafficking highways in the country.

Oh, wait. That’s my story, not one I heard. I only understood it completely two years ago. It seared my mouth when I tried to tell it, so I wandered toward the sun and begged it to turn me into ash, into smoke, into anything other than this dredged body. Wait, that’s my story, too.

Part Sand

I have so many things to do, but my dog is sleeping on my lap.

A turkey vulture glides over the creek, wings bent, head down. Fist-shaped clouds fill the sky. Am I the only one who braces a little all the time — in the Walmart, in the wildlands, in my home? You just never know what’s coming. When I was manic, I told the ER doctor my family was always exploding and floating. It’s true. The only way we survived each other was to float like vultures in our violent skies. Mania is a way to float when gravity’s fussy little hands won’t let go, when the weight of reality is unsurvivable. It’s a way up and out, all wing and wonder. Then you land, hard, the earth splitting you with its open hand. What’s my faith? That I’ll be broken again in this lifetime. I have faith in that the way the vulture has faith that he’ll find carrion before nightfall.

The vultures and the storm arrive together. Below, the dead, waiting. Below, the dry land, waiting. Famine, feast. Drought, water. A blue tractor pushes a single bale of hay across the pasture just before the rain begins to fall.

I hated the wind when I couldn’t escape the wind. Now the wind is gone. I miss the wind. I love the wind.

Part wind part sand. Part sand part canyon. Part canyon part water. Part water part stone. Part stone part moss. Part moss part bark. Part bark part loam. Part loam part clay. Part clay part man. Part man part prayer. Part prayer part song. Part song part wind. Part wind part sand.

This morning, the sky is a common opal, milky blue-white with deeper blue-gray behind that. Nothing shining through. Nothing casting off light. Nothing for us to point at and say, There it is, evidence of God. This dull sky hangs above the desert’s painted soils, its gutted reefs, its nameless headstones. It neither consumes us nor purges us. Just another day. Just another sky. We’ve all seen thousands like it. Good morning.

Facebook, how would I watch two rescued prairie dogs eat grape tomatoes without you?

Isn’t this why we’re all here? To postpone our own and each other’s departures? From life, I mean. From life.

Exploding and Floating

A turkey vulture glides over the creek, wings bent, head down. Fist-shaped clouds fill the sky. Am I the only one who braces a little all the time—in the Walmart, in the wildlands, in my home? You just never know what’s coming. When I was manic, I told the ER doctor my family was always exploding and floating. It’s true. The only way we survived each other was to float like vultures in our violent skies. Mania is a way to float when gravity’s fussy little hands won’t let go, when the weight of reality is unsurvivable. It’s a way up and out, all wing and wonder. Then you land, hard, the earth splitting you with its open hand. What’s my faith? That I’ll be broken again in this lifetime. I have faith in that the way the vulture has faith that he’ll find carrion before nightfall.


Stone Heavy

This stone-heavy ball of hope. This gravel-slick hill before me.

It’s easier to forgive the dead for what they’ve done than to forgive the living for what they’re doing.

Cinched by cumulus clouds, the Pine Valley Mountains are sugar-white thanks to yesterday’s snow. Below, sand-encrusted cars zip behind the cattle ranch’s picket fence. Three rock doves draw my eye from cottonwood to rooftop, then everything is still until the air shifts, until another car passes, until another bird flies. I could waste my life here, right here.

That beating? It’s the rhythm of death but also the rhythm of life.

Good morning, air. Good morning, land. Good morning, birds singing the desert to life.

Weaponing Healthcare

Today, my primary care doctor opened my appointment by telling me that he believes I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve survived and/or live with multiple illnesses, including cancer. I live with more than one rare disease, including common variable immunodeficiency, which is serious and life-threatening. I have autoimmune diseases, renal insufficiency, postural orthostatic tachycardia, and arrhythmias. I’ve been treated for atrial fibrillation. I have aortic root and ascending aortic dilations. And I have PTSD and serious, life-threatening, bipolar.

All of this is documented in my medical record at Intermountain, where my primary care doctor works. It’s not in my head. It’s not me imagining health issues that don’t exist. They exist, and I’m attempting to address them. I worked as a medical writer and editor at some of the best institutions in the country for years. When I get a diagnosis or face a health challenge, I do research and have the determination to address the situation however I can.

Today, I was asking about my fasting blood glucose being over 100 for the past two years. That’s diagnostic for prediabetes, but none of my doctors brought the high results to my attention. High blood sugar seems like something I should be able to discuss without being called a hypochondriac. It’s especially important given that my chances of developing diabetes are 3 to 4 times higher because I have bipolar disorder.

I was also at the appointment to discuss my BUN level and (BUN/creatinine ratio). My BUN has doubled in the past 5 months and is above the normal range. Perhaps that’s not an issue, but given my history of renal insufficiency and the fact that lithium, which I started taking at a higher dose 5 months ago, causes kidney disease in about 26 percent of patients, the higher BUN level seems like a valid issue to raise.

Healthcare systems don’t seem to welcome the type of patient I am—one who’s female, has chronic health issues, and has a mental health diagnosis. We wait years or decades before our issues are taken seriously and addressed. By that time, we often have medical trauma because of how the healthcare system has treated us or our conditions have progressed, often irreversibly, because we were gaslit into thinking it must all be in our heads, a point our doctors belabor.

If I can’t approach my doctor for routine care, explanation of test results, or to discuss a health concern—the very things primary care providers are supposed to do with their patients—without the entire encounter being dismissed as evidence of a mental health problem, then why am I even trying so hard.

This isn’t the first time this has happened here in Southern Utah. Another doctor at Intermountain denied the fact that I had atrial fibrillation despite a preponderance of evidence that I had the condition. I was denied the medication I needed because of his insistence that I didn’t have afib. Yet another doctor at Intermountain tried to tell me my diagnosis of common variable immunodeficiency was unfounded despite the fact that I have extensive documentation of that disease from accomplished immunologists who know how to diagnose and treat immune system dysregulation.

I’m tired. I’m tired of this treatment. I’m tired of this sexism, this ableism, this dehumanization. I’m just tired. These attitudes and behaviors on the part of doctors cause unnecessary and severe iatrogenic illness for those of us who are subjected to them. I can’t carry that burden on top of my actual health and mental health issues. I’m tired.

Wayfinding

When you feel trapped inside rooms you didn’t willingly enter, I’ll draw clouds on the ceilings so you can remember the sky.

When they run, they run away. They are us or us in other bodies.

Your heart will speak to you one thousand times today. Let it.

It’s hard to find your way when you don’t know where you are, and that’s pretty much how I feel every day: lost and longing but also curious and free—moving instinctually toward where I think I need to go, who I need to be, what I need to feel, and what I need to do.

Terror and Awe

The terrible reality is that health is more expensive than disease in this country.

Trauma is a wound of the present, every day. — Anonymous

A member of a support group I belong to wrote this, and it is hitting me hard. I want to lie on the floor and repeat this sentence until it inhabits every cell—until my whole body knows that I understand, that I understand. That I hear it, feel it, sense it. That I know what it has lived through and still live through, often elegantly, nearly always silently, and sometimes madly, madly.

Dreamed I attended my own funeral. I looked good.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, if the suffering I’ve experienced will, somehow, be transmuted to beauty, to love, to healing—for myself or for anyone else. But tomorrow must come like kelp wrapping its lithe blades around marine life and glimmering bits of trash alike, and I must be there with it, bobbing at times, gasping for breath at times, wishing the water was colder or hotter or shallower or clearer and, much less often than I’d like, simply floating without fear in my heart, without terror in my mind.

Terror and awe. The lulling sounds of those words. Terror. Awe. Terror. Awe. A swing twitching in winter’s wind. A wooden metronome on an upright piano. Gauzy drapes sucked into and spit out of an open window.

I did not tar hope’s feathers.

Euphoric from the propofol used in this morning’s colonoscopy, I flop into bed to dream of cake and human kindness.

Wooden Cathedral

Why do I keep finding my words on your tongue?

Don’t quiet quit your life.

My mini-writing retreat ended up being a retreat from writing, one I needed.

Life: Losing a shoe and finding a sock.

Your studio is the middle of three, with a purple flagstone walkway and an image of a tree on the courtyard gate. Perfect. I’m on my way.

I keep listening to the Contagion soundtrack. Music for our times.

Brevity is the hallmark of someone who only writes on a smartphone.

All the ways things could have ended but haven’t.

I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.

I eat dark cake in the dark.

These days, writing retreats are just me in a room I don’t have to clean myself.

I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.

Woke from a nap looking like a combination of my mother, my sister, and The Elf on a Shelf.

I love every bird who is singing and every bird who is silent.

I feel like I swallowed a guillotine blade.

I’m not sure why, but I keep looking around stiffly as if I have a cast on my neck.

I suppose one can be at motion, as in standing on the cusp of it, as in looking onto or into.

In motion, not at motion.

My inconclusive heart. My errant clavicles. My wandering womb. My basted spleen. These parts of me at rest, at motion, steeped and parched. I thank them. I give thanks for them. I’m honored they’re here with me now.

I’ve just misread the phrase basted spleen as bastard spleen and bastion spleen. I’ve just typed spleen as sleep and peels. Dyslexia is my collaborator.

If the man who sexually assaulted me could see me now. He’d be so proud.

For those in Utah: Activism does not equal satanism.

The day I led you to a wooden cathedral in the field and, mid-air, hummingbirds flashed their jeweled feathers.

I was all typos this morning. Being wildly ill is affecting what my thumbsies do.

The wind’s blowing.

I found a little pie and ate it.

You don’t need someone to tell you the wind’s blowing.

I thought I could only raise my voice if others did the same. But they were silent. I had to raise my voice first, then they raised theirs.

My master of fine arts program offered free bonus coursework in trauma dissociation.

Imagine screaming for your life when trauma has its palm on your omohyoid muscle. And that trauma is other people. And they’re telling you to shut up. And they’re crushing your neck. And they’re calling it massage.

I’m at the weight-loss stage of my illness where people want me to eat anything: an exoskeleton, a hoof, teeth.

Ruin is my safe word.

Living in southern Utah means having a second chance at everything I did thirty years ago.

Let’s get some better language, folks.

But her emails, I say every time I send an email.

I never stopped writing when I left poetry. I just started composing elaborate Tweets and Instagram photo captions.

I don’t like it when the wind wheezes like a child with untreated asthma who’s just tried to run a fifty-yard dash.

The kind of wind that uproots thoughts.

Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.

Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.

If you don’t love me once you learn I’m nonbinary and sexually fluid, then you never loved me.

One large organism. That’s what we all are. When part of us dies, part of a whole dies.

All the earth ever wanted to be was the earth.

I hate the poem “The Mower,” by Philip Larkin. The hedgehog wouldn’t have died if the speaker had checked the lawn before mowing it.

You didn’t bring me back to life. You brought me back to a trauma state that I used to associate with living.

I’m listening to sad songs. They’re all sad songs.

I’m getting tired. This question just popped into my head: “If you were my sandwich, what kind of sandwich would you be?”

Note to selves.

I used to think the internet was an oracle. Now, I think it’s a monster.

And yet I think it’s beautiful.

I can totally write a single sentence and stop there. But why?

The trinity I knew was guilt, shame and fear.

Finding joy. It’s like holding an extinct bird in my hands.

And if the sun doesn’t come up, I will never die. Nothing will die. Not one person, not one idea, not a single living being. Even the earth will be safe from death.

Until the sun comes up, I’m rejecting death on every level. Death of the mind. Death of the spirit. Death of the body. Individual deaths. Collective deaths. The death of democracy. The death of polyvocality. All deaths fitted neatly inside another death like death nesting dolls.

Imp, quit saying “The End” to shut down conversations. You’re neither a child nor a god. Children think they control beginnings and endings. Gods, as we imagine them, may have that ability. You don’t. You’re just someone acting at once childlike and godlike, a putrid admixture.

A living being is a living being is a living being.

I’m trying to stay alive until the truth comes out, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.

Brands are people now. They act like people, interact like people, react like people, and are informed by people.

Brands are people now. They have an insecure attachment to us, and we have an insecure attachment to them.

Brands are people now. They talk to us as if they are our teachers, philosophers, sociologists, leaders, gurus.

Brands are people now. They self-consciously expose their psyches, including the marketing tricks they use to lure us in, to keep us in conversation with them, and to make us experience ourselves with and through them.

Brands like Steak-umm are people now. They assume a teacherly, philosophical role. They tell us exactly how they’re manipulating us and how we’re being manipulated by other brands. And we do what they predict. They can’t shake us.

But they can Steak-umm and bake us. Or maybe we’re just there for the baking (and the taking).

I love Steak-umm, by the way, it’s one of my dearest friends. Because brands are people now.

Brands are people now. They act unkind toward us. They act indifferent toward us. Spokespeople like Sarah Silverman explicitly tell us they don’t even care if we buy what they’re promoting.

Brands are so people now that I want to avoid them the way I avoid all people.

What are brands if not a conglomerate person that arises from the human tendencies, limitations and impulses of all the people creating any given brand? And where does our consciousness and brand consciousness begin and end? Do we know? Do you know?

Who are you wearing? I mean that blouse. Who designed your ottoman? Did you get it at Target? Studio McGee? Oh, I love that perfume. What a great car.

Brands have been people since people have been in the business of creating brands. But brands are meaner now. They’re just as cruel and indifferent and loathsome as we are, which means we’re getting meaner. I mean, that’s obvious, right? That we’re getting meaner.

And more cynical. Look at how cynical brands are. That’s a clue about how cynical we are. Because we’re all brands, and we’re all people. And brands are cynical people now.We’re not buying the world a Coke these days. And perfect harmony? Try cacophony. The brands are people, and they know it. They know how much trouble the world is in.

Brands! You used to make me feel safe. You gave me hope. You were like the lyrics to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” As a child, when I’d see you on television, you made me feel like I could live, like it would all get better.

You don’t know anymore, do you, brands? You don’t know if we can live, if things will all get better.

Brands, I believe every word you uttered when I was young. I got through being abused, being molested, being raped because of you. I got through all of it because of you. Now where are you? What kind of person have you become?

I know you don’t have any easy answers, brands. I know you’re scared, too. I know, I know. You’ve done your best. You were always a stand-in for religion and spirituality, for relics and icons and talismen. I know it was too much to ask of you. To play that role. To be all that.

Ace Hardware feels my feels. It just sent me an email that reads: “Let us help you.” Of all the brands, I believe Ace Hardware is the one that actually could help me. Ace isn’t cynical. It’s doesn’t antagonize. It doesn’t tell me my future is iffy at best. It doesn’t scare me.

In short, Ace Hardware is a good brand friend to have. But it’s not my best brand friend. Honestly, I think Ace is a little naive, especially these days. It has some things to learn about being a person-brand. I might need to seek out some new person-brands to befriend.

I would love to be a hippopotamus named Fritz.

I wish I could show off my feet and make someone love me.

No expression without digression.

Be inconvenient and all else will follow.

A picture of the hamster I had seventeen years ago came up today in my photo memories. I loved that hamster. Her name was Tater McGee. I’m a wreck now.

I need a better elevator pitch for telling people I’m not straight. Apparently, saying “I’m not straight” isn’t clear enough.

Imagine being dead for one hundred years and people still leaving books at your grave.

I feel the dead close. Closer than the living.

Water, water while away your sighs, spiral through my ridges. If today is a window, it’s a way out.

When I darken like wild rain in a quixotic moment, the shores of my life reluctant to wake.

When I see the sunset tethered, tamed. When I hear wood moving on a smooth creek.

The dock remembers water. I remember the feel of escape—dry as land, quiet as mercury stretched and spread and hardly here.

Across an afternoon, the boats away and away. I linger like a canyon, like someone’s love or lies.

Ruin.

Basalt: even darker after rain.

Listening to what screams outside in the deep dark.

Beauty, I can’t leave you.

Deep Crimes

I drove past the gorge and smell like the gorge.

All this land and yet no healing because of all these people.

I’m always moving inside the wrong water.

My local hardware store has a copy of The Iliad.

His mind is a gas burner that won’t light.

It’s like my clothes have been spending time on other people. They smell very good and not at all like me.

The burst of adrenaline that occurs shortly before someone destroys me.

Again, but without the pathologizing language.

Don’t make a long story longer by stating that it’s going to be a long story.

My wind is full of rocks.

Feel free to throw tomato soup on my poetry.

I used to think I was experiencing ennui. Turns out I just have a bad heart.

Mihi in odio est. It is hateful to me.

Do not give up. The earth needs our palliative care.

We live in a post-humane world.

Night of deep crimes. Day of mirage ceilings. During each, an orchestra of fire between my ears.

I’m some sound like a crow or crowbar, a cheap closet door fisted open.

Here, it’s an afterlife of branches and ancestors and hands on my shadows.

This autumn is unmetered, a dream of wind and shovels.

These ethics really get in the way of a good time.

They’re not unfriending you because they’re not paying attention to you.

You. Your tongue. Your bell-clap. Your drumming. Pull fistfuls of everything from my dress, my drawers.

Driving home, I blast rock music for the cows flanking the road.

Tonight, they got to hear AC/DC.

I met a Gila monster today.

My favorite hawk just ate my favorite lizard.