Author: Dana Henry Martin

Spared

To be spared is to be pared, part of you left but part removed. To be spared means to pare, to reduce what happened to its essence and to find your own essence despite what happened. Injured but not killed. Damaged but not broken. Burned but not torched. You are what is left over, what you can afford to be, what you still have to give others. In Old English, spare means not enough. Were you not enough to be worth destroying or not enough after being destroyed? In Latin, pare means prepare. Do you feel prepared now that you’ve been skinned?

Humane Bug Trapper

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, birders are calling owls “lil darlings,” and I’m here for it.

Happy New Year. Thank you all for making this one survivable.

I have to use binoculars to see the spines of the books on my high bookshelves is how I am.

I dreamed I asked someone to sign my copy of their chapbook. They were like, How do you spell your first name, Darling? Without thinking and without an ounce of humor or irony, I replied, S-A-D.

I know having a waterbed filled with zero sugar Cherry Coke that I can sleep on and drink from is impractical, but it’s what I want.

I’m stressing myself out in that way that I only am capable of stressing myself out is how I am.

Listening to Modeselektor on repeat is how I am.

Writing letters to my dead mother is how I am.

Facebook thinks I’m a library and is trying to furnish me.

Speaking the truth is not without consequences.

String art weirds me out.

More and more, I like less and less. 

Oh. It’s December 20. My mother died twenty-one years ago today.

I don’t think of myself as sans serif. I think of myself as serif-free.

I bought a replica of a medieval carnival badge called “Good Harvest.” Badges like this one supposedly provided protection and ensured prosperity. The one I ordered depicts a person driving a wheelbarrow full of phalluses along a road that’s a giant phallus with legs. That’s quite the harvest. During the Middle Ages, phalluses were believed to drive out evil and confer good luck. Badges like this one were popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Google “medieval carnival badge” if you want to see an assortment of designs. There’s one that’s a vulva with legs walking around with a rosary in one hand and a phallic pilgrim’s staff in the other. That might be my favorite.

I really can’t see very well these days. I’ve needed glasses for years but have gotten around it by memorizing the eye chart right before the ophthalmologist comes in for my appointment. Today, I thought I was going to watch a program called “The Smurftown Tunes.” It was actually “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Not at all what I was expecting.

This new font, Sans Gender, is hard-coded to replace more than one hundred needlessly gendered terms with inclusive terms. This font is so the boss of me. I don’t know if the font would allow me to say that, but it’s true. And something has to be the boss of me. Why not a font?

I see the poet who threatened me last year has a new collection out with a press that purports to be a safe space. Congratulations all around: to the poet, the press, and the community that makes it all happen.

CNN: Quit putting Hans Nichols on your program. He’s using the term “schizophrenic” right now to describe inconsistent behavior. That’s sanist and unacceptable.

The gash in my fitted sheet created by my rough heels has grown so long that one of my calves is now stuck in it. I could free myself, but that would require a teensy bit of physical and emotional effort. I think I’m just going to stay like this all day. My heels win. The gash wins. I’m going to nap like a cruel President.

The chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma in my hometown was a consultant for MKUltra. My friend told me this today. I’m super weirded out about it. My mother may have known him. He also killed an elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a large dose of LSD.

There are pyrrhuloxias in Oklahoma. Hot damn.

The Nazis used the font Fraktur and its variations for their propaganda, including Mein Kampf, but banned it in 1941 for being “judenlettter,” which translates to “Jewish letters,” meaning it was linked to Jewish printers and writers, so an edict was issued to replace the font with Roman styles, which were required for all Nazi communications throughout Europe.

Now, the ousted font is one that’s accessible to people with disabilities. And its replacement is a Roman style. This is significant. This is eerie. This is history repeating itself.

It’s good to know fascism has a font. I’m still on the font thing.

Literary journals and presses that require all submissions to be set in Times New Roman may want to rethink that requirement. It’s not an accessible font for those with reading issues and learning disabilities. And now it carries an ugly political connotation to boot.

Dear Leader, I found a readable font family called Sans Gender that works for me as a dyslexic nonbinary individual, and yes I am buying it. And no, you can’t stop me. Take your Times New Roman and be on your way.

Keep your hate font away from me.

Well, I know what font I won’t be using moving forward.

Walan the wombat has stopped having panic attacks, has started doing zoomies, and is now shaking his head back and forth, which is a sign he feels happy and secure. He’s also been playing with other baby wombats. I’ll tag you on his latest video if you want to see it. And no. I’m not crying. Not even a little.

I am going to Thomas Merton myself into hermitage until I no longer say and do all the wrong things.

Yesterday in Utah, a skier had to be rescued from a crevasse, and a hiker had to be rescued from quicksand. This is why I say inside.

Hacking my gut microbiota with apple cider vinegar is how I am.

Dear New York Times: Cookies are delicious, but “cookie” is not a season. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Department of Injustice

Watching a video of a nudibranch pooping is how I am.

Apparently, the FDA is practicing evidenceless-based science now.

In the Oklahoma birding group, someone posts a photo of a dead white-throated sparrow they’ve found at their campsite, hoping to get an ID. Someone IDs the bird. Someone posts a quote from the Bible: Not even the sparrow falls to the ground without God’s notice and care. Someone posts a painting they created based on that Bible verse, an unassuming sparrow looking up into a shaft of light. A funeral of sorts is held for the sparrow. A space opens up in the group for mourning and love. This is deep birding, not the run-of-the-mill look at my beautiful bird photography skills found in other birding groups.

Sometimes, all I can say about a poem is that it exists.

I just misread a headline as “Hummus: A Monstrous History,” and everything I thought I knew about hummus flashed before my eyes before being supplanted with a darkness I could only imagine and barely fathom. But no worries. It was just humans in that headline. Not hummus. We’re all good. Enjoy your hummus, monsters.

The rock fracture at Yosemite National Park is actively occurring. Meanwhile, I am passively occurring. We all have our way, Yosemite.

As an aside, look at this glorious language. Geologists dispatched to the area of the fracture said they could hear it cracking like a frozen lake that wasn’t consolidated. That description must absolutely be used in a poem.

TFW you wake up in the morning and suddenly remember you shared one of your poems on Facebook the night before.

I’m totally involved in the life of a sick baby wombat named Walan is how I am.

I’m buying a humane catch-and-release bug trapper is how I am.


December 25, 2025

The laccolith shoulders this inelegant sky, nothing to write home about, as if this weren’t home now but that other place, the one I’m from, a town that’s rotting building by building, foundation by foundation, the fences, the red brick, the sweetgums and their dejected seeds. But mostly the psychiatric hospital, which the state left to vandals years ago.

Where I live now is less town than scrub, less scrub than sand, less sand than canyon. Plenty of room for a word to get lost, to go out on the air and never reach a listener but also never boomerang back to the speaker who stands, silent, beyond language, at least for a spell, isolated from everyone, including themselves.

That’s when the laccolith comes in handy, a kind of giant anchor for thought, for yearning. Headless under dark clouds, the color of night before night falls. A heavy future, a heavy past, a sense of always about it that makes humans seem like baubles, a bracelet of seals surrounding a whale in a faraway watery world before one slips into its mouth unnoticed.

What rises here rises in the distance, with its monzenite and spruce, big-eared bats and fir, bitter cherry, dollarjoint cactus, pygmy rabbits, sandweed, spleenwort. We’ve never been liberated from names or naming. In my ignorant past, I didn’t learn what to call things or what to call myself. Cardinal was red bird. Finch was sparrow. Father was father. I was daughter.

I read that if you think enough about a relative, your genes flip on and off to become more like theirs. Ten minutes a day for thirty days is all it takes. In case that’s true, who should I think of? I’ll take my chances with my mother, the way the white-tailed antelope ground squirrels take their chances with the feral cat when the neighbor’s trees are heavy with apricots in late summer. At least her genes helped me survive him.

Pistachios escaped cultivation in nearby mining towns and made their way up into the mountains. Birds, the first landscape architects, move them around the foothills, where they grow like bonsai. Humans spread from place to place, trying to find and lose ourselves. We look for footholds. We lock in. Even if we only grow a little, it’s something. A small life is better than none at all.

Horses and cows come and go here, the way they do where I’m from. My mother came and went, into and out of the hospital as a nurse and sometimes as a patient. Those buildings feel like her body rotting, returning to earth with no dignity. Her broken windows. The word PSYCHO spray-painted on her side. Her interior waterlogged and full of God knows what in the one-time hospital chapel that hasn’t shivered with song in decades.

Inger Christensen says there is war all the time. There is war. There is war. War in the cells. War in the genes. War in the heart. War in the mind. War in the family. War in the mother. War in the father. But there is also deerweed and spikemoss, manzanita and mat muhly. There is histone modification and methylation, expression and heritability. There is asbestos and lead, observation hatches and safety glass.

There is what happened and what passes for what happened, in memory, in polite company, in our palm lines, in our bloodlines. There is war all the time, even under new paint and old dirt.

Nowhere Going Nowhere

Across the creek, cows have replaced horses. The windmill has given up on the idea of spinning. Rust keeps it still even on windy days. I dreamed I was beheaded, and Stephen Miller joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He rented me a pastel house in the middle of nowhere while I grew a new head. I lived there with Jason Statham, who let me see the world through his eyes until I had my own. He wore all black and sharpened knives incessantly. Folks like to walk into the wildlands at the end of my road. They always come back, like my head did. It was the end of times in my dream. Thirty days of unspeakable violence. CBS was inciting it by cutting their stories in a way that made us hellbent on destruction. The end of times. The end of the road. A nowhere going nowhere fast. A head that grows back but why. Even a cow knows better than to attempt such a thing.

The Architecture of Mental Illness

Mental illness has an architecture. That’s part of the story of asylums and treatment in this country. Central State Griffin Memorial, the hospital in my hometown, wasn’t laid out like this, but it had that same grand feel juxtaposed against the lives of those who inhabited the buildings.

Throughout its history, which spans more than a century, Central State’s story has been one of hope, ignorance, dehumanization, and harm: the same story from the asylum era to era of deinstitutionalization to today. I can barely tell any of it but have to before that history is lost. My mother worked there as a nurse and was treated there as a patient. Her relationship with Central State spanned more than three decades. That architecture was in her body, her bones part of the structure of those buildings and that land. Now, we need to make sure these places don’t come back with a new story: one of coercion, exploitation, profit, and greed.

—

Source: PBS Utah video about The Kirkbride Asylum, which was the template for many other asylums across the country.

Rootball First

I dreamed I was in a seminar, and the speakers kept making jokes about a man’s appearance. He’d answer a question, and they’d say things like, That’s a pretty good answer for a bald guy.

Finally, I’d had enough. Quit saying he’s bald, I said. That’s body shaming and has nothing to do with his answers.

They replied, Of course you’d say something like that, Barbie Doll.

I was like, Take your seminar and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

The seminar was “The Care and Cultivation of Miniature Palm Trees in the Desert.” They gave each attendee a miniature palm tree. I’d already managed to kill mine. I’d only had it for an hour. I pulled it out of its pot by its dead canopy and threw it to the ground rootball first like I was some kind of wrestler who was about to leave the wrestling federation on principle but wanted to get one more slam in.

My friend Rethabile Masilo was there. He grabbed the dead palm tree and said he’d bury it for me.

You just go, he said. Take the fight to the streets. So I did.

Bloatano

I lost my phone for a while today and had the exact same feeling of being untethered that I experienced when my mother died. Unfortunately, this played out in front of my therapist, so he no longer has some image of me as a moderately reasonable or quasi pulled-together person.

I wrote a poem. It’s not about my phone, but I do have a poem about my phone because I love it. I mean her. I mean Aluminium. That’s her name. She and I have bonded over the fact that we both contain lithium. She has a little case with a cover on it that’s kind of like the leather pocketbooks my mother’s cigarette company used to give its customers for free. I love her. I also love my mother, who died on December 20, 2004. Oh, that’s what’s happening. That anniversary’s coming up in two days, hence all the big emotions directed at Aluminium.

This Calibri T-shirt is getting tighter as the night wears on. It feels like a corset and not in a good way. Bloatano has entered the building. I mean my body. I mean I’m bloated, but Bloatano sounds better, like the monster that GI distress is. The internet says I’m the first person ever to use the word Bloatano, so that’s kind of a big deal, which means I’m kind of a big deal. Bloatano also affects my ego from time to time, clearly.

I blocked three people today. It was super. My image of the medieval badge gave me the courage I needed in the precise moment I needed it. I can’t wait to hold all those little phalluses in my hand when the actual badge arrives. If phalluses really ward off evil, I’ll have ample protection.

Mistuning

We seem to have lost the ability to comprehend, to reason, to infer, to extrapolate, to synthesize, and to contextualize just about anything other than maybe song lyrics, and even then it’s iffy.

By comprehending, I don’t just mean understanding. I mean interpreting things like tone, which is essential for grasping meaning(s). We’ve lost that, too.

We’re taking personally that which is not personal and not taking personally that which personally affects us. Instead, we deflect, defend, deny, derail, dismiss, disparage, detonate. I’m tired of that pattern. We’re giving birth to mistuned responses in the driverless car that passes for communication.

We’re reading and listening too fast or not at all, at once too little and too much, leaning into things like AI to do our work for us, even when we aren’t using it actively and may not be aware of how it’s shaping our communications and changing our brains (and in turn our minds).

We’re tired and angry and sloppy in our reading, writing, and responses. I don’t mean some we that’s far away or out there or that doesn’t include poets. I mean all of us. The past 24 hours on Facebook have been unbearable for me. I’ve tried to talk about two issues that are significant. It’s clear from many of the responses I received that Facebook isn’t the place to say anything that matters.

So why am I there? Why are any of us there? Maybe it’s time to not be there, at least not in any significant way, whatever significant means these days. I’m afraid it doesn’t mean much.

Bad D(a)NA

I took a genetic test last year. It said my overall health score is in the 74th percentile. I was like, That sounds about right. Well, I looked at my score again today and saw that it can be broken out into DNA and lifestyle. My lifestyle score is in the 99th percentile. My genes? Only the 49th percentile. Half of the genes they look at promote health. The other half strongly promote illness, disease, and disorder. And I do have a number of health issues, rare diseases, syndromes, and one big, fat disorder. So it’s not off.

So far, the company has identified 149 potential risks based on my DNA. I recognize a bunch of them because they aren’t just risks. They’re acute and chronic issues I have, like heart arrhythmia, thyroid inflammation, dyslexia, and mania. It even picked up on my sugar cravings, tendency to worry, droopy eyelids, rosacea, TMJ, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

And that 149? It’s not even factoring in things like postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, common variable immunodeficiency, and follicular thyroid cancer, all of which I’ve had or currently have.

I can add labs to my report to bring my overall score up. (Aside from my TSH lately, my labs are awesome, mostly because they miss a lot of things.) But I can’t get over that DNA percentile. How am I a viable organism? How am I here? Am I dreaming this life? Are a groin hernia and leaky gut really in my future? Do I have a future?

In the words of my fellow Gen X elders: What gives?