Truss Me

Cancer cells can hide inside other types of cells within the body, which is how cancer can evade detection and continue taking up residence inside us even after cancer treatment.

Viruses can mask themselves inside us and avoid being found for years. Hepatitis C does so using FAD, a molecule composed of Vitamin B2 and the energy carrying molecule ATP.

It only takes one B cell turning on our bodies to get all the B cells around them whipped up and make them act the same way, at least for a time. That’s how autoimmune diseases like alopecia areata happen, where an itch or some other benign thing affecting the skin turns into a bald patch that lasts for months or forever because first one, then many, B cells misinterpret the itch as a threat.

My immune system is dysregulated. In addition to having immune deficiency, I have several forms of autoimmunity. My humoral immune system doesn’t always attack invaders such as viruses and bacteria, but it does attack me, my body, routinely. Dysautonomia looks like it’s an autoimmune disease. That tracks with my immune system dysregulation and the way I’ve been developing more and more autoimmune diseases over the course of my adult life.

Many of the health issues I’ve been having over the past two years seem to be my body saying no, the way Gabor Maté discusses such phenomena in his book titled When the Body Says No. My body has been saying no since I was a child, since my trauma started, my familial sex abuse and trafficking. My body keeps saying no and is now in a rhythm of saying no, sometimes quietly and—in a pattern that starts every seven years and resolves in about a year’s time—sometimes piercingly.

I’m at the end of one of those cycles now, but my body isn’t coming back. I’m a rubber band whose elastic has failed, the kind that ultimately break after years of use. I still can’t gain the weight I lost. I’m in pain every day, sometimes extreme pain. My heart gallops and loses its pacing. It would be put down at the track. I’m struck by bouts of exhaustion that come when they please and leave when they please. My TSH absorption continues to be significantly dysregulated despite not even having a thyroid anymore.

I’m fighting, but I’m not coming back. I don’t know if I’ll return this time. The trauma I’ve experienced is severe. My health issues are alarming and serious. Complicated, my doctors say. Your health is complicated. They are somber when they speak to me. They don’t have as much hope as I do, or at least as much as I once had.

The first person Maté writes about in his book dies. She can’t come back from her health issues and ultimately succumbs to them. Cancer, I think. I’d have to look again, and I can’t bear looking. That book is hard for me to read. This life is hard for me to live.

But I want to live. I will live fully as long as I can, whatever that looks like for me and whatever that continues to look like over time.

Haters, especially local haters who think the problem in this community is me because of my gender and sexuality and because of the ways in which I talk about my trauma, especially in and through my poetry: You don’t need to keep me down or hold me back or marginalize me. Stop doing that to me and to others like me. You’re poison. We need the antidote, not more of you. You will be ashamed of yourself someday. You will wish you’d led with love, been flooded with love, exuded love. Trust me. (Dont’ truss me.)

Pain, Uncertainty, Hard Work, and Writing

I’m wearing my Victorian chemise. I’ve been cleaning and crying and organizing my closets all day. While gently spreading a newly washed flat sheet across my bed, I thought about my dog Hayden, who died almost two years ago.

Pain, pain, pain. It came sharp and quick like needles marching up and down my body—not just losing Hayden but all the pain before and after. I think we so suddenly remember the animals we’ve lost because they allow us to enter into other painful experiences. Animals are guides, I believe, even when they’re no longer with us.

There’s been so much pain in my life, in my husband’s life, in our friends’ lives, in our families’ lives, in the neighborhoods where we’ve lived, in the cities and states we’ve called home, in public spaces, in private spaces, in our country, in the world.

Leonard Cohen spent six years meditating in silence on Mount Baldy. He finally came back because he knew he was a writer and had to write. He was writing all the time while meditating, he said.

I used to say I was a text generator, not a writer. I was rejecting agency and narrative. A fellow poet and dear friend influenced me in this regard or maybe we influenced each other. The stance was entertaining but preposterous. I’m actually a writer, not a text generator. But I had folks fooled: On Twitter, some of my followers actually thought I was a bot.

It would be easier to be a bot. It would. This world makes me bleed, and I bleed into it in turn.

When I was arranging a stack of poetry books on a high shelf this afternoon, one of them fell on my head and left a welt between my eyebrows. It’s kind of a third-eye type of thing. The offending collection was by John Donne, my favorite poet, a man whose work sets my heart beating in time with his lines. What’s that saying? Something about being hit over the head … Donne’s aim was a bit off, but close enough. Point made.

Earl Smith, a man I met once who’s dear to me said we just have to do three things: try, love, and use our gifts to help others. Phil Stutz, a Jungian analyst whose work I admire, says we will never escape the following three things: pain, hard work, and uncertainty.

That’s what I’m meditating on now, after three days of sitting with an especially painful situation. I need to try. I need to love. I need to use my gifts to help others. And I need to do those things despite pain being unavoidable, hard work being necessary and constant, and uncertainty being ever-present.

And I’m going to have to write at least some of it down. I think that’s unavoidable, too.

On Writing, Poetry, Health, Trauma, Surviving, and Lucid Dreams

This essay was written on Twitter throughout the day on January 1, 2023.

—

I’m drafting a new essay here piecemeal, the way I write my notes for a story on a series of notecards, real ones, old school. That’s really all I ever do here: Write long stories in small chunks, in vignettes and aphorisms and observations. I’m doing that today.

Ginsberg didn’t have time for metaphors. I might not have the time or desire to fix my typos or to state things perfectly in this story outline. I certainly don’t have time to say things in order. That will come later. Or the narrative will remain disjunctive, which I also like.

There’s power in disjunctive narrative. Is disjunctive even what I mean? It’s not. What do I mean? I mean narrative that’s all scrambled up the way we think about our lives and stories. I mean: no imposed order other than capturing what the mind presents as quickly as I/we can.

Because we all do this. We all have minds. Our minds don’t live inside narrative. We have to learn narrative in order to survive. Narrative turns chaos into something we can respond to and live within. But today, the particular, infinitesimal part of the we doing this is me. This is my scrambled story.

Welcome to my mindfield. You have one, too. We all do.

You’re inside your mindfield right now. I’m inside mine. Don’t confuse the mindfield with a minefield. Having a mind is not the same as littering the land with weapons: the communal land; our lands that are shared but are not, and never will be, owned.

I’ll tell you the two endings to this draft essay right up front, where they belong in a scrambled story. First, this ends today. I had transient ischemia overnight, then SVT, then atrial fibrillation, then hypoxia. Diltiazem will end that until I visit Mayo next month.

Second, I had the most profound lucid dream in that hypoxic, crushed-heart state. About my trauma, of course. But also about healing. There was healing once I made the choice to leave the concrete place with the men and dance on sand with four women who’ve tried to be my mothers.

But it ends today. Once I have the diltiazem on board, along with the fludrocotisone, along with other treatments that are on the way, this will be over. What, you ask? All this trauma (re)processing. These dreams. This heart stuff. This near-death stuff. Over. And on my terms.

I’m fixing my busted heart enough for now to get back to real sleep, not the galloping, faltering sleep of the arrhythmic and heart-strained. I’m throttling my trauma (re)processing until I can do it slowly and sustainably.

That image, the one where I’m dancing on the sand with my four mothers, is where I’m landing with the trauma work for now. It’s what I’m holding onto. Because I did that. In my dream, I made the choice to leave the nightmare of concrete men. I went to my mothers in the soft sand.

[Interlude while heart recovers. Imagine soft music playing. Mill about.]

[Adding a note to clarify that I have my endocrinologist’s and interventional cardiologist’s support to take diltiazem. I’m not making that call on my own.]

I’ve been making use of a writing studio I rent from time to time. It’s ten minutes from my home, just on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa as the locals call it because of its dreadful googlable history. I’ve been able to drive to it since I started taking fludrocortisone.

I can’t sleep at the studio because of my heart issues, but I can be here during the day. This morning, on my way here, I encountered a rockslide that the police are monitoring. Then I hydroplaned twice. It’s been raining, a lot. The rocks and roads aren’t behaving.

Depending on what happens with the rockslide, I may have no way home this afternoon. The police officer said he didn’t think things would get so bad that all the lanes would be affected. We also haven’t had this kind of rain in years, so … [shrugs] … who knows?

I want to say “of course” about the rockslide and the hydroplaning. As in: Of course, this, too, is happening on top of all the other issues and impediments in my life that are or appear to be in the way of my living right now.

But there’s no “of course” about it. That would be my mindfield imposing on the rock, on the road, and on my travels in this time and place. The natural world does not collude. And roads are just petroleum-based gloop we smear on the land. Of course roads succumb to the elements.

Earth is not people. It’s chock full of us—mostly the dead, as Nietzsche observes—but it’s not people. It’s of us, in a way, but not us. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t conceal. It has no desire to do harm.

Earth is mostly not even of us. There’s so much in addition to and beyond us. We’re just people: a minority in the living, breathing world.

You might be ahead of me if you had an OK childhood. It’s taking me longer than it might have taken you to figure out people and their behaviors and what informs those behaviors. I’m also thinking about all of this in light of what I read by Aldo Leopold yesterday.

I’m watching rain fall from my writing studio’s eaves. It’s wearing little ruts in the decomposed granite in perfect little lines. I could align my knobby spine with the ruts and have perfect contact with the Earth—or at least with the decomposed granite lovingly spread on it.

I can’t speak to the collective mindfield other than to caution us against thinking we, together, know more than we know or are more important than we are. These thoughts feel basic, pedestrian. I feel silly sharing them.

We got into trouble when we made ourselves larger than the Earth.

My thoughts are as simple as a Yugo. I’m not a 1963 Ferrari 250 Gran Turismo Omologato thinker.

I want to talk about surviving. When my mother died, she left me a letter. Part of it read, Do whatever you need to survive. It was her last bent-tree message, her last encoded bit of wisdom, stripped bark-bare at the end of her life.

It’s what she’d been telling me all along, in words and through her example: Do whatever you need to survive. And I have. I’ve already survived, as have you if you’ve lived through trauma. Surviving is a process, not an end state. It’s not something we have to strive for.

You are here. You have survived. Your body knows how to do this and how to continue doing it, even when the seasons change, even when your heart is strained, even when new aspects of your trauma come tumbling out of your mind’s many closets.

I want to pause here and say this: Men deal with this, too. Men have power and privilege, but it’s not doled out equally, and men are asked to do so many unspeakable, nearly unsurvivable things during their lives. Everything from war to daily living is hard on men. It is.

Men survive unfathomable trauma, too. My heart is with those survivors. In the end, many of us are survivors, maybe most of us. Some of us don’t even know what we’ve survived, the enormity of it. The iceberg below the surface of it.

But when men come through great trauma and it’s paired with power and privilege, they can become dangerous in ways they wouldn’t be without that power, that privilege.

[Another interlude. My body needs me for a moment.]

[Also, Happy New Year. I’m expunging today. What are you doing?]

[I’m suddenly thinking about James Tate’s Jesus riding his little donkey. I think of that poem in moments of sudden, unexpected happiness while surrounded by what is awful. The poem pleases me in ways I can’t articulate or even comprehend. I mean, I could but I won’t. Explication is a buzzkill.]

[I’m wrecking grammar right now. I sort of love it: both grammar and the wrecking of it. Better than wrecking lives, including my own.]

[James Tate came after T.S. Eliot. Matthew doesn’t know that. Matthew thinks no poet has written significantly since Eliot. Matthew’s wrong. He was wrong in The New York Times. Writers write things down, so it’s not Matthew’s fault. Good writers can write the wrong things down.]

[The problem is the voice Matthew has, the power. Matthew is part of a larger system of power that’s a problem now and has been and will continue to be a problem.]

I’m drawing an iceberg now, an iceberg of something: behavior and what informs behavior? What we see and what we don’t see? I’m trying to figure something out.

My family and the Land Run, my family and Choctaw Nation, my family and Chickasaw Nation, my family and secret pregnancies, my family and the circus, my family and the rich husband, my family and a fancy house, my family and phonographs, my family and furs, my family and cars.

My family and suicide, my family and The Great Depression, my family and shipyards, my family and displaced Asian-American families in California, my family and racism, my family and fighting racism, my family and no farm, my family and no fancy house.

My family and being shunned, my family and learning to run, my family and fire, my family and oil, my family and power, my family and crime, my family and lies, my family and phobia, my family and rape, my family and incest, my family and trafficking.

Also, my family and surviving.

I forgot a big one: My family and the Dust Bowl. Also, my family and Freemasonry. My family and Mormonism. My family and (alleged, attempted) poisoning. My family and a gunshot to the back (at least, I think that’s how it was told to me). My family and mobile bars in GMC vans. Well, one van. One mobile bar.

[Interlude. Heart racing. I met a poet once who said she disdained any poet who feels anything while writing. That still has me stumped.]

In the dream, two men were after me. One was the devil. I was in one of those Russian-looking apartment complexes with exposed-aggregate concrete and iron rails everywhere and an open courtyard with all the apartments surrounding it, facing in.

I knew both men, but one was a shape-shifter, a self-identifying soothsayer. I never knew if he was there to help or harm. I saw the first through his window while passing by with a load of laundry. He was red, hot, everywhere in the room, and spinning like PSR J1748−2446ad.

The second caught me looking in the window. He saw me run toward the open concrete stairs leading to my apartment. He ran after me, yelling: I told you the devil was real. I told you to look to the angels. I fell, my heart arrhythmic. I clung to the rail, bleating.

I thought the second man was going to help me. Instead, he told me it was my fault. What had to happen now was on me because I didn’t feed the angels. He grabbed my ankles and dragged me, step by rough step, lower and lower. The concrete tore at my knees and shins.

I don’t want to do this, he said. He meant it. He was doing what he thought he had to do, what he was compelled to do by some imagined power. My skirt snagged on the stairs, exposing more and more of my legs, then pulled higher. I clung to the railing. I was so tired. I almost let go.

Then I did it. I said no to the dream, to the scene, to the weakness, to the surrender. To all of it. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was on the sand, in wildlands, no concrete in sight and no men.

Four women were with me: my mother, my mother-in-law, my dearest friend Pat Best who always said I was her daughter, and my neighbor—the one who recently tried to love me.

We stood in our respective traumas, unable to speak, tension in and between us like circus wires. Then the tension broke. We danced. For the Earth. For ourselves. For each other. For our bodies. For surviving. We danced and laughed and felt love’s malleable connective tissue.

Three of those women are dead. I love them dearly and understand them better now more than ever. It was just a dream, one I lucidly chose, but there was real healing in it. The one who’s alive can’t love me. We are tension in this life, but we are soft support in other realms.

I had four mothers: one cloth mother, and three cloth-wire mothers. It’s still four mothers. I’m lucky.

I had one motherlike monster, a skinwalker who trafficked me with her husband. I was also unlucky.

As we were dancing, one of my mothers had chest pain. She pulled out a blood pressure cuff and took a reading on her right arm. The other mothers laughed. Stop, I said. This is important. We all need to take our blood pressure readings now in both arms. Things got serious.

Our blood pressures checked out. No big differences between each arm. No heart disease. No blocked arteries. We laughed and continued to dance. I woke up.

That’s all I have to say today. The rest will have to wait. I’m staying on the sand with my four mothers, with their cloth and wire. We’re all together there, and we’re surviving. The cloth is for our bodies. The wire is what we’re using to skid over life’s glowing coals.

My Dog, My Hands, My Buttery Butter-Stick Fingers

I know when my dog, Lexi, is happy. I know when she’s sad. I know when she wants to be tickled. I know when she wants me close but doesn’t want me to touch her. I know when she’s waking me up because she’s scared versus happy versus feeling playful versus wanting a tummy rub versus having to potty really bad.

This morning, my dog had to potty really bad at 5:09 a.m. That was a hard way of entering into today, but I did it because when I have to use the bathroom, nobody makes me wait until it’s convenient for them. And because I don’t “have” a dog, even though I used the phrase “my dog” above: I live with a dog, I love a dog, and I share my life with a dog. She’s family. And my bestest family member had to potty at 5:09 a.m. this morning.

I was sleeping soundly—my mattress and pillows are puffy clouds soundly—when Lexi woke me up. I was dreaming of something. What was it? A subway, glimmering tile, water in the distance, a weaver I know, an unnamable feeling, and some Southern Utah LGBTQ+ community overlord trolling my Facebook page telling me what not to say.

I didn’t want to get up, especially not at 5:09 a.m. in December, which feels the way 1:09 a.m. does in June. So dark. So nightlike it could never pass as anything other than night. Not dusk, not dawn, not the cusp of dusk or dawn.

My hands are cold. My keyboard is loud. My ears are sensitive. My fingers are sliding off keys. I’m writing off-key, too, because I’m typing letters in the wrong order, all of them. (Thanks, dyslexia.) There’s no flow in the writing for me right now, which makes writing unbearable.

My fingers are hard sticks of butter qwertying without finesse. I know my fingers are smaller than butter sticks, but that’s how they feel so I’m sticking with my imperfect metaphor. Do they make miniature butter sticks? If so, all the butter for this hard metaphor spreading across my nearly inoperable fingers at what is now 5:51 a.m.

A writer posted on Twitter yesterday about marriage being for everybody. I thought he said “margarine.” That’s emblematic of the unsolicited gifts dyslexia gives me daily:

Margarine: It’s for all of us, not just some of us!

Hilarity ensued as the writer and I had a good chuckle over the outdatedness of margarine and how, for now, butter has the upper hand, which is funny because we’re back to hands, which obviously makes me think of my hands or at least my fingers. We’re back to my sloppy butter/finger metaphor. (Yes, I went there. Sue me. Puns are a sign of intelligence.) There’s no escaping this metaphor. It’s smeared all over this bleary essay like butter on a slice of toasted bread.

The thing is, margarine has a hell of a story. It rose to fame during World War II when butter was in short supply, so it and other fats were rationed.¹ Margarine had been around since 1869, but it had a problem, which was its color.^1,2 It was white. It was plain. It was super meh to look at, which made it unappetizing. We eat with our eyes, after all. (That’s actually not entirely true, and it’s an ableist thing to say.) In a word, margarine suffered from oilism.

The solution to the meh-ness of margarine? Dye!³ Margarine was mixed with vegetable dye to make it look sunny, like the butter everyone knew and loved, the color we used to paint our kitchens before beige then gray then greige then white then apparently beige again shouldered color out of our homes.

And here’s the really interesting part: The customer had to do the mixing. Margarine was originally sold in its white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the “home cook,” meaning the woman of the house, had to mash into the margarine until the concoction turned yellow.³

But I digress. I’ll write a proper essay about margarine later. What I wanted to say this morning is that my dog, Lexi, got me up early. I understood exactly why because she came from an abusive situation in Texas where she was bred by an unethical breeder. She’s learned how to overread and overcommunicate with humans in a way I’ve never seen any other dog do. Strikingly, in the year since she’s lived here, she’s learned how to imitate me when she needs to convey something, anything, everything. She can’t use language like I do, but she knows how to use her entire body—from her ears to her eyes to her paws to her tail—in various combinations to say things like, Mom, quit giving me those silly kisses. Please know I still love you, though, and want you here next to me. Just ‘no’ on the kisses, OK?

She talks to my husband and me like this all day long, and it’s the most adorable and endearing thing ever. Dad, why are you close to the back door with that coat on, but you aren’t looking at me like you’re about to take me outside?

Or Don’t you see me lying here like a piece of driftwood, so good and so quiet, but also so hungry? I don’t want to be demanding or anything, but you totally forgot to feed me. You’re at least ten minutes late doing that. Do you want me to be this sad piece of driftwood forever?

Or, a new one she added recently that I had trouble translating: Mommy, mommy, maaaaaaaaaawmeeeeeeeee. I feel weird and have to, like, lie here like this on the rug in the middle of the living room, aimless and foggy. I don’t know what’s going on. Is the floor quicksand? Is it, like, holding me down or something? Am I, like, stuck here forever?

That was the day we gave her one-quarter tablet of trazodone before a visit to the veterinarian to make sure she hadn’t cracked her tooth on a toy that’s not supposed to be capable of cracking a dog’s tooth.

The most intriguing part of all this is that she acts like me. These aren’t generic communications. She tilts her head the way I do. She puts her paw on my chest the way I put my hand on Jon’s chest when he’s rushing up to me too fast and I need to whoa-nelly his overly enthusiastic approach. She mopes the way I mope and lets joy flood her body the way it floods mine. She even dances like me.

Lexi’s asleep now on the flokati rug in the living room that we call her Floofer, not to be confused with my electrophysiologist, who I call Dr. Flvoolr because that’s what I called him right when I came out of anesthesia the other day. (Dr. Flvoolr is not his actual name, but it’s sort of close. I got three of the seven letters right.) Lest you think we’ve relegated Lexi to the floor, that Floofer is on top of a fluffy dog bed which, in turn, is on top of our moderately uncomfortable mid-century-style sofa. It’s nearly a princess and the pea situation, Lexi’s Floofer setup.

My hands are warmer now, but they still aren’t serving me well. My ears are ringing. The keyboard still sounds like someone rummaging around inside a drawer full of Legos. The lamplight interrogating my desk is as taxing as the first general income tax ever imposed in our country, which occurred during World War II, when the number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million by 1945.⁴

(All that taxation and a gal couldn’t even get her hands on a stick of butter. I know, I know. It was a war. A big one. I get it.)

I want to go back to sleep like Lexi has, but now I’m staring the day right in the eyes. It’s staring back. I tried turning my head slightly the way Lexi would as a calming signal. The day isn’t averting its gaze. I’m trapped here among the wakeful, at least for now. Time to putter around the house, grab some breakfast, and catch up on the news. Kyrsten Sinema! Britney Griner! Elon Musk! President Biden and Title 42! Fourteen more books designated as “pornographic” by the Washington County School District in Utah—including several by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood! There’s never not news these wide-eyed days. My new favorite pastime is reading the news before my husband or my friend José has, then being the one to break it to them, especially when the news is salient, good, strange, or all three somehow—the perfect news trifecta.

Below, I’ve included a poem I started writing in 1995 about margarine when I was taking Robert Stewart’s poetry class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s not the best poem, but I like it and it’s relevant, so there it is. It’s my one-thousandth version of the poem and is the best shape I could whip it into. I may not have whipped it like butter, but I like to think I at least whipped it good.

—

Margarine During War

Women keep settling
(oleo, factory jobs)
though they pine for sex
the way they long
for butter on their lips.

After war, they dab
eye shadow and rouge for men
whose war-whores
didn’t teach them to kiss.

But the women
hoist skirts, drop stockings,
for soon the bread they’d break
would be kissed with butter
(real butter).

—

Sources

Yglesias, M. (2013) Guns vs. Butter, Slate Magazine. Slate. Available at: https://slate.com/business/2013/07/butter-rationing-guns-vs-butter-in-world-war-ii.html (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
Vaisey-Genser, M. (2003) “Margarine, Types and Properties,” in B. Caballero (ed.) Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Second. Elsevier Science Ltd.
Magazine, S. (2011) Food Dye Origins: When Margarine Was Pink, Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/food-dye-origins-when-margarine-was-pink-175950936/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
Tassava, C.J. (no date) The American Economy During World War II, EHnet. EHnet. Available at: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).

The Poem and the Body, the Body and the Poem

I intended to write a piece on poetry yesterday, but instead I experienced a tear in my retina. Right eye. Noonish. I saw white lights like fireworks, followed by a hovering gray blob that obscured my vision. It was roughly the shape of an acorn cap or a winter hat with a fuzzy ball on top. An ophthalmologist at KU Medical Center saw me right away. He looked deep into my vitreous gel with a fancy headlamp that made him look like he was about to go spelunking and exclaimed, I see the acorn in your eye! I thought he was making a joke, but apparently he could see a bundle of proteins torn from my retinal lining floating in the gel.

Why does the poetic image communicate faster than other forms? A few years ago, I asked this very question on Facebook and then proceeded to answer it myself. How annoying of me. My answer was as follows:

Arthur Koestler has an interesting theory. He says poetry requires thinking on a third plane, a kind of “bisociation,” meaning perceiving a situation or an idea in two individually consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference. This bisociation disturbs our patterns of thinking/feeling and causes a crisis, which requires a third plane of thinking/feeling to arise, one that is antithetical to but that does not negate the strife of the two.

Since this moment of entry into the poem is a moment of crisis, I would argue that we respond to the crisis the way we are hard-wired to respond to all crises—as quickly as possible. Our entry into the poem is similar to pulling a hand away from a scalding object before realizing on a conscious level that the object is hot. It’s instinctual, a survival tactic. Perhaps bisociation in poetry works on this level as well—because of the crisis the poem presents, we move swiftly to a different mode of thinking/feeling that allows us to enter the poem without completely fracturing our identities, without obliterating our ways of seeing and moving through the world. Bisociation is a way of surviving the poem, of seeing the world as we experience it on a day-to-day level, then seeing the world of the poem itself, then seeing a plane on which to stand, one that straddles the two and gives the reader a place to exist, to breathe.

Perhaps this is why poems work on us so quickly, why the image communicates faster in poetry than in other forms of writing. Precisely because poems put us in crisis.

I removed that post from Facebook years ago, but I stashed it in my poetry files. I came across it today and appreciated it as one way to understand how poems work. I also appreciated my former self for leaving me this trace. It could prove useful when people ask me what poems are, how the mean, and under what conditions they operate.

If you look at a vertical sagittal section of the human eye, you are supposed to see something that resembles a camera. That’s not what I see. I see an angelfish without the fins. I’m sure this says something fundamental about me. The watery fish in the head. The brain home to an aquarium. The two specimens that cannot swim, that cannot escape, that do my bidding, that are forced to document the production.

In his poem “Trace,” Eric Pankey writes: To occupy space is to shape it. / Snow, slantwise, is not white / But a murk of winter-black basalt. / In the gullied, alluvial distances, / On the swallow-scored air, / Each erasure is a new trace.

Having a torn retina is not without its consequences. I feel like a mean girl punched me in the eye. Maybe at a bar. Maybe after I looked at her the wrong way. Maybe after she mistook the fireworks in my eyes for something I never intended.

If you look closely enough at a poem while wearing a headlamp, you can enter its recesses and observe the detail held within its vitreous gel. What drifts and where. What has lost viscosity with age and use. What holds fast. But when you occupy the poem, you change it. We change things by looking. There is no way around this.

When I told my husband about my retina, he asked if reading poetry might have caused the tear. I said poetry had no bearing on what happened. He seems to think poetry leads to disaster. I’ve tried to tell him for years now that we all lead ourselves to disaster, with or without poetry. Poems simply document the path from cradle to grave; from point of entry to point of no exit; from one dark, craggy landmark to another.

Forty-Four Signs of Immunotypical Privilege

Every day, as an immunotypical person —

I can touch door handles and other surfaces in public without much concern.
I can go out during flu season without worrying too much about contracting the flu.
I can read about the recent resurgence in measles without feeling alarmed. After all, the measles vaccine is not contraindicated for me, and I know my body has mounted an immune response to the disease.
If I get a slight cough, I don’t have to worry about it turning into bronchitis or pneumonia.
My health status never goes from relatively normal to life-threatening in a matter of hours.
When I take antibiotics, they work quickly and I only need one round.
I haven’t been on antibiotics dozens or even hundreds of times over the course of my life.
I have never been on prophylactic antibiotic therapy. I don’t even know what that is.
I don’t have to routinely take medicines such as prednisone that weaken my bones and put me at greater risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis.
I don’t have to wonder what comorbidity might be lurking just around the corner and if it will be a noninfectious condition, a malignancy, or an autoimmune disorder.
I have never heard the phrase “immune dysregulation” and don’t have to concern myself with what that might mean.
For me, boosting immunity means popping more vitamin C or Airborne. I have no idea what immunoglobulin is or why it’s essential to the human immune system.
When I attempt to eat out, I don’t have to think too much about how long items are left on buffet tables or how well food is washed and prepped by food handlers.
When I am out in public, I don’t have to worry when people cough into their hands or without covering their mouths at all.
I can be sure that, when I go to classes, movies or restaurants, I will find a place to sit in which I am free from issues that exacerbate my breathing problems, such as perfumes, fragrances and cigarette smoke.
I know I won’t have to pass on social activities because they would put my health at risk.
I know family gatherings won’t pose a threat to my health, even if young children are present.
If someone I love is in the hospital, I don’t have to think about when I can visit, how long I can stay, or other health considerations. I can fully focus on that person and his or her health needs.
I can attend school, have a full-time job, raise a family, and engage in recreational activities without also having to manage the many conditions that would affect me if my immune system did not function properly.
I can leave meetings, classes and conversations and not feel excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped, or feared because of my immune system.
If I pick up a magazine or watch television, I will see images that represent me and my experience of my health.
I never have to speak on behalf of all those who are immunotypical. My thoughts about my immune system can be my own with no need for political alliance relative to my immune function.
My actual and potential contributions to society will not be challenged because of my immune system.
I can go for months without thinking about or being spoken to about my immunotypicality.
I am not identified by my immunotypicality.
I won’t lose friends who can’t relate to what I am going through, who think I am exaggerating about my symptoms, or who just can’t deal with having a friend with my health status.
I know I won’t be discriminated against by employers who neither understand my condition nor have the desire to provide a reasonable accommodation, despite the legal mandate that they do so.
I do not have to be afraid that, when I talk with others about my health, they will suggest unsolicited supplements, dietary approaches or exercise programs.
I will not be told by friends, family, and even uninformed members of the medical community that my condition is really just a psychological problem such as anxiety or depression.
I know nobody looks at me and makes assumptions about why I appear to be ill (or well), or why I am too thin (or too heavy), or why I am not fit (or manage to stay fit despite my illness), or why I do (or do not) eat what I do (or do not) eat.
I don’t have to explain why I have a lingering cough, why I might sometimes need to wear a mask in public, or why situations and settings that are safe for others may not be safe for me.
Because I have never had to wear a mask in public, I have never been asked to leave a public place because the manager or owner of the establishment believes I am putting others at risk, when in fact the mask is to protect me from the pathogens others carry.
I don’t have primary immunodeficiency, so I never encounter people who make the assumption that, despite the condition being genetic, I somehow brought it on myself through my diet or lifestyle.
People aren’t embarrassed to be seen with me because of my health status.
When I talk about my health, I can be certain that friends, family, co-workers and others will not become uncomfortable and change the subject.
My partner doesn’t suffer from undue stress and hardship because he or she is my primary or only caretaker.
Nobody tells me I should feel lucky to have primary immunodeficiency because it means I don’t have to work or accomplish anything during the day.
My doctors have seen a lot of patients who are immunotypical. This means I am not put in the position of having to educate them about my immunotypicality, since they are already familiar with it.
When I present in a health crisis at the emergency room, I am given prompt medical treatment, not told I am merely having a panic attack.
Since I don’t have primary immunodeficiency, I am never called belligerent when an emergency room resident refuses to believe I have the condition and I am forced to insist that I do.
I’ve never had the experience of being misdiagnosed over and over again throughout my life.
I don’t have old misdiagnoses in my medical record that can’t be removed without a great deal of time and effort on my part.
I don’t have to deal with the financial burden of expensive, ongoing medical care and therapy.
I don’t have to face insurance companies that must review coverage for my life-saving therapy before that treatment is approved; that sometimes make patients go off their therapy for months in order for those patients to prove they still have the condition; and that sometimes deny therapy because they don’t feel the patient is ill enough to warrant it, despite documentation to the contrary in the patient’s file.

—

I live with common variable immunodeficiency and wrote this piece for Primary Immunodeficiency Awareness Month. It takes as its jumping off point Peggy McIntosh’s 1993 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Yesterday Jon and I stood on a pier at Juanita Beach Park for a long, long time, waiting for the beavers to return to their den. We’d seen one of them bobbing along the far edge of the water, its wet furry head above, then below, then above, then below the surface. With only the head intermittently in sight, I had to imagine the rest of the creature, its chunky body and short legs, I supposed, paddling awkwardly beneath.

Sometimes the head would come up under a lily pad, which would become an impromptu hat for a foot or two before the plant’s tether would pull the leaf away and the wet furry head would again be revealed.

This is how night should come, I thought.

Jon asked if I was ready to leave yet. He becomes impatient with nature just as nature is about to reveal something to or about him. He likes to move briskly through landscapes because that keeps him in his safe, usual thoughts. Stopping poses a risk because that is when nature can change a person.

But stopping is important. We need to allow ourselves to let nature have a say in how we think about and move through the world. Just ask William Stafford, who urges us to let your whole self drift down like a breath and learn / its way down through the trees … Stand here till all that / you were can wander away and come back slowly, / carrying a strange new flavor into your life.

The beaver was nowhere in sight but we located a mother duck with six ducklings beneath her. She looked like an upside-down Easter basket with all its goodies underneath. She had found a nice spot to camp out for the night and was drifting in and out of sleep, opening her eyes whenever the grass moved, a small bird came near, or a firecracker was set off. I wondered then to what degree wildlife across the United States collectively worries on the Fourth of July. It must sound like the end of the world. Or hunting season.

Jon asked several more times if I was ready. “You ready yet, Bud? Ready now?”

This is how night should come, I thought again. It should come slowly over the trees, above the grasses. It should settle on the water just like this. It should guide the beavers gently and slowly through the water until they find themselves at the worn pathway leading to their den, where they pull themselves onto the mud and wriggle across decaying, tamped foliage, making the final turn into their home and out of our sight.

Yes, it should come just like this.

Last night is the first time in weeks I have not felt anxious and panicky as soon as the sun goes down. Since my test results, I have been so worried about what the diagnosis will be, what comes next and how my life could be severely altered or truncated. As soon as the light begins to fade, my heart rate and blood pressure have begun to rise. I have spent every night in a body that hums with fear. Fear has become its own composition with no end, no rests, no shifts in pitch or volume. Just its continual drone, its dissonant multi-tonal vibration.

But last night, night seemed natural. I was not afraid. I did not kick and scream my way into sleep or try to fight my way out of it once I was there. Last night I was a beaver. I was grass. I was water. I was that whole gloppy corner of the world taking up the darkness and whispering, Yes, yes.

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Margarine During War

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