Oklahoma

My Dead

People love the rubber until the rubber meets the road.

I’m buying jade cicadas for all my dead is how I am.

My dead, carry me home. My dead, carry me home. Through fire, make me warm. Under water, make me fluid. Across earth, make me solid. From air, breathe your dead breath into me. Carry me home, my dead. Carry me home, my dead. I will carry you, too.

A physician who arrived on the scene after ICE agents shot Alex Pretti said the officers were not performing CPR. Instead, they appeared to be counting Pretti’s bullet wounds. (Sources: MedPage Today, Daily Kos)

I’m carrying my dead.

Birds need water as much as they need seed. Love needs action as much as it needs language.

The first murder was nearly half a million years ago, which shows violence has been in our nature since our ancestral humans. The blows were directed at the face so the killer could see who they were killing as they were doing the killing. Does it surprise me that the agent who fired the last five shots did so while Pretti was lying unresponsive and face up? Not at all. He wanted to see who he was killing as he was killing him, to see who he was destroying as he destroyed him. This is an old story. Hate is as old as love. But compassion had already evolved in our ancestors as sustained and long-term, as a way of showing commitment to others and surviving as a group. I believe our capacities for love and compassion are greater than our capacity for hate. I believe they can help us survive, even when that means surviving each other.

I’m so sad that I know this sadness cannot be entirely my own.

Wael Tarabishi

A man in the Oklahoma birding group just called a northern mockingbird his northern mockingfriend.

Holding in pee when I’m ten steps from the bathroom is how I am.

I think Utahns should bring back the whistling and whittling brigade, but only to get ICE out of the state.

I think I like poets about as much as I like librarians. I say that as a poet who almost studied library science and who’s been around a bunch of poets and worked in libraries alongside a bunch of librarians. I like what poets and librarians do. I like what they stand for. I just don’t expect much from either group when it counts. Look, words. Look, data. You know?

Weavers and birders on the other hand? Fuck yeah. All the fuck yeahs. Take umbrage with this post if you must. Take my disappointment, frustration, and annoyance, too, while you’re at it.

Of course I don’t mean any of this. I mean the weavers and birders part. They’re the folks I turn to when even caramel corn isn’t enough to see me through.

Who’s keeping me alive right now? Oklahoma birders, that’s who. They don’t just post photos of birds. They tell stories, like this one:

This roadrunner got under the hood of my Cutlass and rode all the way from Don and Loel’s house in Tuttle to my home in Moore, Oklahoma, and lived in our neighborhood for almost a year before disappearing.

That is the shit, my friends. A gem of a story in only thirty-eight words.

These typos in a post by Blue Ridge Wildlife Center are perfect: If you believe that loons can take off from land, is lie. Liar told you that. From now on forever, I am going to say Is lie. Liar told you that whenever the situation warrants it.

You know how you get a weird answer from a Magic 8 Ball, so you just jiggle it? I sometimes find myself wanting to jiggle people a little into a different mindset or behavior. Not violently. Just so their hollow icosahedron floating in its cobalt alcohol solution will land on a better face.

I’m eating a whole thing of caramel popcorn with my tongue so I can keep typing is how I am.

Carolyn Kizer didn’t shut up, either.

I know folks don’t mean to. That’s part of the problem.

Thank you for coming to my fuck you.

I dreamed I was at a rave but didn’t want to be, so I went outside and picked up dog poop from people’s lawns.

Hugging my weighted therapy dragon is how I am.

They all killed him. Every agent who harassed him, restrained him, kicked him. Maybe one of them shot. Maybe more than one. But they all killed him. They are all the shooter.

GestapICE.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti

Hundreds of words that translate to one: dismissal.

From a member of the Oklahoma Ornithological Society: Folks, we have a native songbird killing event starting tomorrow for many of the states in the United States. This is supposed to go for over a week in my area (Oklahoma). If you have nesting boxes up for bluebirds and other cavity nesters, consider adding a handful of clean, dry pine needles or straw for insulation. Make a bowl with your fist pushing the needles or straw up the sides. Also, do whatever you can to feed these native songbirds and offer fresh water. I use an old frypan with a small heater in it on my back deck rail and change it twice per day. I also have a larger birdbath in the yard that also has a heater in it. Good luck to everyone. Stay safe.

I keep misreading bandanas as bananas and wondering why I need to stock up on bananas to stay warm in style all winter long.

I dreamed I doubled as a fire extinguisher.

I mentioned assless chaps one time in a comment on a friend’s post, and now Facebook is showing me all these ads for assless chaps is how I am.

For me, the pronoun they works on many levels. One complaint about using they in the singular is that it’s grammatically incorrect. But is it? The mind is plural and decentralized. We may be one, but “I” may not even be a thing other than an understanding between us, a kind of “you there, me here” shorthand, a fiction that appears to simplify living. They is a better pronoun for me than he or she any day. It does more than help me escape the waist trainer of gender essentialism. It helps me remember that my mind is not one and never was and never will be.

When we lived in Seattle, everyone thought my life partner was Moby, especially at the health-food store. I was like THAT’S MY MOBY GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY MOBY.

Nobody owns language or its rhythms. It’s what we make it, all of us, not what power wants to make it.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve prayed to God for my daily zero-sugar Cherry Coca-Cola.

I’m dipping turkey bacon in chocolate hummus is how I am.

Please can I just be plastinated now please please pretty please.

Can you guess what I’m doing based on what I’m wearing: a tank top, a tennis skirt, kneepads, a headlamp, slippery socks, my reading glasses, earplugs.

The other day, the life partner and I were watching television before bed when the remote control slid off the sofa and landed with a thud on the area rug. We were both silent as we tried to figure out what happened. Then the life partner said, in all seriousness, Detachable penis.

We heal together. We heal in community.

The purple gallinule found in Massachusetts who wasn’t named at the wildlife rescue where she was taken so the staff wouldn’t get attached to her? Her name is Tandy. I’m naming her Tandy.

I just misread a headline as Reducing Puppet Size May Help with Night Driving. I was like of course the puppets should be smaller so they don’t block the view, especially when it’s dark out. Pupil. The actual word was pupil.

Bewildering Cage is, as of this very moment, the title of the manuscript I’m working on. It fits with the body theme, the asylum/psychiatric hospital theme, with the gender identity/sexuality theme, and nature of existence theme. Thanks to Centa Therese for commenting on the Terrance Hayes poem that contains the phrase “bewildering a cage,” which I misread as “a bewildering cage,” so thanks, also, to my dyslexia. Massive thanks to Ren Wilding for reminding me we are galaxies. The galaxy itself may be a bewildering cage, but we can move around, and dance, in it. We just can. And we can talk like dolphins.

(Now I have the song “Here Comes the Rain Again” in my head, but with the lyrics changed to Talk to me / Like dolphins do / Walk with me / Like dolphins do. EEEEEEEEEEEE EEEE EEEEEEE.)

The Wasting (2016- )

Just trying to name this period in U.S. history. I think this works because it captures the wasting away of culture and the literal wasting of people in the streets.

From a Facebook ad for a dog carrier: Safety buckle prevents jump-out panic. We all need that buckle, Facebook. Every one of us has jump-out panic right now.

I am ill-equipped to hear this much talk about golf this early in the morning or ever really which is why I try not to leave the house if I can help it is how I am.

I’m doing the Safety Dance today. Ivan Doroschuk of Men in Hats wrote the song after being kicked out of a club for pogo dancing. It’s a protest against bouncers prohibiting the dance style. Often interpreted as anti-nuclear, Doroschuk says the song is more broadly anti-establishment.

I just gave myself an asthma attack by laughing too hard after doing an impression of a dolphin singing “My Sharona” is how I am.

People who are making comments like, Bring back the chokehold, can fuck all the way off.

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a lightning strike against tyranny. — Dana Henry Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a silver sound in the dark. — Ren Wilding

I organized my closet for five hours yesterday is how I am.

A birder in Oklahoma called scaled quail cottontops, and it’s the first time I’ve smiled in days.

A woman killed her six-year-old son and herself here in Utah yesterday in Canyonlands. No more. No more death. No more murder. No more horror. No more. No more. No more. No more. No more.

Her dog was in the back seat.

Today is one of those days in the desert when the wind sounds like a warning.

Poets are alive in their lines.

It’s hard in this desert rain to not feel the heavens have been slain.

We need to be together now, as poets, as creatives, as thinkers, as human beings. Whoever you turned to yesterday, whoever turned to you, may you all look back and realize that you helped each other go on. There is healing in being together during difficult times, unthinkable times. I was with two poets yesterday who made today possible by making yesterday less impossible. May Renée Nicole Good rest in peace. May we live in peace.

Listening to songs I first heard when everyone I knew and loved was still alive.

I dreamed poetry was outlawed in the United States.

There was a mass shooting in Salt Lake City last night outside an LDS church at a funeral. Two dead. Three hospitalized in critical condition. Three more injured.

Renee Nicole Good

Sometimes just by giving it language, you discover something within you that’s been waiting to be heard for a long time.

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?

My weekly stats report from Grammarly: Grammarly analyzed 801,077 words. You were more productive than 99% of Grammarly users. If only some of those words were any good.

Writing makes the unspeakable speakable, survivable. I walk this line, this lettered terrain, until I find myself, for only then can you find me. Only then can I find you. Here we are in Ma time, in what’s happened and what could happen. The pause, the upbeat, the architecture of connecting and letting go. I’m waiting, bated, inked blood in my heart and on my tongue, reduced to vowels, then to a single sound. You know the one. That first utterance, O.

I’m about to buy my dog a treat-dispensing toy piano is how I am.

Could not sleep. Watched the news. What the fuck. I mean fuck. I mean fuck. What the fuck.

Meanwhile, in Utah: An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

This body doesn’t know which gender it is, so it’s using all of them.

(Adapted from John Gallaher’s Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. Every time I read the word genre, I think it’s gender.)

I dreamed I accidentally dated the devil and thought he’d ruined my life, but then I yelled at him in front of everyone in a Walmart parking lot. He dove inside a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass and never came out again ever. So that’s where he is if you need to make a deal with him or whatever.


ICE OKC

In Oklahoma, the federal government is attempting to convert a 415,981-square-foot warehouse thirty minutes from the home where I grew up into a 1,500-bed ICE detention center. City attorneys and city officials say they can’t stop it because these detention centers are explicitly exempted from local zoning regulations.

That’s been the case for a long time, with precedents that date back to 1941. What’s changed is the number of people being sent to these centers. That number jumped during Trump’s first term in office and is jumping again during his current term.

What’s also changed are the conditions within these centers and the number of human-rights violations and worse occurring within them, including the homicide of Geraldo Lunas Campos, who was in ICE custody in Montana. According to a witness, five guards held him down. One put an arm around his neck and squeezed until he was unconscious and died.

Detainees held a demonstration inside an ICE facility in Dilley, Texas, two days ago to bring attention to the inhumane conditions within the facility and to demand their freedom. Among those heard shouting during the demonstration? Children.

Five-year-old Liam Ramos, detained in Minnesota last week, is one of the children being detained at the Dilley facility. He’s there with his father.

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.

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.

Loosening Our Ties

My father had a tiger’s eye bolo that I loved. I wore it in grade school when we reenacted the Oklahoma Land Run. (Yeah, we did that. Also, there was more than one land run, but we only learned about and celebrated—for lack of a better word—the main one for simplicity’s sake.) I wanted to be a cowboy. My teachers protested. They wanted me to do whatever the girls were doing.

I’ve been looking for a bolo that’s like my father’s for a long time, but most of them are turquoise, and my father’s was shades of brown. I found one today tucked into the back corner of a gift shop. It was made of tiger’s eye. As soon as I saw it, I remembered that’s what my father’s was made of, and it’s also why tiger’s eye was my favorite gemstone as a child.

As I held the tie, I thought, “My father was more than the sum of everything terrible that happened to him and everything terrible he did, including what he did to my mother and me.” It was a surprising thought. I want to believe that—that there was an untarnished part of him tied to the traintracks inside his heart. He may have tied that part up. He may have wanted it tied up. But it still existed, whether or not he longed to free it.

I bought the tie to commemorate continuing to be in mental-health recovery after my trauma-induced mania two years ago. As I drove home, 104.1 played “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. The sky was lapis lazuli polished and held to the light. The cliffs in and around Zion looked at once eternal and ephemeral. As much as their presence hints at forever, they are also literally dust in the wind.

I started crying. How could I not? How could anyone spend time with this land, this sky, and not untie the parts of themselves that are immobilized in their hearts?

Let the heart run. Let it rewild. Let it forget suffering. Let there be nothing to suffer from or for. Let us all loosen our ties and help others loosen theirs.

Hope Hall

Now, Hope Hall is an empty and quiet place, one where footsteps echo down tunneling hallways. Bob McDonald, who once stayed in an open barrack on the campus, said “the noise level was huge” when patients were “warehoused” in the mental health ward, back in the 1980s and before. Their cries reverberated throughout the building, he said, and patients pounded on their doors. Some had only an eyeball-sized peephole to the outside world.

And more important, perhaps—the patients had little or no treatment for their illnesses. They were the castaways from generations that didn’t understand them. They were locked up and kept out of sight.

—

From a story about Central State Hospital / Griffin Memorial Hospital, where my mother worked for thirty-five years. We need to seriously evaluate where mental-health care is headed under the July 24 executive order. It’s headed back, not forward. Back to the days of warehousing human beings like sacks of grain. Story link in comments.

Pinfeathers

There are some things you can’t show, things you can’t share once you’ve seen them, so you turn them into a poem, and you can barely do that. Because they happened in the state you’re from. Because they happened in the state mental hospital where your mother worked. Because they happened while everyone looked away. Because we were not much better here in the United States than the Nazis were where those sent to mental hospitals were concerned.

Because in a day room in Taft, Oklahoma, we let a little boy sit wet with his own excrement or urine or blood or all three, a strip of white cloth cinching his arms to his neck. Because he’s not the only boy or the only man in the photo. Because this is what we did to human beings in the 1940s but also now or again or now and again with a new face, a new flavor, a new reason, from a new hatred, a new greed, a new form of consciouslessness.

What did I leave out? That the boy was Black. Everyone in the photo was Black. This was at the State Hospital for the Negro Insane. That’s what they called it. Are you sick yet? Do you want to turn away? You already have, from all of us, as the cages are built in Florida, as we find new reasons to cage. Will PETA come to the rescue? People are animals, too, and being treated worse than animals.

People who cage people are animals in a different sense of the word. They should start an organization called People for the Obliteration of People. POP for short. It has a ring to it. It’s weaponized.

Here, drink from this metal cup. Here, sit on this wooden bench. Here, look through this barred window for the rest of your life. Here, here. Here, here.

The photos I’m looking at include one of the back ward at the hospital where my mother worked in Norman, Oklahoma. These are not easy images to see, but this history matters. What’s been happening to people like me has been happening to people like me for a long time. This country could learn a lot from this history as its pinfeathers break our democracy’s skin.

The Oklahoma History Most Oklahomans Never Learned

On the desegregation of American psychiatric institutions and structural racism in American psychiatry. Link in comments.

—

Oklahoma,1964: Taft State Hospital was an all-Black facility, with an all-Black staff, located in an all-Black town. In 1940, its 738 patients were cared for by three psychiatrists (including the superintendent), three nurses, and an unknown number of direct care staff, who apparently all lived in one room. In 1949, Oklahoma consolidated the state hospital with the Institute for Colored Blind, Deaf, and Orphans and the Training School for Negro Girls, creating one large facility for Blacks with all manner of clinical needs. Oklahoma desegregated its public facilities in 1964. Rather than admit white patients to its state hospital for Black patients, as most of the other states would do, Oklahoma transferred the Black patients to its two other (all white) state hospitals. Taft was closed in 1970 and converted into a correctional facility, thus confounding in the public’s mind people with mental illness and criminals. (Some state hospitals have converted some of their units into correctional facilities, leading some people to think that psychiatric patients are being held behind multi-layered, barbed wire, razor-topped fences.)

What Happened

Sexual violations can take time to understand, to come into our consciousness. What is was. What it’s called. Knowing what happened, knowing the name of what happened, can lead to a whole other level of distress that needs attention and healing. Even though nothing about the experience changes, knowing what it is, what a violation it is, changes everything.

I grew up being so violated I didn’t have names for anything. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that I really started to understand. I was watching a news story that included the details of a woman’s rape by multiple classmates. I was like, That’s rape? I’d been in a nearly identical situation once with two older classmates, which meant I was raped. That’s the first time I realized what happened, what it was.

Then I went through a list of other incidents in my head and was like, Then what was this, and what was this, and what was this? It turns out it was a combination of rapes and sexual assaults. Also child sex abuse. Also, much later, in 2023, I realized I’d been trafficked. I’d just learned that there was a huge sex-trafficking ring in my hometown and in other parts of the state my father frequented with me. It’s one of the largest in the country. I don’t know that my father was formally part of that or if he just found his way into those spaces because he was drawn to them. But I do know he sexually abused me. And his best friend sexually abused me. And his best friend’s adult son was extremely inappropriate with me in a sexual/grooming way. And his work associate came around the house with his penis sticking out of his short shorts while I was told to sit on the ground in front of him, putting me at eye level with it, while my dad was there watching both of us. And I know that man was also sexually abusing his children. And my father’s former friend was sexually abusing his daughter. And I was in that house a lot, all the time, and it never felt safe there, and it wasn’t because he was hitting her or throwing her down the stairs. It was another kind of unsafe, one she wouldn’t be able to talk about until she was in her fifties.

And I know my father made me talk to truckers on the biggest sex-trafficking highway in Oklahoma. I know I had a CB radio handle. I know the truckers knew the handle. I know they would get on the CB radio and ask for my father by his handle, then ask if I was there and if they could talk to me. And I know I obliged. And I know I thought it was fun. I believe I was on my father’s lap some of the time, but that may just be how it felt emotionally—that closeness and tension. And I know my father stopped once, with me, to meet up with a man who saw me and looked scared and wanted to leave. That’s where what I know ends. I don’t remember the rest.

When I learned that there was a name for all of that and the name was child sex trafficking and abuse, it was too much of a shift, though nothing that happened had changed. What it was had changed. I spent parts of 2023 delusional and terrified. I felt like I’d come to understand something the human mind isn’t meant to understand and that I’d survived something the human body isn’t meant to survive.

So yeah. Maybe fuck [poet’s name redacted] or at least that comment she made and the similar ones other folks made in 2015. What happened with the poet who harmed me was nothing compared with what my own family and namely my father did to me and allowed to be done to me. But it was still sexual assault, and it was still fucking awful, especially because the poet made me talk about my child sexual abuse as he was assaulting me. It turned him on.

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This post was initially a response to a comment on another post on my Facebook page.