Poetry

‘No Sea Here’ Is Here

My chapbook No Sea Here is finally here, thanks to Moon in the Rye Press, Lisa Bickmore and Jem Ashton, and funding by the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.

I received fifty copies as part of this micropress project and plan to give those to folks who have already generously shared their work with me, who have helped with the collection, and who have, dare I say it, made me a better poet and person.

After the first fifty copies are gone, I’ll have additional copies available that I purchased at a discount. For those, I’ll use a pay-what-you-can model to help offset my costs, including postage, while also making sure anyone who wants a copy can have one. If there are any profits, I’ll donate them to a social or literary nonprofit.

Images: 1. No Sea Here in the afternoon light. 2. An interior page from the collection. 3. Fanned-out copies of No Sea Here. 4. The back cover of the collection with the Moon in the Rye Press logo.

Spring in Salt Lake City

Spring in Salt Lake City and my collection No Sea Here from Moon in the Rye Press in hand.

Images: 1. Lisa Bickmore giving me my copies of No Sea Here in Salt Lake City. 2. Along the Jordan River Trail near South Jordan, Utah. 3. Another view along the Jordan River Trail. 4. The life partner, Lexi, and me at Gardner Village in Midvale, Utah.

The Naming, Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto

The Naming is a reconciliation: with the personal, the familial, the ancestral, the spiritual, the terrestrial, the institutional, and the political. It is a world that is being created over and over again because of and through the past, one in which the speaker finds himself in time and place but also outside time and place with the help of his father’s fathers.

I feel deep history and deep love in this work. It’s the kind of collection that makes me think, I’ve been doing it all wrong, and by that I mean living—in the here and now, without calling my ancestors in close, my mother and my mother’s mothers. The Naming points at history to find out where it hurts the most, but it also points at us to show us how we can begin to heal.

Images: 1. The collection on a stand with a pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. Interior pages from the collection alongside the pomegranate.

Seedbox

Poems that occur outside are becoming less popular, especially poems in, about, and from wild places.

We increasingly live in boxes and in boxes inside boxes.

We write poems about the boxes we live in, where the poems themselves are boxes that are capable of holding nothing or everything.

Birds seem to be OK still in poems, usually written about superficially or inaccurately.

Trees, same deal.

Some trees just appeared in a poem I’m reading as I write this post. They have no names but filter light. Dappled is the word the poet uses. Dappled holds nothing where trees are concerned. Dappled is not even in the box of the poem.

A Facebook post is a box inside a larger antisocial box parading as a ballroom floor where nobody knows the box step.

My office is a box inside the box of my home that looks out on a desert punctuated by more and more boxes every year. Some of those boxes move. Others never do.

I think ghosts are boxes but can’t prove it. I know some ghosts break down over time in monsoon rains. Be careful with that cardboard you’re handling. It may be your grandmother as a box.

The trees in this poem I’m reading are talking. They’re asking questions. They’re interrogating orchids. Of all the flowers worthy of investigation, orchids don’t even make my list. I want a word with the seedbox flower, aka the rattlebox. I want to know about its cubic capsules and rigid sides, why it decided to go out into the wild and be a box when it could have been anything. Explain that, seedbox. Answer for yourself.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe we should stick with boxes, not birds and trees and flowers.

At this very second, a box is lumbering down my dead-end street in the form of a trash truck to pick up recyclable boxes from a bin that’s just a fancy box.

There’s no end to boxes once you start paying attention to boxes.

There are probably more boxes on Earth than trees or birds or orchids or even poems.

The next time someone asks how I am, I’m going to say I’m boxes is how I am. It won’t make sense, but it still will be true.

Well, would you look at this? Turns out we’re full of cuboid epithelial cells, so I am boxes and I do make sense as boxes.

But our lungs are trees and our scapulae are wings. There’s no removing these wild things. We have within us what is beyond us even as we try to erase ourselves from anything that doesn’t box us in.

—

This essay initially appeared on Facebook.

Scattering Light

My manuscript Crude was shortlisted for the Lightscatter Press Book Award, judged this year by Heid E. Erdrich.

I’m from Oklahoma. Crude is set largely in that state. The work deals with issues related to trauma, healing, and the formation (and destruction) of identity through places and what happens in them. The word crude functions in several ways in the manuscript. It captures what is raw and coarse and also speaks to the oil industry, which informed so many people’s lives in Oklahoma through the 1980s, including my family’s.

Things like the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the oil boom (and subsequent bust) may seem like forever ago and like they have nothing to do with your story. But Crude is where we were and where still are, all of us. We are all hurting in one way or another in this crude country and this crude world. We are all healing in this crude world, too. Or trying to.

We’ve survived, my kin and me, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unsurvivable. Surviving the impossible is possible. That’s my story. It’s that I’m still here and so are you.

Lightscatter Press is a micropress here in Utah whose publisher, Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, and board of directors all live, write, and work in the state. It’s one of those dream presses for me because of the people involved and what the press embodies. I’ve said before that I don’t aspire to be on the biggest press. I want to be on a press that cultivates a sense of community and connection, a sense of people and place.

I’m touched by this. It’s good to know my work matters in some way to some people. After all, I’m not writing about what I’ve experienced for fun. It’s not an exercise. It’s a decision to enter into a way of being and to remain there for as long as it takes, which I hope is as long as I live.

The winner of the award is Sagirah Shahid, whose book SPIRIT: An African American Muslim Lyric, will be published in Spring 2027.

Image: My mother’s grandparents, father, aunts, cousin (who was passed off as an aunt if the rumor is true), and dog in front of one of their early homes in Oklahoma. This family photo and many more are woven into the fabric of Crude.

Propel Disability Book Series

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining the advisory board for the Propel Disability Book Series at Nine Mile Books. Propel focuses on disabled poetry, noting that disability is often overlooked in publishing, even by presses that prioritize other forms of diversity. All Propel books are written, edited, and produced by disabled poets.

Steve Kuusisto invited me to be part of Propel in this role. I can’t capture in words how much this opportunity means to me. The work is essential and dovetails with my personal experience and advocacy around severe health- and mental-health issues, neurodiversity, and trauma.

This role also gives me a sense of belonging, which is something I don’t typically feel. Belonging is also essential and allows us to do our best work in the world with a sense of meaning and purpose. I mean it when I say I’m honored to serve something bigger than me and something that matters to me in poetry—all while being accepted for who I am and the perspective my experiences have given me.

I feel like a clipping that’s starting to grow roots, the magic of that.

Image: The covers of three collections from the Propel Disability Book Series. Left to right: Anne Kaier’s How Can I Say It Was Enough?, Nathan Spoon’s The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, and D.J. Savarese’s Swoon.

‘Becos,’ by Bill Knott

I had this collection years ago before I left poetry and sold, donated, or gave away most of my poetry books. I just got this beautiful copy from Chaparral Books in Portland, Oregon. A friend read a poem from the collection to me last week. I realized I no longer owned the book and needed a copy.

Images: 1. Becos propped up on a book stand with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. Interior pages from the book. 3. The book propped up against the horse sculpture to show its spine. 4. The collection lying flat on a desk with the dried pomegranate, horse sculpture, and hourglass.

Killer Tomato

Colton Moser, Mosa’ati Moa, Timothy Jones

I feel like y’all’s y’alls should be a thing, like, I’m talking about y’all and y’all’s y’alls.

I got on my smart scale for the first time in just over two months, and it was like A lot of the numbers here are totally different than they were the last time you were on the scale or something to that effect. And then a big message popped up that said IS THIS THE SAME PERSON WHO USUALLY USES THIS SCALE?

For the love of …. not smart, scale. Not a smart thing to say at all. FFS, yes it’s me. It’s my weight and my visceral fat number and my subcu-you fuck all the way off, scale. It’s mine mine mine all mine.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam

My condition is not your insult. So first, let’s stop using the psychiatric as a metaphor for the awful. Politicians, celebrities, those who have platform need to stop doing this and explain why they are not using mental illness as a way of putting someone down. — Susanne Paola Antonetta

We all need to stop doing this, and we all need to explain why we’ve stopped. — Dana Henry Martin

I feel like someone’s nailed tack strip to my brain is how I am.

The Imam of the Utah Islamic Center was targeted in a shooting Monday in Sandy, Utah. This country is swimming in the fetid waters of hatred. Hate speech turns into action turns into violence turns us into something other than, less than, human. I love Utah. What I hate is that this happened here.

Woke up. Read something sanist. Read something ableist. Read something racist. Read something islamaphobic. Read something transphobic. I’m not making a random list. This is what I read on Facebook when I woke up. I’m not talking about the news. I’m talking about what some folks here are writing in their posts and comments. My body has flipped inside out to protect itself. If you see a blobby many-organed thing coming at you, it’s me, Inside-Out Dana.

In my dream, someone keeps calling Dee Jay Tee a killer tomato, and I’m here for it.

I just read penpal as penile is how I am.

A floating piece of lint just scared me is how I am.

You died. I changed my hair.

Somehow, and I don’t know how, I ended up working out in jeans today is how I am.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kid Rock make me want to swear off milk, throw out my jeans, and adopt a sedentary lifestyle.

Feeling well-seen by certain folks in poetry means everything to me. I’d call you out by name, but I don’t want to make things weird.

You can’t block the dead on Facebook.

American robins, flushed from cottonwoods flanking the creek, have settled in my honey locust. They are singing. They don’t know how not to.

I had to get out all seven of my essential oil sniffers at once is how I am.

They were out of regular headaches, so I had to pick up a cluster ice-pick headache instead. Who knew this product was even on the market? 0/10. Do not recommend.

I am fucking feral rn is how I am.

‘I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014,’ by Bill Knott

Images: 1. I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014 standing perpendicular to my desk with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 2. The author image on the back cover of the collection. 3. A page from the collection.

On and Off the Page

What my last post is leading me to is the understanding that I matter, meaning my voice matters, my perspective matters, my experiences matter, and my identity matters. That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. Reading Andrea Gibson all day yesterday led me here, to a place where I can say That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. In my case, those are easy words to say but hard ones to believe.

What’s also true is that I have a new intersection to consider, one that will guide me as I continue to share my poetry. I want to find publishers who like my work and also want to support my being in poetry. I want my voice, perspective, experiences, and identity to matter to those publishers, not just the work that stems from those things. This is especially important as I try to find homes for my manuscripts.

Right now, I feel that level of support from several publishers, including Chiron Review, Meat for Tea (both the review and the press), Moon in the Rye Press, The Nomad, ONE ART, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Each feels like it’s saying why I write what I write matters, not just what I write. Given what I’ve come through in poetry and in life, that’s important to me.

I don’t want to publish with folks who dislike me or just tolerate me. Once they know a little bit about who I am, I want them to feel like it’s important to include me in poetry, on and off the page.