Salt Pyramid

In Hurricane, Utah, two dozen or so children and their parents were playing music and cheering drivers on from the side of the road. They were waving homemade signs that said things like “You Matter,” “You Are Loved,” and “Keep Going.” We drove past them twice on our way to run an errand. I cried twice, that I did.

I love my new phone Aluminium so much that I have a special stuffed dragon whose only job is to cradle her all day. Was she in that cradle just now? No. Did I knock her over and make her fall on my keyboard screen first? Yes. Is she OK? Too soon to tell. She may be scratched. Her protective cover flap wasn’t pulled over her darling face. How do I feel about myself right now? Not super, dude.

I wrapped my king-sized chenille blanket around my waist and am wearing it like a sarong is how I am.

Sentence from my dream: Like gods in Greek myths, we are gilded, guilted, and gutted.

You’d think I’d put all my dopamine to better use, but no. I make fiddly spreadsheets.

I’m doing a deep dive into facts and fictions about the Osage orange is how I am.

A list of my bad habits:

1. All of them.

Had a wild night. Didn’t take my mascara off until 10:12 p.m.

I got stars on my ceiling, baby. I got a nebula. Come over and be one with everything.

I wrote this in 2008 when everything hit the fan. Well, not everything, clearly. There’s a lot more on that fan now, and more is hitting it every day:

“If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.”

I put my hoodie on backwards and had the life partner zipper me to my office chair until I got my chapbook No Sea Here finalized and off to Moon in the Rye Press.

It worked. The file has been finalized.

And I’m still zippered in. I kind of like it. Am I in a dominance and submission relationship with poetry? Of course I am.

The new fire alarms the life partner installed because the old fire alarms kept going off In the middle of the night just went off in the middle of the night. I fell over trying to get my jeans on so I could assess the situation. My left foot got caught up on the hole in the knee, and down I went. Lexi is in wild-animal panic mode. The life partner is basically sleepwalking around the house in a daze, still wearing only his boxer briefs.

I just read a poem about birds by Lisa Bickmore to two birders and their pet bird. Don’t tell me poems can’t be part of our daily lives.

The life partner is outside with two birders and an actual bird who are applying bird-safe film to our windows. Huge thanks to Great Salt Lake Audubon for helping us get this film up before the winter birds arrive.

For those of us who enjoy a broader than average* spectrum in terms of mood, energy, and intellect—which can be both a gift and, at times, a difficulty—you’ll be happy to know the fall equinox is tomorrow. That means day lengths will level out, so we will no longer be in freefall day after day where light levels are concerned. You did it. We did it. Now let’s rock fall bigitme.

—

* Whatever average is. That depends on who’s making that assessment and according to what criteria.

𐎼𐎤 𐎠𐎱𐎤 𐎥𐎨𐎱𐎤
𐎼𐎤 𐎡𐎸𐎱𐎭
𐎼𐎨𐏂𐎧𐎮𐎸𐏂 𐎠𐎨𐎱

I’m trying to figure out cuneiform syllabograms in case we need to learn a secret language, but I don’t think any of this is right. It’s supposed to read:

we are fire
we burn
without air

Fall hard? Get up harder.

The life partner to me just now: Will you smell my thumb and tell me if it smells like peanut butter?

My heels are so rough I tore a big gash in my fitted sheet while I was sleeping. Again.

I wake with my underwear somehow so much the victim of overnight shifting that it’s 100% not where it’s designed to be and 100% where it’s not designed to be.

I may be the Utahn Utahns don’t want, but I’m still a Utahn. The past few days have proven that to me. I’m saying things like “my community” and meaning it.

From MedPage Today: Doc Has Sex Mid-Surgery.

This country has jumped the shark.

I was told this morning that I’m borrowing the label of sanism. Howso? I live with trauma and bipolar. I’m not appropriating anything. How can anyone have read my poetry and my writing, including my writing here, for the past two years, as this man did, and not understand that I have mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experience?

A male poet just messaged me to insist their sanist behavior isn’t sanist. It was a vitriolic message based on my posts yesterday about the forms sanism takes. This is an accomplished poet many of you read with, admire, and engage with daily.

Social media was 4channed years ago. Our culture in general is more 4chan than most of us realize. Our politics are def 4chan.

This week, I’ve been told I should be euthanized. I’ve been told I’m spreading hatred. I’ve been told I’m the problem (in reference to the shooting). I’ve been told I seek easy answers. I’ve been told I want to stay in my comfort zone. I’ve been told I’m responsible for Southern Utah’s culture, including its flaws and limitations.

We say we don’t know anything about 4chan culture, but so many of us are 4chan to a T. Like the boys and young men the 4chan subculture targets, we’ve made a hard turn away from compassion and toward a nihilism that has no end other than destruction—of each other and the world.

I’ll never believe my life has no purpose and love has no meaning, so 4chan me all you want. You won’t turn me.

To every thing there is a hot take, and a time for every hot take under Heaven. But once you have actual information, the time for your hot takes is over.

Intelligence in part means seeking out and synthesizing new information rather than clinging doggedly to what’s outdated.

What you left inside me: nail clippings, cigarette butts, used condoms, whiskey, anything that oozed from you and your friends.

When I die, preserve my mouth so science can thaw it one day and remember what it sounded like when people fought, when they screamed.

Print me out some new lungs so I can scream better, scream harder, scream longer.

Brian Kilmeade, are you sorry? Are you really, really sorry? Why do I have a hard time believing those words just slipped from your lips and that you know the first thing about what it means to be compassionate?

I’m commiserating with the screeching white-tailed antelope ground squirrel is how I am.

Men, which I mean conceptually, stop trying to roll your word-stones into my mouth. It’s a Sisyphean task, and I won’t gag on your “wisdom.”

I’m listening to The Crystal Method’s album Tweekend is how I am.

The things you don’t know about are often things you don’t know about because you can afford to not know about them. Ask someone who’s affected by the things you don’t know about. Odds are, they know about those things because they can’t afford not to know about those things. Your erasures and omissions are another form of othering, one that enables discrimination.

I rolled a ketogenic pizza up like a burrito and am eating the whole thing is how I am.

Poets: Be aware of intrinsic sanism in the spaces you create when you bring poets together to share work, to create, to teach, and to learn. Try to identify sanism the way you are able to identify other forms of discrimination. Try to create spaces that welcome everyone, even those with mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experiences.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said during a segment about those affected by the July 24 executive order, which affects those who are unhoused, who have mental-health diagnostic labels, and who have substance-abuse issues: Or involuntary lethal injection or something. Just kill them.

It gets worse: Joseph Massey wrote a poem eulogizing Charlie Kirk.

I’m listening to Depeche Mode’s “Clean” on repeat is how I am.

An unexpected Duran Duran song is like a drink of cold water straight from a hose in this dumpster-fire country.

You know who tells you the news before law enforcement and news outlets? Dictators. That’s who.

I dreamed poetry was a pile of salt the size of a pyramid, and I was forced to eat all of it.

Folks who discard you when you speak your truth? Duck ’em. Of course I don’t mean duck. That’s a typo. But come to think of it, also duck ’em.

I’m watching a bat drink tomato juice is how I am.

I love that moment when someone sees me as safe and code switches while interacting with me.

I dreamed a poet was making me do pull-ups in a doorway and yelling, You need strong arms to write strong poems.

Hate speech is never free.

My seer stones tell me there’s going to be a lot of unfriending and blocking on Facebook over the next few days.

The Venezuelan boat turned around. It turned around and we shot it. And here’s a face cream. And here’s an AI that’s made to be you and that can fix you by being you even more than you are you. And here’s a fob you can use to secretly record everyone. And here’s a deal for seniors. And here are some fitness classes. And here’s a thing for stripping the leaves off rosemary. And we shot the boat. And we hit it. And it sank. After it turned around. We shot it better than ourselves, better than we are at shooting. We are AI made to strip the world. We are recording you. Seniors are a deal now more than ever. We make them wear our faces. Our fitness depends on them. Leave secretly or we will hit you, cream you. After you turn around, keep turning. You’re out of thyme.

At least my brother gave me a unisex first name. And my family says it the way that’s typically associated with the masculine pronunciation, “DAY-nuh,” as opposed to the feminine pronunciation, “DAH-nuh.”

Why did my brother name me? There’s a long story behind that. Of course there is. In my family, there’s a long story behind everything. Our stories are like arm fat just waiting to be squeezed out from behind a tightened tourniquet and into the light of day.

Your memory keeps my body on its knees.

It’s only 80 degrees here in the desert this morning WHERE IS MY PARKA

It’s like everyone’s trying to get through the gate even though there’s no fence.

Why didn’t anyone tell me there are more than six stress patterns in poetry? That’s all I’ve been working with for years. I didn’t even know about the existence of the amphibrach, antibacchius, bacchius, cretic, molossus, and trilbrach. Who here knew about any or all of those?

I mean verse is right there in the word for all that is. It’s not the uniprose, for crying out loud.

I just saw a horrifying ad here on Facebook for an AI twin. It’s supposed to be a copy of your mind and train you to know yourself more deeply than you know yourself—by being you. Get me out of this skibidi timeline.

It just occurred to me that establishment poetry is a function of institutionalism. Institutionalists created it. Institutionalists perpetuate it. Institutionalists seek it out, dream about it, crave it, feel incomplete without it. It’s like a government in that way. Or a religion.

People are yelling at Mitt Romney in a Salt Lake Tribune post here on Facebook, and I’m all ready to go defend my man.

My doctor’s medical assistant sang me “The Name Game” song using my name today. So yeah. I’m going back there.

I found a fascinating thesis about Communism, poetry, and the Oklahoma Writers’ Project from 1935–1938.

Corn moon has everyone acting happy in St. George, Utah.

Corn moon had me nightmaring about poets in the wee hours. I was doubled over from physical and existential pain on the floor of a library in Cedar City, Utah. Poets were kicking me as they walked by. A librarian finally opened a nearby elevator and rolled me into it so I’d be out of the way as the poets continued having their important discussions about poetry.

Trans people are people.

I see the poetry establishment as a nucleus. As cells age, the nucleus of each cell accumulates abnormal molecules that are toxic to the cells themselves. So yes. The poetry establishment—the core of poetry so many aspire to, which is part real and part myth—is a nucleus, and an old one at that.

He’s a comics scholar and one-time critical theorist who’s into graphic medicine and knows which way the toilet paper roll goes? Oh yeah, baby.

/me bites lip

I love the folks over at Bluesky.

This afternoon, I was listening to my favorite Bo Burnham song, “All Eyes on Me,” when the life partner interrupted me to tell me that—wait for it—I need to remember to change out the new fire alarms in 2035.

I’ll be dead by then, he said. You’re going to have to remember to do this.

And this is what I mean when I say ours is a household informed by various and sundry anxieties.

I’m watching an American mink open up Easter eggs filled with treats. This will carry me through the night and into tomorrow.

Through me, my mother is half alive. Through my mother, I am half dead.

I just misread COVID vaccine as mood swing is how I am.

In rooms full of men, my body becomes something other than my own.

Every word I write makes the world both more and less accessible.

Bless the birds who are migrating thousands of miles to their winter lands.

What light is left in this world.

We are ghosts haunting our present with our past.

We’re Here. We’re Poets. Get Used to It.

I dreamed I was in the U.S. Senate chambers, where a politician was spewing the hate of the moment as faithfully as a geyser, when a feeling started moving through my body. It began in my gut and had me on my feet before it reached my brain. I didn’t even know what I was going to say, but it ended up being this:

What’s the point of poetry?

Why does it matter when it can lead you down some unknown path, and you don’t even know how it will end?

When it gets you so lost you feel like you’ll never be found?

When everything ahead of you is a blank page, and there’s nobody there to help you fill it?

What’s the point of starting out on that journey all alone, maybe never to finish, never to come back the way so many who wander lose in the end to their wandering, boots into snow, knees into dirt, head into clouds?

The point is to go forth anyway.

To try.

To make that creative journey, which is an existential journey, because it can bring us back to ourselves and each other in the end rather than relegating us to seats where hate lives and breathes, where the air is sucked out of the room every time we open our mouths, because poetry is an act of living and an act of love, and politicians, hell all of us, need to lean into love.

Leaning the other way, into darkness, is not an option because it’s an extinguishing.

The human spirit will not be extinguished.

Living beings will not be extinguished.

The Earth will not be extinguished.

We’re here.

Poems are here to remind us why.

The whole thing was somehow caught on a live camera and played to a gaggle of teens who were visiting the capital. As I left the chambers, they all threw their arms up the way I’d thrown mine up as I spoke. In unison, they yelled POETRY! Poetry gave them hope that day, as it gives me hope every day.

I’ve written before about how dreams may be more our reality than waking states. I hope that’s the case and that dream logic seeps into all our waking states today, tomorrow, and as long as we’re all sharing space here in time. Happy fall equinox.

More Abuses in Poetry

I’m reflecting on how I could have stopped writing poetry at any of a number of points over the past year:

Last spring, when a poet I’d known for more than two decades went on his page and threatened me because he thought it was inappropriate for me to tell him that, as a friend, I loved him. He decided that meant we were having an affair. He attacked me privately, then went on his page to tell the entire poetry community he was going to out me as a married woman who was acting disgracefully. I had to watch women poets, including those I know, console him rather than telling him his behavior was inappropriate. That is the one and only time I’ve screenshot a Messenger conversation and shared it. I did so to put an end to the unfounded, untrue, and libelous comments he was making. He immediately blocked me. I never even said his name—though I would if something like that happened again today—and I removed the screenshots the next day rather than leaving them up as I could have. (Update January 26, 2026: They’re back up on my Facebook page.)

Last winter, when a poet who’d been following my work for months and said he wanted to publish some of my poems left an obscenely hostile, sanist comment on one of my microessays lamenting the fact that people are using a bridge down the street to die by suicide. He screamed that I needed to be in therapy rather than writing and that my writing was the last thing he needed in his life, as if he hadn’t followed me and chosen to read, and laud, my work up to that point. As if he didn’t have the power to stop reading what I wrote or unfriend me or mute me or any of a suite of well-adjusted options that were available to him.

Two days ago, when a poet I’ve known for more than a year, perhaps the most successful and talented poet I know, lashed out at me for using the term sanism, indicating that I was “borrowing” the term, implying my experiences with abuse and trauma and my lived experience with bipolar aren’t valid because, unlike him, I haven’t been to war. It was not the first time he’d lashed out at me or the first time he’d engaged in disconcerting comments about and behavior toward women, namely women poets with mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experience.

That’s about one-third of what’s happened over the past year. Poets can be so toxic and vitriolic and othering and fragile and entitled and bullying—and even engage in nasty tactics like gaslighting—that it’s still hard for me to wrap my head around it. I am shocked every time it happens, though I shouldn’t be. Something similar but much worse is why I left poetry for years back in 2015.

Shame on those who engage in behaviors like this. Shame on the effect you’re having on other poets. Shame on the dynamics that underlie what you’re doing. Shame on you for doing everything seemingly in your power to remove folks like me from poetry in particular and the world in general. I mean the human world. I also mean the living world. Like everyone with a dignoastic label and lived experience with bipolar, I have a 1 in 5 chance of unaliving myself. Not trying to. Actually doing it. Anyone who nudges, pushes, or shoves another human being in that direction needs to sit with what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Bigtime.

I had just finished my essay for Mad in America the day before the poet accused me of appropriating the term sanism. What if I’d pulled that essay? What if I’d decided not to submit my manuscript to any more contests? What if I’d decided not to write poems or essays anymore? What if my mental-health recovery had been compromised?

Folks who need my writing would have lost my voice, including my insights, perspective, and stories. And I would have lost part of myself. That could have been what happened because poets like the ones listed above make poetry too much. Too hard. Too unwelcoming. Too dehumanizing. Too rancid. Because of the sexual assault that occurred with my mentor, which took me away from poetry and—in a sense—my life for seven long and lonely years, I am always close to leaving when some new poet rears his head in a similar way, with similar impulses and similar levels of dysfunction.

But I told myself when I came back that I will not leave. I will not budge. I will not back down. I will be a 4 in 5 even if certain men in poetry have absolutely no regard for my health, well-being, or life. That’s the biggest fuck you I can give men like that.

And I will write. I will not stop writing.

—

And those of you who know these types of folks and do nothing? Shame on you as well.

And those of you who think folks like me should shut up about things like this, who confuse us for the problem because we speak about the problem, who tell us to just get over it or at least not talk about it publicly? Shame on you, too.

I do not have the capacity for any of you. The work I’m doing is far more important than publishing poetry, that is if I have to stay silent about abuses in order to have work accepted or dissociatively participate in the system without being able to advocate for change within the system. I will not stay in the good graces of a toxic culture. This is about human rights. All of it. My life, my work, my purpose.

Updated Immunotypical Privilege List

In 2014, I wrote a piece titled “44 Signs of Immunotypical Privilege” shortly after my diagnosis with common variable immunodeficiency. It’s a compilation of my experiences and those articulated by others living with various forms of primary immunodeficiency. The Irish Primary Immunodeficiencies Association published it on their site and had plans to make it into a brochure, though I’m not sure the brochure ever materialized.

My piece was inspired by Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” written in 1998. I later updated my piece when “COVID” and “monkeypox” became household names. It’s now titled “46 Signs of Immunotypical Privilege.”

I plan to write a new piece titled “44 Signs of Neurotypical Privilege in the Poetry Community.” It won’t make people feel comfortable. That’s not the point. The point is that it needs to be written, and it matters, and I can’t see how to not do so after what amounts to an executive extermination order against those with mental-health issues. Ask Brian Kilmeade. He sees that order for exactly what it hopes to be and understands exactly what it allows those who hate us through and through to say, including my fellow Utahns.

—

46 SIGNS OF IMMUNOTYPICAL PRIVILEGE

Every day, as an immunotypical person—

I can go out when COVID is circulating without being in a high-risk category that makes me much more likely to be hospitalized, die, or develop long COVID.
I can go out during flu season without worrying too much about how serious contracting the flu could be.
I can see the exponential rise in monkeypox cases and not worry that I might be especially vulnerable to the disease.
I know my immune system will respond to flu and COVID vaccines. I might even skip vaccination altogether without serious health consequences. Attenuated, live vaccines such as the one for monkeypox are safe for me because my immune system works properly.
I can read about measles resurgences without feeling alarmed. After all, the measles vaccine isn’t contraindicated for me, and I know my body has mounted an immune response to the disease.
I can touch door handles and other surfaces in public without much concern.
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’ve 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’ve 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’m out in public, I don’t have to worry when people cough into their hands or without covering their mouths.
I can be sure that, when I go to classes, movies or restaurants, I’ll find a place to sit in which I’m 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, potentially unvaccinated, 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 their 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 didn’t 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’ll 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’m not identified by my immunotypicality.
I won’t lose friends who can’t relate to what I’m going through, who think I’m 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 requirement that they do so.
I don’t have to be afraid that, when I talk with others about my health, they will suggest unsolicited supplements, dietary approaches or exercise programs.
I won’t 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 won’t become uncomfortable and change the subject.
My partner doesn’t suffer from undue stress and hardship because they’re 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 my lifetime.
My doctors have seen a lot of patients who are immunotypical. This means I’m not put in the position of having to educate them about my immunotypicality, since they’re already familiar with it.
When I present in a health crisis at the emergency room, I’m given prompt medical treatment, not told I’m merely having a panic attack.
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.

My Poems in Fence

This is the issue of Fence that my work appeared in back in 2001 just after I completed my undergraduate coursework. When I showed it to my first poetry teacher, he wouldn’t even look at my poem. He just said the journal wasn’t one he read or took seriously. I felt stupid for thinking my work had merit and that Fence was a credible publication. I didn’t submit work for seven years after that interaction with my teacher. I mostly didn’t write during that period, either. Matt Jasper calls this kind of thing wing clipping. This felt more like ripping my feathers out by their calami.

The issue I was in includes work by Bruce Andrews, Jorie Graham, Cate Marvin, and Adrienne Rich, among others. It’s astounding that anyone could look at the table of contents and respond the way my teacher did. Fence is one of the best literary journals out there. My teacher should have been celebrating me, not diminishing me.

Fence is currently open for submissions. Their reading period closes October 31, 2025.

—

Images: 1. The front cover of Fence, Spring/Summer 2001. 2. The first page of my poem Quintet being held down by an iron bee paperweight. 3. The cseconf page of my poem.

Black Box

I had an exciting thought about a poem at the tail end of a dream, and now I can’t go back to sleep. The fact that poems thrill me after three decades says a lot about poems. Perhaps it’s not just the Earth and sky that last forever, as the band Kansas asserts. It’s also the verse, the line.

I will never remember what happened to me two years ago today because I was overmedicated in the emergency room at Intermountain Health after being turned away when I went to the mental-health access center there for help the day before, but not before the access center kept me in a loud, brightly lit room for 24 hours with no bed, where I was left alone with two male nurses. What a terrifying thing for someone with a history of abuse at the hands of men to endure while in a state of trauma about her childhood abuse. Also, sleep deprivation and exposure to lights and noise, including music, day and night are more in keeping with prison torture tactics than with mental-health care, but sadly, the two are often one in the same. Shame on Intermountain for engaging in such practices.

To top it off, they failed to give me my thyroid-replacement medicine for hours, thereby exacerbating the state I was in by disrupting my endocrine system, which in turn negatively affected my HPA axis. That axis is key to emotional regulation. I don’t have a thyroid thanks to thyrotoxicosis and cancer, so my thyroid-replacement medication is critical. My TSH was already 11mIU/L when I got to the access center. It should have been less than 1mIU/L. The access center made my hypothyroid state even worse by not administering my medicine in a timely fashion.

The ER overmedicated me after I said Joseph Smith was delusional. What I actually said was, Sure. It’s fine when Joseph Smith does it, but not me. I wasn’t being hyperreligious. I was deconstructing religion, in that moment Mormonism, as well as the unwritten social rules that appear to govern when someone is seen as insane, divine, or both. Crazywise, as some call the latter. But not, largely, Southern Utahns, and certainly not ER workers at Intermountain.

That’s the last thing I remember. I blacked out for more than a day, this one: September 9, 2023. It’s a dark, rough-hewn box I can’t open, but I think Sharon Olds’ devil from her collection Satan Says might be inside it. By that, I mean my father.

Folding

This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.

And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.

This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.

These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.

Biomimicry: Poetry As a Cell

In a world of ribosomes (poets) crowding the nucleus (poetry establishment), live reeflike as the smooth endoplasmic recticulum on the outskirts of the cell. This is where synthesis happens, and much-needed detoxification.

Shown: Image of a cell I altered so the labels apply to poets and poetry: Establishment Poetry, Barrier, Poets Girdling Establishment Poetry, Reeflike Synthesizing and Detoxifying Poets.

Breaking Molds or Just Breaking

More notes on how and why I’m at an impasse with poetry. I’m amending my previous statement about my poetry and writing not being strong enough to continue with either. I think both are strong but that my poetry in particular is not aligned with what editors and publishers are looking for and that shaping my work so it’s better aligned with what contemporary editors want will destroy something fundamental in the work, in the process, and in my healing.

I don’t want to slot my poems into this or that mold. I don’t even want to be aware of what the molds are. Poetry is as much about breaking molds as honoring those that have a history of serving poems and their readers well, even if it’s just because familiar molds create one less barrier for the reader. But new molds do something for the reader as well, and for the poet. And barriers aren’t always a bad thing. Some of the most rewarding poems require thoughtful consideration on the part of the reader. New molds are important and shouldn’t be rejected because they’re unfamiliar. Not everything new is bad. Not every outsider poet has no idea what they’re doing.

The highly endogenous nature of poetry doesn’t always serve poetry well, as folks tend to gravitate to the names they know and the styles of poetry that sound a lot like the other poems they’ve been reading. How many voices are being missed? My guess is a lot.

I think poetry has moved in some disconcerting directions in the past few years in terms of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, which extends to which voices are included and which are excluded. I’m not down with any of that. I’m down to write—and to write from my embodied self as it relates to the world. I don’t want to see my work altered to the point of being unrecognizable so that it can get published. What use do I have for a poem that doesn’t look or feel like me anymore? I don’t want to see my work or my life or my mother’s life gutted for the sake of having an easier or more palatable or less complicated poem or understanding of the world or understadning of things like psychosis.

I also recognize that if I had more talent or if my poems were challenging in the right ways (whatever that means), there would have been some evidence of it by now. That evidence doesn’t exist. As I move into my mid-50s, I have to consider what I’ve invested in poetry over the past three decades and whether I can continue to invest in it. Workshop fees, contest fees, manuscript reviews, submission fees, and more add up, as does traveling to read my work, assuming I could even get an invitation to read anywhere. I don’t have the time, energy, or health to keep up with the financial and other demands of poetry, all while waiting years for something, anything, to happen.

Then there’s the sexual assault I’ve talked about more than some of you might like. That experience in itself was awful, but worse, perhaps, was the poetry community’s response years later when information about that poet came to light from several sources. Hundreds of poets were involved in discounting the poet’s actions and claiming he couldn’t have done what he was accused of doing. By that I mean: hundreds of poets I respected up until that collective public outburst were involved in discounting the poet’s actions and claiming he couldn’t have done what he was accused of doing.

This is what I mean when I say pathology is systemic. In this case, it wasn’t just one poet doing harm. It was many, including editors and publishers, the very people I won’t placate now with easy-to-slot work that doesn’t raise anyone’s hackles or that only raises certain hackles the right way (again, whatever that means). There are too many of these poets to avoid. They live in every part of the country, teach at numerous institutions, and have published with just about every publisher out there. I remember what they said. It’s triggering to see their names throughout the day when someone brings one of them up or quotes their work or drops their name into a group chat I’m in.

When I crept back to poetry cautiously in 2022, I thought things would be better. They aren’t. The kinds of things that happened to me are continuing to happen to other poets. Poets are still largely silent about everything that happens in poetry and protective of those who create and sustain systems that lead to inappropriate exertions of power.

Navigating all this is weighing heavily on me. I told myself in 2022 that I’d go as far as I could go in poetry and that I’d stop if it became clear I needed to. I would just stop. I said this to myself as if it would be simple, stopping. It isn’t. Continuing isn’t simple, either.

Not About You

A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.

I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.

Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.

This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.

This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.

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