Utah

Morning Prayer October 16, 2024

I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.

I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.

Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)

I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.

Toquerville Bypass Road

You know that bypass road in Toquerville that I wrote the sad porcupine poem about? Well, while we were away, a boulder the size of a truck unexpectedly dislodged from the lava outcropping they’re slicing through to accommodate the road. The boulder fell straight down into the newly paved roadway while construction workers looked on, then it sat there for weeks because nobody could figure out how to move it.

Apparently, the boulder was eventually blasted to pieces using dynamite. The neighbors told us all about it when we got back. It was the talk of the town and even made it into the local paper. (Tom Bennett from neighboring La Verkin managed to catch the boulder falling on video, which made for a good online news story.)

The company building the road won’t comment on what happened or why they failed to anticipate it. There are many more boulders where that one came from. The outcropping that’s being opened up is heavy, dense basalt on top, but below it’s a combination of veins of hard and soft sandstone deposited over time that have been completely upended by geological forces so they may run almost perpendicular to the ground like the ones behind our home do. That’s important because it means water can erode the now vertical or nearly vertical veins more readily than if they were sandwiched horizontally between harder layers. Within all that sandstone are boulders of varying sizes, apparently including those the size of a truck.

There are houses up on that outcropping, too, which makes no sense. A little ways over by the Virgin River, a house slid into the gorge a couple of years ago. Other homes have been abandoned or are at risk. We saw someone trying to shore their property up with a massive retaining wall that eventually slid into the gorge along with their hummingbird feeder. Those people are gone now. They left their Joshua tree behind.

We’re in an erosion zone here as well, so everything is always cracking and crumbling and siding down to the lowest point it can find. This land’s essence is change. It doesn’t care one iota about smooshing people, houses, and roads as it continually changes.

But we care. So we talk about the big boulder and incorporate it into local lore and Henny Penny about it for weeks on end—and when the bypass road finally opens, sure we’ll drive on it, but probably not without looking up and saying a little prayer. We’ll be looking for boulders, to be clear, not toward the heavens.

I’m not sure how this bypass road conforms with Chapter 16 of Toquerville’s City Code, which requires the preservation and treatment of sensitive lands, including ensuring no hazards are created, such as rockfalls, and protecting and preserving significant natural and visual resources, such as lava outcroppings. But what do I know? Maybe I’m still just upset about the porcupine. (I’m definitely still upset about the porcupine.)

Wildness

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter. I want another d or n. Something. Maybe a second i or one of those slashes right through the middle that allows the word to be at once one thing and two things. Wild|ness. That still doesn’t look right.

I had a thing to say about poetry, a quip or an aphorism that I came up with while I was making the bed. Then I saw my husband’s blood on a white pillowcase and lost my train of thought. He cut himself working on the house and didn’t think he needed a bandage. He needed a bandage. Because he had no bandage, the pillow became his bandage.

There’s something about the blood-red of blood on the bright white of white that makes the non-brain parts of my body react. To what, I don’t know. I saw a beaten woman bleed all over her white eyelet skirt at substitute teacher training last year in St. George, Utah. But this goes back further than that.

There are also, of course, the white floral handkerchiefs women used to carry that had crimson berries sewn onto them to disguise the blood they were coughing up because they had TB. But that’s not it, either.

It’s something from my childhood, something I saw or experienced. Blood drowning white cloth. White cloth destroyed by blood. Frantically trying to get bloodstains out of white fabric.

My mother knew how to do that. She removed nearly all traces of what happened to her, what she survived. She had a wildness that couldn’t be beaten or shaken or ripped out of her. I mean another word there, not ripped—a word I can’t say here on Facebook. Remove the i and one p. Add an a. Yeah, that word. By my uncle and later by my father.

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter.

Trauma is one of those words that looks like it’s packed with bodies.

Mother is one of those words that looks like it can be anything at all. Moth. Ether. Mote. Other. Tome. Moot. Mere. Mete. Hoe. Tooth. Hoot. Root. Home.

But most of all: There, there. There, there.

And the blood washes down the drain like always.

Sunny Southern Utah

Toquerville, Utah, is only thirty minutes from the Arizona border, so it’s pretty much like I’m not even leaving the state. That’s how I’m going to think about it. I’m uneasy about returning to an area that has so much embedded trauma.

Like the women and girls who were sex trafficked across a four-state area by way of a horse trailer that Samuel Bateman carted them around in. He was the father or husband of all of them. In one case, he was both their father and their husband. They were as young as twelve years old. He made them have sex with men while he watched. He said it’s what God wanted them to do and their hymens would grow back.

Like the man in Enoch who killed his mother-in-law, wife, five children, and himself because his wife filed for divorce. He didn’t want the embarrassment and shame that would bring upon him. Better that they all die than live as a broken family. Like the graves of the children and their mother lined up in the cemetery three minutes from Toquerville. Like his unmarked grave in some secret location.

Like runners who are trying to escape the compound Warren Jeffs still operates from jail but are found by other followers and dragged back inside the makeshift metal walls surrounding parts of the community.

Like the FLDS woman in substitute teacher training who met up with her husband during a break and returned with a badly split lip. How blood dripped onto her white eyelet skirt. How she cheerfully struck up a conversation about poetry while she bled.

Like the man patrolling BLM lands with a gun and a knife who calls women hikers he meets c-nts and tells him their presence is threatening so he’s justified in killing them. How the sheriffs say he’s within his rights to defend himself if he feels threatened. Besides, it’s a he said, she said situation, they say.

Like the youth who’ve died by suicide after coming out as LGBTQ and losing their whole families, their whole communities, everything they’ve known. Like the LDS church’s response, which is to be even harder on trans members, denying them opportunities the way they denied opportunities to Black members in the 1970s before they almost lost their tax-exempt status for doing so.

Like the outdoor adventure camps for children and young adults with behavioral issues that are riddled with abuses, devoid of accountability, and often run by staff with more unaddressed mental health issues than the children and youth they’re purportedly trying to help.

Like the seventy-year-old man who meets you in a state park and grooms you alongside his wife so he can later send you a photo of himself naked in his bathtub.

Like the mental health professionals who say your issues have absolutely nothing to do with trauma. You just need to go home to your husband. They write in your chart that you’re involved in trafficking, as if you’re trafficking others, when the truth is you were trafficked, sex trafficked as a child, by your family.

Like the therapist who lays her hands on you in a session and pulls the evil out of your body in long, expansive motions, the one who asks you to accept Jesus Christ as the one true savior, to renounce things like yoga and Buddhism because Jesus is the only one, the only way. Like your insurance paying for this session. The gaslighting of that. The mindf-ck of that. The absolute where the f-ck am I of that.

Like the things you still won’t put in writing because alt-right extremist groups are involved, militias are involved, ties to Cliven Bundy are involved, and these groups have thousands of local members who’ve gotten ahold of the Koch brothers’ playbook for destroying communities at the hyperlocal level. And they’re doing it. And it’s working because they have guns and rage and more guns and more rage. No end to the guns and rage. Someone has to pay for whatever’s made them so g-ddamn angry.

Like derealization as the only way out of that place, that inanity. Like insanity as the only sanity within insanity. Like nobody talking about any of the things that are happening. Like none of it even exists. Like trauma doesn’t girdle the area the way the lacolliths and sandstone formations do. Like abuses and suffering don’t rain down like summer storms, penetrating everything that can be penetrated and roiling from the creeks before they make their way elsewhere.

Falling in Love with Places

I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.

Quirky

One year and three days ago today, Jon and I went for a hike in Snow Canyon, located in Ivins, Utah. A couple approached us. They were in their 70s. They asked to take pictures of us because they liked how I was dressed. They even got another hiker to take photos of us with them.

The man started talking about polygamy and all his polygamous relatives. He said I looked like his sister, who is very pretty. He asked me to pull up my dress and show my legs. Everything he said was funny, lighthearted, girdled in puns. It seemed harmless, especially coming from someone his age who was with his wife. But it didn’t feel harmless, not if I’m honest with myself. My body knew it wasn’t harmless. The body always knows.

They love-bombed us with all the things we had in common. She was an English teacher who loves literature and weaving. He was that everydad kind of guy who noodles with electronics and technology. They were just like each of us, so similar it was uncanny. The wife, C—, even noticed that she and I both have moles on our right cheeks. Family, she said. We could be family. You could be my kin, he chimed in.

We exchanged email addresses because C—, whose nickname was Queen, wanted to send me images of a woven rug she’d purchased. We still weren’t registering the kind of danger that we were in, that I was in. I was trying to flex in Southern Utah, to meet folks where they were at and to be open to everyone. Danger wasn’t on my radar, not until later that day. I was leading with love and trying to survive in an inhospitable culture.

Later, I emailed Queen about the weaving. I got a reply back from Quirky instead, one year ago today. That was his nickname. His response to my email was a photo of him naked in his bathtub with a bottle of lavender essential oil on the tub’s rim. His accompanying text was: You have to promise me that if I send too much, just tell me!! Off to Bear Lake after I get out of this bathtub!

It was too much, Quirky. Way too much.

This is the day: August 31, 2023. This is the day one year ago when I became terrified of everyone, the day my C-PTSD and bipolar 1 swooped in to save me, as implausible as that might sound and as inelegant as those protective mechanisms appeared to me and to others. They saved me from terror, from abject terror about being fundamentally unsafe in the world, even in super-safe family-friendly sunny Southern Utah. They saved me from not recognizing that I wasn’t safe, that Quirky and Queen weren’t safe.

C-PTSD saved me by making my body scream when I couldn’t hear it whimpering. Bipolar 1 saved me by giving me something other than sheer darkness as the only thing left in my existence. Bipolar made me think maybe, just maybe there’s something other than and beyond evil in this world—something unlike the Workys or their earlier counterparts: the Coolidges, the Yoders, the Swains, the Whites, and last but not least, my family, the Guthries.

Quirky and Queen are real people who really did live in Utah and who really did what they told us they did for a living. I looked them up after I received Quirky’s email. I looked Quirky up again today. He died at the beginning of 2024. He was active in his LDS ward, loved gardening, was charismatic, and made everyone feel welcome. A real gem in the community. No cause of death is listed.

I am walking out of that chapter of my life now, that near undoing (or unbounding, to extend the metaphor). Welcome, August 31, 2024. I’m happy to be here, or at least moving in the direction of happiness and healing.

Post-Monsoon Bloom

I have a Mojave Desert wardrobe, but I’m a Sonoran Desert dweller now.

I need to be more columnar cactus, less Joshua tree. More legume tree, less pinyon-juniper.

More post-monsoon bloom of annual flowers, less monotony of Mormon tea.

More thornscrub, more upland, more plains. Less ecotone, less basin, less mountain.

More swelling tropical air, less strained, stolen aquifer water.

More desert, less golf course, less water park, less carwash.

More diversity, equity, and inclusion, less banning of diversity, equity, and inclusion.*

I don’t want to walk around like that old desert, its desiccated husk wrapped around my body, though the desert’s not to blame. No desert is ever to blame. As Samuel Green writes in his poem “Convenant: Saying Hello to the Land We Will Love”:

              We have only
              the compass of how we walk here
              how our feet move
              over the soil that will feed us.

Let us feed our lands, not feed on them. Here in the Sonoran Desert. There in the Mojave Desert.

Let the lands guide us. Let us honor them. Let us save them and in turn be saved by them. Let us not always destroy everything and everywhere and everyone.

Give me that wardrobe. I’ll suit up.

—

* Utah recently banned diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on campuses and in government.

Weaponing Healthcare

Today, my primary care doctor opened my appointment by telling me that he believes I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve survived and/or live with multiple illnesses, including cancer. I live with more than one rare disease, including common variable immunodeficiency, which is serious and life-threatening. I have autoimmune diseases, renal insufficiency, postural orthostatic tachycardia, and arrhythmias. I’ve been treated for atrial fibrillation. I have aortic root and ascending aortic dilations. And I have PTSD and serious, life-threatening, bipolar.

All of this is documented in my medical record at Intermountain, where my primary care doctor works. It’s not in my head. It’s not me imagining health issues that don’t exist. They exist, and I’m attempting to address them. I worked as a medical writer and editor at some of the best institutions in the country for years. When I get a diagnosis or face a health challenge, I do research and have the determination to address the situation however I can.

Today, I was asking about my fasting blood glucose being over 100 for the past two years. That’s diagnostic for prediabetes, but none of my doctors brought the high results to my attention. High blood sugar seems like something I should be able to discuss without being called a hypochondriac. It’s especially important given that my chances of developing diabetes are 3 to 4 times higher because I have bipolar disorder.

I was also at the appointment to discuss my BUN level and (BUN/creatinine ratio). My BUN has doubled in the past 5 months and is above the normal range. Perhaps that’s not an issue, but given my history of renal insufficiency and the fact that lithium, which I started taking at a higher dose 5 months ago, causes kidney disease in about 26 percent of patients, the higher BUN level seems like a valid issue to raise.

Healthcare systems don’t seem to welcome the type of patient I am—one who’s female, has chronic health issues, and has a mental health diagnosis. We wait years or decades before our issues are taken seriously and addressed. By that time, we often have medical trauma because of how the healthcare system has treated us or our conditions have progressed, often irreversibly, because we were gaslit into thinking it must all be in our heads, a point our doctors belabor.

If I can’t approach my doctor for routine care, explanation of test results, or to discuss a health concern—the very things primary care providers are supposed to do with their patients—without the entire encounter being dismissed as evidence of a mental health problem, then why am I even trying so hard.

This isn’t the first time this has happened here in Southern Utah. Another doctor at Intermountain denied the fact that I had atrial fibrillation despite a preponderance of evidence that I had the condition. I was denied the medication I needed because of his insistence that I didn’t have afib. Yet another doctor at Intermountain tried to tell me my diagnosis of common variable immunodeficiency was unfounded despite the fact that I have extensive documentation of that disease from accomplished immunologists who know how to diagnose and treat immune system dysregulation.

I’m tired. I’m tired of this treatment. I’m tired of this sexism, this ableism, this dehumanization. I’m just tired. These attitudes and behaviors on the part of doctors cause unnecessary and severe iatrogenic illness for those of us who are subjected to them. I can’t carry that burden on top of my actual health and mental health issues. I’m tired.

No Hands, No Eyes

I’m dealing with so much trauma that it’s been destabilizing twice now in the past year. I’ve lived with trauma and the sequelae of trauma my whole life, but learning more about my childhood trauma over the past twelve months has been too much for me to process, cope with, or even understand.

Being in Southern Utah triggered a deeper understanding of my trauma. It’s an extremely traumatized and traumatizing place. Living there was like living in a vivid dream, a scary one, one that showed me more than I could process about my childhood, my family, and my father. An alt-right extremist leader who crossed boundaries with her own students didn’t help. A seventy-year-old who sent me an inappropriate photo of himself didn’t help. A trucker who tried to solicit me for sex at a family restaurant didn’t help.

People’s behaviors were so unreal there that I felt like I was being gaslit all the time. Reality didn’t feel like reality. Things that happened on a daily basis were unfathomable.

Law enforcement being sexist, dismissive, and steeped in LDS beliefs and values didn’t help. The domestic violence center only doing phone intakes and scheduling those intakes three days out didn’t help. Their failure to keep their intake appointment with me didn’t help. Not having anyone believe me about any aspect of my trauma or the unfolding situation with my husband didn’t help.

Nothing helped. Nobody helped. Even my therapist violated ethical boundaries by touching me during sessions, almost like she was laying hands on me to remove trauma from my body. She said she could do so because she was also a licensed massage therapist. That’s not the case. She also proselytized heavily during our sessions, diagnosed my husband without seeing him or treating him as a patient, and told me to leave him. When I needed my therapist, she pushed me deeper into fear and exploited my vulnerable state to foist a religious message on me and to dictate what I should do with my life.

My husband didn’t get support, either. Not really. He was shoehorned into the same theocratic system as me. He got messages about the man being in charge, husbands monitoring what their wives do, and so forth. He got a message about everything I was perceiving being untrue. And that’s just not the case. I have legitimate concerns about my husband’s behaviors, including those that also pushed me deeper into fear.

I ended up having a brief reactive psychosis/mania twice, once in February and again in September. That can happen when current traumas are too much for me to bear and my whole complex PTSD web is activated. I’ve been dealing with far too much medical trauma, community trauma, and domestic trauma for far too long. It’s been more than two years since I developed long COVID and the slew of health diagnoses that followed. Two years since I started writing and speaking publicly about the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community in Southern Utah. Just under two years since so much more of my childhood trauma came to light. More than two years of solid stress with my husband, and before that the destabilization within our relationship that the pandemic caused.

I tried so hard to make things work in Utah, to find a place for my voice, my writing, for me as a person. I tried so hard to fight for others so they could also have a place in the community. I tried so hard to overcome diseases and conditions that leave most people homebound. I tried so hard to fight for my marriage and for my husband. I tried so hard to heal from traumas that I now fear I’ll never be able to heal from.

I don’t know what to do. I know I can’t go back to Utah. I know I’m too physically ill and too emotionally destabilized to make it on my own here in Oklahoma. I know I can’t leave my husband behind because he’ll languish in that environment, which he doesn’t deserve. Despite some of his behaviors, he also deserves a chance to grow and heal. I know major changes need to happen so I don’t panic, dissociate, and have brief psychosis every time something else happens that’s traumatizing.

I’ve really never been more terrified, day by day, moment by moment, second by second. My whole world is gone. My whole life is gone. I’m like the speaker in one of my poems who loses everything a little at a time until there’s nothing, not even hands with which to write or eyes with which to read.

Zion

Deliver me from the man who ran over a porcupine in broad daylight because of his need to thrust his way forward always forward always faster and always darker, coal smoke billowing from his tailpipe as he hits the gas hard.

Deliver me from that man who saw the porcupine struggling after his back legs were crushed, who didn’t stop, who didn’t take the porcupine to the wildlife rehab on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa, who didn’t care because black smoke because man because manly because grrrrr because move over here I come like it or not because get off of my road and out of my town and I’ll put my foot in your ass and I’ll mow you down I mean it I mean it look at me I really mean it look at my Gadson flag and my Dixie flag can’t you see I mean business look at my neck veins little lady, pretty little lady, lady why’s there a thought in your head a little tinkling thought about love that’s so silly so outdated so childish like a school bell hey little lady listen here it’s not God’s way for you to think or tell a man what to do a big man a strong man a fast man and you damned well know it so stop thinking just stop stop it right now.

Deliver me from what the porcupine must have felt there in the road on the hot asphalt in the heat so close to the soft sage flanking the road’s shoulder. He got so close but not close enough never close enough for speed for thrill for look I killed that varment woohoo hot damn and never enough blood left in the leaking husk never enough life left in the pressured heart and never enough limp left in the body nobody will ever gather for ever.

Deliver me from those who came after and also didn’t stop. The sedans and SUVS and minivans and trucks and semis and hatchbacks and Outbacks and Elements and motorcycles and RVs.

Deliver me from every one of them. Deliver me from my neighbors. They didn’t stop. They didn’t stop. My neighbors didn’t stop. Too busy doing God’s work to do God’s work.

Deliver me from my own absence as the porcupine struggled, for coming behind too late by hours, maybe, or maybe only by minutes which is even more self-hatred to be delivered from.

Deliver me from rewriting the story so I’m there, so I take the limp, quilled creature in my arms and usher him to safety, to people who care, to angels on this earth who spend all day helping the creatures of this earth. I almost typed heart. Heart is earth. Earth is heart. Same letters. How did I never see that before? Grief brings out glimmerings, doesn’t it? This is how and why we survive grief. No glimmering, no future. No heart in earth, no earth in our hearts.

Deliver me from those who have no earth in their hearts, no heart in their earths.

Deliver me from my revisions my impossible revisions my anger that story only takes us so far into the future because it never changes the past. Our stories are cursed that way as we are cursed.

Deliver me from the cursed. Deliver me from myself as one of the cursed. Curs-ed, say it with two syllables. Say it with me. Curs-ed. Clop along to that languid beat, that dirge. The march of what we’ll all be without love and without hope.

Deliver me from revisions existing only in our minds and not actually changing what happened, what really happened. The porcupine is dead. That’s what happened. In broad daylight. Visible on open road. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed his hellbent smoke-infused take that world roll.

Deliver me from this iron-encrusted place whose heart was lost in the creek, in the canyons, up on the cliffs when … years, hours, minutes ago? How long? How long has it been? Since we came, since we named, since we shamed, since we couldn’t leave couldn’t leave couldn’t leave this place alone?

Deliver me from how long we’ve lived like this, baffled and battled and beaten and battered and branded and broken. How long must I writhe, I mean write, before I write my way out of this failing, flailing, hellish heaven on earth? A minute? An hour? A day? An eternity?

Zion—my great nephew, not the place—deliver me from this land whose name you carry in your pocket on your papers in your heart and in your genes. Yours is the real Zion. It lives inside you, little one. Never deliver me from who you are—from you, my kin, my kind, my kindred. [REDACTED] Pin me here to this tree, the only one that’s safe these days with all the fruit trees eaten bare. The family tree. My tree, our everlasting tree.

As for you, Zion—the place, not the great nephew—deliver me from you. Free me from you. Forget me. You don’t even have to forgive me. If you can’t reverse time and bring that porcupine back to life, if you can’t unwind the clocks that are all wound too tight here warping time and space and hearts and minds, then deliver me. I beseech you. Deliver me from what we’ve made you, from what you’ve become. Please deliver me.