Essays

Poetry As Survival

During Saturday’s Utah Poetry Festival panel discussion on Poetry As Survival, if there’s time, I’d like to talk about why trauma is a wound of the present and how poetry (and other forms of art) can help with processing those wounds.

One of the reasons trauma from the past plays such a role in the present is because our brains don’t time-stamp traumatic events properly. The hippocampus, which is responsible for encoding and storing dates for our memories, can’t do so when levels of arousal or stress are too high. Instead, memories are recorded in great detail but without a time-stamp associated with them. That’s why there’s an always-ness to traumatic memories, an endlessness, a nowness.

The first way poetry addresses this issue is by allowing us to move time around as we write. As Gregory Orr says, this gives us more control over a situation we may have had little or no control over when it was happening, which in itself is empowering. The very act of writing about the experience is an act of survival. But the act of writing also gives us a past, a present, and a future—that is, the sense of time and its passing that’s missing in our encoded memories about what happened.

Even if we write about an experience in the present tense, the act of putting that experience in writing, moving it from the body to the page, from feeling to language, helps us do the time-stamping necessary to process what we’ve lived through. That’s what I believe anyway, as a poet who lives with trauma but who’s not a psychologist or neuroscientist.

The second way I believe poetry is helpful is that it serves as a creative historical record that we can revisit anytime we want and reinforce what we’re learning as we heal. I realized this last fall when I was looking through my older poems. Together, they serve as a network of external time-stamps that reinforce an I am here as opposed to I am still there message. I can read my poems and situate them in time in a way that helps me make sense of my past and my life as a whole. This thing happened. Here is when it happened. Here is when I wrote about it. A year ago. A decade ago. A week ago. Not now.

And that’s the point of time-stamping: to know what was then and what is now, as well as what isn’t now.

I’ve had similar experiences when I look at photos I’ve taken, but the time-stamping isn’t as strong for me as it is with poetry, probably because I just point at things and click. I don’t put artful effort into my photos the way I do with my poems. I’m also not stepping into parts of my life or into the world itself in photos the way I do—or the way I hope to—when I write a poem.

I love language in ways I can’t properly articulate. I’m dyslexic and had extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I was young. It was poetry that allowed me to enter into language, not dull language but magical language that gave me access to worlds outside my family, my home, my town, and what happened there. I have a strong time-stamp associated with the first real poem I read. It was in a children’s book tucked on a shelf in what was once my sister’s room, but it wasn’t a nursery rhyme. I found it, and I loved it, and it was mine. I know where I stood when I read it, how the paper felt, what it did in six lines, and how I came alive reading it. Fully alive. Fully present. I had no idea at the time what a gift the poem would be or how it would shape my life and my healing.

For me, healing is a process and there will always be an ongoing-ness to it. But the poems I write are essential parts of my mind at this point, externalizations of what my hippocampus can’t do as readily as someone who hasn’t experienced trauma. I hope I also create beauty, at least sometimes, in and through my writing.

I’ll close by saying that I’m not talking about poetry as therapy. I approach poetry as an art, and I also recognize its healing powers, which for me are rooted in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality.

Poetry and Internal Family Systems

I’ve been thinking about Internal Family Systems and how that model of the psyche, of the self, applies to healing in and through poetry. The IFS model draws on Carl Jung’s work, which drew on indigenous ways of knowing, so there’s a long tradition behind it about being conscious and being human. The focus in IFS is on the mind, but it’s also on the body because we are all embodied. No mind without body. No body without mind. Or minds, as Richard Schwartz, the creator of IFS, might say.

I’ve long understood that different voices were at work in my poetry, much more so than when I write a lyrical essay or, say, a feature story about health or medicine. In my earlier work, those voices were darker, for lack of a better word. Not that they were dark. They just lived in darkness. I couldn’t see them well outside my poems. I often thought I was channeling some experiences that were outside of me or that were part of the collective unconscious, which certainly can be the case.

I came to see, over a period of more than two decades, including the seven years I spent not writing poems, that what those voices were sharing was either what happened to them or their feelings about what happened to them. The “them” in question was me. Many of those things happened to me. My voices were what Schwartz calls parts, also known in other models as subpersonalities or ego states.

Poems gave me permission to write what I couldn’t face or completely understand or entirely integrate. I write poetry in a state that’s closer to meditation or sleep, so the door is at least somewhat open to parts of my experience and parts of my self that are otherwise sequestered.

I’m not talking about a pathology or a label like dissociative identity disorder. Schwartz says this having of and living with parts is the natural state of the mind and works well until trauma happens. Or traumas. Even then, no part is bad. They’re all trying to help. They all want to be heard, and they need to be heard. I keep typing heart instead of heard, as if parts of me know this going in, going toward them, is the heart of the matter.

I typically move fluidly with my parts now when I write poems. I think this is one reason I write so much. All the parts, well at least many of the parts, come to the table and follow my lead as I tell their stories. That’s my self, guiding these creative interactions, which makes the parts feel safe. Safety is exactly what they need.

We’re still working on how to be in the world, but we’ve got the poetry experience down. A couple of my parts are still in the shadows. They’re the most vulnerable ones and the ones I fear. There’s one I may feel disgust toward. We all have parts like that. The work is doing the work to talk to them and bring them closer to me, unshaming them and loving them.

I’m not sure Internal Family Systems has been written about in terms of trauma literary theory, but it should be. It’s another lens for understanding how and why poetry can help heal trauma. It rings true for me, like the bells I sometimes hear in downtown Toquerville that make their way across the creeks to find my body and set it to music.

Kelly

A few months before she died, a dear friend of mine, a poet, called me and apologized over and over and over for how she treated me in 2015, which was to stop communicating with me over the issue with the poet who harmed me. We’d been close. Very close. I’d reached out to her several times in 2015 and thereafter with no response. I didn’t hear anything from her for seven years.

She believed me, she explained as she cried, but she didn’t know what to do. She was just so sorry. She needed me to know that.

But she also asked why I still cared, so many years later, about what happened. Couldn’t I just let it go, she asked. Turns out that question wasn’t for me. It was for her. A few weeks before she died, she called me and told me her father had sexually abused her. We talked for hours. These things aren’t ones that can be let go. They live in our bodies and make their way into our consciousness, sometimes decades later. They have to be seen and recognized and processed, not let go the way you might brush off an insensitive comment or a minor annoyance.

What I learned from my friend is that sometimes we push others away who have experienced what we can’t let into our consciousness, what we can’t deal with, at least not yet. It can be impossible to face what’s happened to others when we can’t face that it’s also happened to us. The reason for the pushing away may not even be in our awareness. What happened may be stuffed so far down that we don’t know what happened, let alone why we’re behaving the way we’re behaving. We’re just behaving. We may deride the person we’re shunning. We may call them weak or use inappropriate labels to describe them. We may call them crazy, bringing us into superficial alignment with those who do harm and call their victims crazy.

As my friend came to the end of her life, she was able to bring what happened with her father into her consciousness. Or maybe she just wasn’t unable to continue avoiding what she’d been avoiding for decades. But that was just the beginning of the work. When the thing goes from the body into the mind, or more accurately into a shared body/mind existence, that’s only the beginning of healing. My friend didn’t make it past the beginning. But I hold her story and her in my heart. She’s in my poems, always.

She’s the only person who’s ever apologized to me for their part in what unfolded in 2015. And she wasn’t even spearheading anything. She was just caught up in the battle, as were many folks, including victims like me who were unable to speak as we were overrun by those attacking us and those purporting to support us alike.

—

Glass
— for Kelly

Today I saw a starling try to fly
into a closed window as if it knew

the pane was a way out, not a way
through. You feel like that, too,

sometimes, as do I, traumas lining
our pockets and us wondering

at the weight we bear, our desire
to find a body of water deep

enough to cover us like a sheet
of glass. I’ve stood on that shore,

or should I say sore, open wound?
Maybe I should say wound, the verb,

as in how many years have we
wound and unwound like a thousand

pulsating variable stars, held each
trauma-stone to the light and tried

to feed it little snails, as if we could
nourish the pain away or nurture it

into something that might walk
beside us rather than having to be

carried or dragged? We are turning
rocks into sky, you and I, our feathers

oiled, our backs to the sun. We are song-
birds, too. Everyone seems to forget that.

—

“Glass” first appeared in Anti-Heroine Chic.

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.

—

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

Quiet, Dearies

Perhaps the stupid little twat coterie need to be sent to bed without their suppers? Quiet, dearies, adults are talking. Definitions have become so blurred and a no-accountability and unassailable victimhood is now the norm. According to today’s definitions of rape I have been raped hundreds of times. — [Poet’s Name Redacted]

—

This is one of the worst things that was said in 2015 in response to the public discussion about the poet who harmed me and, according to others, harmed them as well. There were hundreds and hundreds of comments like this over a period of weeks that stretched into months that felt like an eternity.

Look at the language [the poet] chooses to use. Look at the infantilization of victims. Look at the complete dismissal of any/all accounts regarding this poet’s behavior.

This comment has stuck with me for a decade. It is not acceptable. It was made publicly and loudly by a female minority poet whose work focuses on the way the self is divided by differing identities. That is, by someone insightful enough to have known better than to say something this heartless and atrocious.

This poet has served as a poet laureate, has numerous collections, has won awards, and has published in the top literary journals. She was never called out for making this statement. What this tells me is that these abuses are endemic in poetry. They are unavoidable. More than that, they are allowed. I can’t look away from the elephant in the room: It’s poets like this and the institutions and entities that support them.

Part of me wishes [this poet] the best and hopes she’s rethought this thought because it’s certainly not her best thought. But another part still feels the damage from this comment and others like it, all these years later. It feels like a grenade went off and I was on top of it. My guess is I’m not the only one who felt that way reading her words.

Light Music

Morning. I feel my hair feathering the sides of my face, a sensation I don’t like but can’t remedy because I’ve lost my hair clip. When I do find it, a section keeps falling out because it’s too short to reach the clip. I locate a smaller clip and ensnare that section separately from the rest. I look like I have tree stuff stuck in my hair, the fluffy, seedy matter that forms before the leaves do and litters streets when it’s shed to make way for actual leaves, actual spring, actual warmth, actual hope, whatever hope is these days, actual or otherwise.

I have to find my earplugs now because my fifty-five-year-old husband is playing a video game at 6 a.m., and I can hear him clicking the controller. CLICK CUCLICK CLICK CLICK CUCUCLICK. There’s no pattern to the clicking that I can settle into, make sense of. I feel like someone’s strumming my ribs with their nails.

Now, the refrigerator is trying to get out of its body as it does for several minutes every morning, poltergeisting the entire kitchen with its WAWUM WAWUM WAWAWAWAWUM. I used to have a wooden rabbit on top of the fridge, but it would vibrate off to the left side whenever these hauntings occurred. I didn’t like seeing it askew, putting it back, and seeing it askew again. At some point, we have to stop engaging in repeated patterns that will never change, never turn out any different. So no more wooden rabbit.

Oh, good. The refrigerator has gone silent, as if it’s been practicing self-soothing techniques. Cry it out, fridge. Cry it out. Breathe or whatever you do.

This is not the morning I want. I want om tare tuttare ture soha playing quietly while I read my new David Ray book. I want to sink into that sadness and silence and away from the furniture banging around in my skull. David, I have taken the counsel of trees / and wise enough to wait for dawn. I’ve waited and woken into all the things. I’ve taken my thyroid medication and had my morning zero-sugar soda and gentled my dog into the morning alongside me and plopped myself down in front of this big window that looks out into the wildlands surrounding Tucson. And David, you used to live here. And David, you lived in Kansas City where I lived. And David, Studs Terkel loved you. And William Carlos William loved you. And you were at one time one of the most celebrated poets in the United States. And now?

You’ve only just died, David. Last December at age 92. I knew before I picked up this book that you were gone. Somehow I knew, though I hadn’t read the news. But here you are on these pages. How can I call you dead? Let me tell you about the things in my head, David. All that furniture that lives inside sound. My husband’s clicking. His footfalls. The sound of him urinating right now with the bathroom door open. Pouring coffee. Clearing his throat. Opening a door. Closing a door. I love him, David. I do. But I am at the edge of the forest. I came there, as you did. Is the darkness before me, behind me, or all around me?

All of the above.

You’ve gone the way every one of us will go: into obscurity and into everything. Being lauded means nothing in the end. Living a certain way, writing a certain way, means everything. Good morning, David. Thank you for the gift of your “light music” over this scene.

The Closet

My teacher says the penis just finds its way into the vagina, knows where to go, doesn’t need any help getting up in there. She says it goes right in the way her husband’s does. She’s pregnant, so we’re pretty sure she’s telling us girls the truth. We’re fifth graders. This is our sex-education class in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1981 at McKinley Elementary School.

We are fifth-grade girls being told the penis just finds its way into the vagina while the boys are in the other classroom with the nice teacher being told who knows what. They will squirm a lot when they come back, the boys, which will be unsettling given what we are just now learning about their penises.

Most of us barely know what a vagina is or how it’s different from the part we pee out of or the vulva as a whole or that there’s a magical subcomponent to the vulva called the clitoris. She doesn’t tell us about the clitoris. She leans back onto one of the little desks at the front of the room, probably one of the reject left-handed ones like the one I beg to use since I’m left-handed but that’s always denied to me because our teacher, Ms. Malecki, is not the nice teacher. She’s no Mrs. Brown, that’s for sure.

Ms. Malecki once left me in the coat closet as a punishment for the entire day. I wasn’t allowed to come out to use the restroom or eat lunch or play on the Big Toy outside. She turned off the lights and left at the end of the school day with me still in the coat closet. I waited at least an hour before coming out. She’d threatened me several times in front of the whole class for occasionally whimpering from the closet. The paddle. I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell the principal, all of that. The principal was related to James Garner, so of course I didn’t want him involved. It would make me uncool forever, and I was already well on my way to being uncool forever without celebrity-adjacent involvement.

I was understandably terrified of Ms. Malecki. Now, I was terrified of her husband’s penis and penises in general, things that seemed like they acted on their own and without authorization and without thought and without consequences the way DOGE will in a future I can’t imagine, one that’s completely out of alignment with the pledge of allegiance we all take every morning unless we’re one of the kids who have to wait out in the hall because their parents don’t want them saying the pledge or singing the national anthem. The scariest thing in my world thanks to Ms. Malecki was the fear that one or more penises would be up inside me all of a sudden while I was hyperventilating on the monkey bars or trying to grab an extra cookie in the lunch line.

Ms. Malecki’s still perched on the little reject desk, which makes her stomach tilt upward. Her exposed belly button gazes at the fluorescent lighting as we ask questions. How do you know if you’ve had an orgasm? You just know. What does the penis look like? You don’t want to know. Are penises going to get inside us as we walk around on the playground or sit in class next to boys? I hope not.

This is a story in which I don’t talk about the sexual abuse I was already experiencing without understanding what was happening. Because the penises stayed tethered for the most part. Because one of the men was a boy, an older boy who’d been held back in school, and I didn’t understand what child-on-child sexual abuse was, that it wasn’t play and wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened. (I mean, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening, and I begged for it to not happen, but I didn’t know what it was that was happening.) Because things didn’t get really bad until I hit puberty. Because that’s when the penises came out. But they didn’t just find their way into my vagina and mouth. They were forced in. They were forced entries. These were things nobody, not even Ms. Malecki, could have prepared me for or helped me understand. We failed to ask all the right questions. Will we be molested? Will we be raped? Will we be sexually assaulted? I imagine her answer would have been I hope not.

I lived in a closet for a long time. Too long. In so many ways, I lived in a closet not unlike the one in my fifth-grade classroom. Afraid to come out. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid that, even once the lights were turned off, the threat would still be there, waiting for me to make a move, to run.

Midnight Dana

Bryan Johnson has a part of himself that he calls Nighttime Bryan. Nightime Bryan overeats, doesn’t sleep well, and makes decisions that aren’t in his best interest. Studies show that we all have a version of this within ourselves, and that this part usually comes forward in the middle of the night during a mid-night awakening. The typical scenario is that we wake up during the transition from deep sleep to REM sleep, which also happens to be when we’re vulnerable to things like worrying, ruminating, and catastrophizing, as well as seeing ourselves and the world through a clouded lens, one that tends to exaggerates our negative traits, minimize our sense of self-worth, anticipate the worst in every situation, and fail to recognize anything positive. I call this our Midnight Part. In myself, I call this part Midnight Dana.

Let me introduce you to Midnight Dana. She’s a little different from Nighttime Bryan in that she’s trying to help. (I actually think Nighttime Bryan is trying in his own way to help Bryan, or at least to call attention to a problem, but that’s not how Bryan Johnson characterizes Nighttime Bryan.) Midnight Dana remembers things. She doesn’t mean to. She just does. Her body remembers. She’s a time traveler who can go to any point in the past where she’s needed, and by that I mean where her memory is needed. She’s important and necessary, but witnessing her deep knowledge and attempting to communicate with her is not easy.

I woke up at 3:38 a.m. trundled from sleep into wakefulness by a disconcerting dream that involved countless rows of girls’ dorm-room beds extending into the distance behind Vince McMahon, the resident assistant, who was standing in the foreground in a light-gray plaid suit waiting for all the girls to arrive.

Midnight Dana did not like that dream. She immediately thought about the semi-private dorm room she’ll be staying in at the summer residency for Pacific University if I decide to enter that program. The thing that terrifies Midnight Dana about this situation is the shared bathroom. Bathrooms have never been safe spaces for Dana, and Midnight Dana remembers what’s happened in them. It’s as if every cell in her body knows, even the ones that have turned over countless times since those abuses occurred. Midnight Dana is part of the institutional memory of Dana Henry Martin. She lives in the decentralized array of awareness that resides within my body. She also interacts with the world around her, responding to inputs from my waking and sleeping worlds and experiences.

Still frothy with sleep, I receded and Midnight Dana came to the forefront. She laid in bed as the bathroom memories flashed like View-Master stereoscopes, but she was also running. Her heart rate was fast and erratic. She was sweating. She took quick, shallow breaths. Her head suddenly hurt like hell. Midnight Dana was in flight mode.

By 4 a.m., Midnight Dana had made a slew of decisions that started with not attending Pacific University and ended with not writing poetry anymore. Midnight Dana made a plan to do nothing but sit somewhere and listen to birds for the next thirty years or so.

Midnight Dana and I are in conversation this morning. We’re talking about ways she can feel safe at the residency and keep writing poetry. What does she need? How can I advocate for her? I want her to know I see her, hear her, and appreciate her. She’s trying to keep me safe and also keep me from walking into a situation that could be incredibly difficult and painful. She’s going to be there, too, if we go to Oregon. I need to meet her where she’s at and advocate for that part of myself so I don’t become a fear-driven organism whose only option is to run fast and hard and away.

This is the basis of the Internal Family Systems model. We all have parts, and we all need to listen to those parts and bring them into Self. Our Midnight Parts can be teachers if we let them. We can bring them into our awareness and into our hearts while ushering our whole selves to, or at least toward, safety.

Midnight Dana is both an exile and a firefighter. She’s been ignored, silenced, and shamed—even by me—and she looks for quick fixes that will allow her to avoid painful feelings. She makes sense developmentally given my past, namely my childhood. I want her to have that life of listening to birds. And I want her to have so much more than that, including poetry, which is where she sings alongside me.

Moving Mountains

Utah Senator Dan McCay, who shepherded the bill banning pride flags in Utah’s schools and government buildings through the State Senate, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to attack the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what he wrote:

“Bye Felicia. Sundance promotes porn. Sundance promotes alternative lifestyles. Sundance promotes anti-LDS themes.”

Sundance is considering leaving Utah, where it’s been held since its creation in 1978. The ban on pride flags could ensure Sundance’s departure from the state.

This is how Utah’s lawmakers are behaving these days, just a couple of years after cloaking their homophobia and transphobia in purported support for federal protections for same-sex marriage. They wanted to be seen as the good guys back then. Not anymore. What’s infected our government at the highest levels has infected Utah lawmakers and many of those who live in the state.

Almost three years ago, I contacted every LGBTQ+ organization and group in Utah to address the hatred and outright bigotry several Southern Utah lawmakers in places like St. George and Leeds were espousing through far-right groups with militia ties. The only organization that responded—the largest one in the state—told me they had decided not to address the issues with our lawmakers. They thought everything would blow over and wouldn’t amount to anything. They perceived themselves as the leaders of Utah’s queer community. As such, they were encouraging everyone else who was queer to stay quiet, too. Like me. I was told not to talk about what was happening.

I told them they were wrong. I’m from Oklahoma and have lived through this. I lived through the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan years, and more. I lived in Kansas and know the Koch brothers and their playbook, which was being carried out in Washington County, Utah, where I lived and across the country in rural areas with a couple of tweaks: guns and violence and, in the case of Southern Utah, with a post-Mormon hatred that was unbounded. I said what was happening in Southern Utah was going to spread to the rest of the state—and quickly. They didn’t believe me. They were Salt Lake City-centric and didn’t see the power lawmakers in Southern Utah had or understand what they were capable of.

I told them anti-trans legislation was going to hit them like a tsunami, and they had a responsibility to address what was happening before it was too late. Weeks later, they flew the director of the organization down to Ivins, a town just outside St. George. People with power and influence in the queer community were invited to a mansion to discuss what to do, how to move forward. It was a private event. Members of the queer community at large were not invited or even told it was happening. Stay quiet was pretty much what they came up with at that meeting. Several people who attended also discussed the past of one of the alt-right group leaders, which involved extremely inappropriate behavior with her female students. (She’d been a high-school teacher in the area at one point.) The group wasn’t talking about that publicly, either.

In a matter of months, nine anti-trans pieces of legislation were signed into Utah law by Utah’s Governor. More laws have been passed since then. Queer organizations have been hobbled and/or gutted. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enacted more hateful and harmful policies that target queer members and their families. Queer folks are being threatened, disowned, harmed in myriad ways, erased, and more—more than ever. And now lawmakers are telling everyone in the state what they really think, what they thought all along but didn’t feel they could say.

I’m not a seer. I didn’t see into the future. I’ve just seen all of this before. I’ve lived through it, survived it, and been shaped by it as someone who’s nonbinary and queer. I didn’t stay quiet like the queer organization told me to. I wrote two letters that The Salt Lake Tribune published, one of which discussed a column by Pat Buchanan that ran in The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 17, 1990. It was titled “Homosexuals Mainstreaming Satanism.” I compared that piece to what was currently happening at meetings and rallies in the St. George area. I also pitched stories to local reporters and provided background material and comments on several stores. This only served to drive a bigger wedge between me and the queer community who didn’t seem to want me or my voice to exist. Ironic? Yes. It’s ironic.

Even with everything unfolding the way I said it would, only worse than I could have imagined, I’m still not welcome in Utah’s queer circles. Last fall, I attended a Zoom meeting for members of NAMI Utah to discuss changes within the organization. That meeting was comprised primarily of queer participants. They recognized my name from the pieces that ran in the Trib, and they thought I was there to glean information about the organization and report on it in The Salt Lake Tribune. I wasn’t. I attended the meeting because I’m in training to become a peer specialist here in Arizona through NAMI, because I’m a mental-health advocate who stays informed about issues that affect mental-health care in my communities, and because I live with mental-health issues and am as deserving of support as anyone else in Utah who lives with mental health issues.

The folks in the NAMI group also believed I was a journalist because they apparently don’t understand the distinction between editorial content and letters to the editor. I’m a poet and writer who’s worked as a medical writer and health advocate. I have a degree in journalism but am not working as a journalist. I certainly wouldn’t “inflitrate” a NAMI meeting. (Please.) Or use my full name in my Zoom profile if I was trying to be sneaky.

The group moderator contacted me individually after the meeting through email to admonish me for being unethical, to insinuate I was there to undermine the organization, and to ask what I planned to do with what I learned during the meeting. It was a stunningly inappropriate communication that was never properly addressed by NAMI Utah’s interim director. She passed it off to a lower-level volunteer as opposed to addressing the infraction herself as the organization’s leader. Here were my concerns, in short: You can’t use an email list your organization maintains to gather information about a member and reach out to them to ask probing accusatory questions. Doing so is discriminatory, borders on bullying and intimidation, and jeopardizes the well-being of a fellow NAMI member who’s seeking inclusion and support.

This is where I’m at in Utah. I’m an advocate whose advocacy is unwelcome and unwanted in both the queer and mental-health communities. The fear that permeates Southern Utah and drives folks to paranoia and conspiracy theories is embedded in the state as a whole, even in the very communities many Utah lawmakers want to eradicate. Queer folks and folks with mental-health issues need to learn how to stand up for themselves and each other, how to bring in and welcome outside voices and perspectives, and how to be true advocates and allies who don’t end up doing more harm than good in their respective organizations. Rolling over, fear, othering bordering on shunning, and baseless accusations aren’t going to get us anywhere, nor is silencing queer voices in the name of queer solidarity. We need to start moving mountains more than one spoonful at a time. And we certainly don’t need to be creating more and larger mountains.

Utah has work to do. We have work to do. We need to show up. My voice isn’t going anywhere, as much as I’ve been asked to remove it from the state, even by some folks in Southern Utah’s poetry community who’ve called my work inappropriate, graphic, and pornographic (just like the Sundance Film Festival, apparently). Hell, I’ve been called a pedophile several times by my neighbors up in South Jordan and later in Toquerville, where I still live part of the year. (One of Utahns’ big go-tos is calling anyone they don’t like a “pedophile,” which is sad given all the actual acts of pedophilia in the state.)

I’ve heard it all at this point. I’m surviving it all on my own, outside of any Utah-based communities focused on support and advocacy. I hope Utah can come back from what’s happening right now. I do. I feel for folks who are being crushed by all of this. But when a bulldozer’s coming, you have to warn others and get out of the way until you can dismantle that bulldozer. You’ll get nowhere if you pretend it’s not coming or throw others from your community in its path or tell them you don’t need their help. Communities who are harmed cannot harm others within their communities. That’s just a reframing of the very paradigm that caused those communities harm in the first place.

Twin Fawns, Treats, and Sitting Right in Rooms

I dated a man who didn’t like to be touched when he ate. Never, not by anybody. Not even me. I tried a few times. It didn’t go well. He only liked square rooms, nothing with an angled or curved wall or a cutout of any kind. Cubbies were for sure off-limits. The house he was living in with his band off Gillham Road in Kansas City was one block over from serial killer Bob Berdella’s house, but that’s not what he didn’t like about it. The sitting room had cherry trim, which bothered him because the rest of the trim was oak. It was supposed to be different to indicate that the sitting room was special. That’s what they did in Victorian homes, at least in Kansas City. Architectural history didn’t matter to him. Consistency mattered, order, and not being touched while eating, which I suppose is order-enforcement of a different kind.

I’d say all of this was problematic, but at some point, I stopped being able to sit in rooms without being squared up to them. In bed, I have to lie in perfect alignment with the walls to either side of me or things feel super off. And curved rows of seating in a square or rectangular room? Floating in the space like that, maybe even with seats whose backs are to the entrance? No, thank you. I’ll find a chair against the wall or drag one there if needed, none of this organismic bacteria-esque drifting as if we’re all being observed under a microscope.

I also don’t like to eat treats when anyone’s in the room with me, namely my husband, or when the news is on or I’m reading a shitty anything anywhere from anyone. My treat time is my me time, and it has to be just right. I have a soundtrack I listen to when eating treats. It’s moody music like Eno and Radiohead. Everything I listen to is moody, or maybe I just hear it that way. Barber. Corigliano. Orff. I’m genre-drifting musically now, probably because I have treats nearby, but my fingers insist on typing this before I eat them (the cookies, not my fingers) despite the fact that my husband’s about to return home, which means there will likely be no treat time for me tonight, especially if I start in on editing this post. I also don’t eat treats while writing and editing. My brain won’t register that the eating has occurred, and I’ll get the keyboard all treat-sticky.

The guy I dated also didn’t like to read anything long, so he limited himself to short stories. Say what you will about that, but he introduced me to Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, and Kansas City poet and writer Conger Beasley Jr. I was still a music major then, as was he. I hadn’t drifted from music to literature and ultimately to poetry, where I remain a producer-consumer to this day.

The last thing I’ll say about him is he showed me twin fawns who died in their mother’s womb and had been taxidermied shortly after their death. They were on display with other preserved animal oddities at a toy store in a Kansas City neighborhood called Brookside. Years later, he bought them from the owner and gave them to his new wife, who’s an artist. They’re art now, those fawns. They live in a vitrine. The artist sells prints of a painting of them. I don’t think it was her, actually, who painted them. Someone did. The fawns were on television as part of an art-competition show. I’ve seen pictures of the artist with the twins beside her under their glass. I love them and hope they’re at peace. I hope they are loved in the real way, not any other way.

It’s hard not to feel something for a man who values taxidemied fawns and shows them to all the girls he loves. Their vitrine is round, not square. Nobody touches them when they eat. They don’t eat because they are dead. They don’t read because they are dead but also because they are fawns, and even living fawns don’t read. Somehow, this last fact makes me profoundly sad.