Notabilia

Litophagy

Mitophagy removes and reuses the components of damaged mitochondria while regulating the biogenesis of new, undamaged mitochondria, which in turn preserves healthy mitochondrial functions and activities throughout the human body.

I think language needs to function in a similar way. We need to continually break it down, look at it in novel ways, question it, lay bare the strangeness of words both as sensory experiences and as signifiers, recycle it, make it new, and in turn preserve the flexibility and wholeness of language with the larger system of embodied communication.

This is why I like ascemic writing and erasures and blackouts and transliterations and poems with parts that are or appear to be missing and leaps in thought and elliptical writing and words that bleed into art and back into words again and writing that replaces what’s expected with what’s not expected — maybe with a similar-sounding word or something that creates the effect of reading a book that has several sets of pages stuck together.

And none of what I love is new, but it doesn’t have to be new to be important or to be discussed. Or to need a name, like mitophagy. Litophagy from the Latin lingua? That’s what I’m going to call it. Litophagy. Let’s clear out and clean up and heal what’s on our tongues.

On Your Knees

When those who are abused, erased, denied, harassed, drugged, dragged, gaslit, badgered, beaten, silenced, shamed, blamed, sidelined, traumatized, threatened, dismissed, derided, and more fritter their time away fearing and fighting each other, who do you think benefits?

The powerful—who want everyone else wiped off the face of the earth unless they can be relegated to servitude with dampened, deadened bodies whose only sanctioned individual and collective purpose is generating more power for those with power.

This is how power works, how the powerful grow increasingly powerful while everyone else grows increasingly desiccated.

Power wants you dead. It wants you on your knees. It wants you when it wants you, and when it doesn’t want you, you’d better run like hell even if you don’t believe in hell.

That’s how powerful power is. Don’t do power’s work by harming others who have no power. That’s not your path to power. You have no path to power, nor do you want one.

Socks Are Hard

The other day, I had my socks on wrong. To be fair, they were complicated socks but not really because how complicated can socks be? I mean, c’mon. I went to my husband to rant about how nothing’s made the way it used to be and even socks don’t work right anymore and what is the world coming to and so on.

He gave me the most perplexed look I’ve ever seen, took a deep breath that somehow felt like a genuine pity hug, and helped me put my socks on the right way as I squirmed like a little kid.

Here’s a hint for those out there who also struggle with their socks: The ankle goes through the hole for the ankle. I know, right? You’re welcome.

These socks are now my favorite socks for so many reasons, chief among them is love. Like Pablo Neruda’s feet, mine, too, are worthy of that woven fire, those sacred socks as magnificent as marriage itself. Love is twice love and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two spouses struggling with socks in summer.

—

The last two sentences are riff on lines from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks.”

Morning Prayer October 1, 2024

As a poet, I am not here to heal men, to do their emotional labor, to unilaterally support them, to coddle, to worship, to grovel, to beg, to fawn, to mollify, to explain, to reason, to plead, to argue, to prove that I am not nothing, that I am worthy, that I am human, that I belong, that I am a poet, too, which does not mean I was put on earth for their pleasure, their crushes, their fantasies, their abuse, their harassment, their drunk dialing, their sidelining, their dismissal, their denigration, their sublimation, their blacklisting, their name-calling, their erasure, and their defamation.

If you come at me, I won’t flinch. Not this time. I’ve survived much worse than you.

I say this to the past, present, and future. I say this for myself and for others so they may come to fully realize what they are and are not here to do as poets and as human beings.

May we all live our lives fully and without using others to fill what’s empty inside us.

Snowy Tree Cricket

Oecanthus fultoni, snowy tree cricket, dominant frequency 2.9 kHz

This species occurs in dooryards and open stands of hardwoods throughout the United States except in the Southeast. Its song is memorable in at least three respects:

1. Especially at low temperatures, the song is melodious and haunting. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, If moonlight could be heard, it would sound just like that.

2. Because its chirps are produced regularly and at rates that are easy to count, the pace of the song can be used to estimate the temperature at which the cricket is singing.

3. Neighboring individuals synchronize their chirps so that a shrub or tree with many individuals throbs with the same rhythm as that of a solitary singer.

Click on the image below to listen to the songs of numerous crickets, including the snowy tree cricket.



Yesterday, I somehow managed to make one OK three-part poem out of what started as a single absolutely hideous poem. It was like fashioning one of those do-it-yourself wire tree sculptures that were all the rage in the ’80s. You had to keep twisting and untwisting until something at least passably treelike emerged, then you had to hang little leaves from the wire branches, which was its own surgical undertaking. I was the only one in my family who had the patience for that kind of thing. It wasn’t patience, though. It was something else: the need to destroy and create, to pare and repair, to make what I saw in my mind a reality in the world, not a poor approximation of my mindplay.

Compulsion was on my side as well, not just with the tree sculpture, but in all aspects of my childhood. I loved picking the tar bubbles in the road that formed on hot summer days and solving complicated puzzle games everyone else gave up on and memorizing impossibly long Simon tonal and light sequences because there’s no stopping, ever, until you absolutely can’t continue—maybe you’re out of tar bubbles and have to wait for the sun to make more or you can’t crack the stupid puzzle’s stupid code or your infuriating working memory deficits won’t allow your brain to hold onto any more BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP BEEPs.

I stuck with that hideous poem yesterday because I’m an adult version of the child I once was: stubborn, driven, perhaps a little dysfunctional. That poem was a pig, and I put some better-than-Walmart earrings on it, dressed it up a little by tearing it apart line by line and reattaching those lines to create a different creature entirely. Half of it lay on the table by the time I was done. Word, words, words. So many words. Sometimes words are too much with us. They’re like metal tree branches that need to be trimmed or tar bubbles that need to be picked or puzzles and toys that need to be put away and silenced.

Oil

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea.

Lake oil. Sand oil. Animal oil. Plant oil.

Oil with a Southern accent. Oil beneath troubled waters.

Oil in another tongue is still oil, oiled and oiling.

Oil on the lips that bite you. I mean me.

I mean father oil, mother oil, oiled mouths, oiled skin, oiled hours, oiled days.

I mean the coffin. I mean the verb. I mean the action.

Run, oil, run. Run from brother oil, from big brother, oiled.

He will draw you up from your dark earth with his skipjack pump and sell you to the highest bidder. A cop. A friend of your father’s. A man. A man.

Or he’ll keep you in a little bottle on an oak shelf until he can refine you, until you brighten, until you slink back and forth in the little jar like the little golden child you were supposed to be, oiled and oiling, body like an O.

O, brother, O brother, hallowed be your O.

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea. But, long before that, in me.

Ableist Culture, Go Fuck Yourself

Folks with mental-health issues are encouraged to create emergency plans for when things go wrong, but scant attention is given to wellness plans that prevent things from going wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, emergency plans are behavior-driven, when we should instead focus on the dozens of easily trackable biomarkers that indicate the presence or absence of metabolic/circadian homeostasis and that precede behavioral issues by days if not weeks.

Why don’t we do that? Because those with mental health issues are routinely dehumanized, discriminated against, abused, maligned, written off, and seen as incapable of attaining health, wellness, and happiness. The system doesn’t even try to help us be fully human and to live full, productive, creative, enriching lives.

We aren’t as far away from locked rooms, back wards, lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, and chemical lobotomies as we think. The medical establishment still treats us like that’s where we belong and that’s what we deserve. (And in the case of electroconvulsive therapy and chemical lobotomies, they’re still happening, just not as barbarically, one could argue.)

So when I resigned from my role at the University of Arizona and passed a vehicle on my way out with a bumper sticker that read Ask Me About My Lobotomy, I was understandably livid. That sticker encapsulates all the sanist* comments I heard while working at UA, from library customers being called meth heads and trash humans to the word crazy routinely being used to describe people and situations to the phrase homeless people being used with derision.

Fuck all of that. UA culture, go fuck yourself.

—

* Sanism is a subset of ableism, so these are more examples of the ableism I witnessed or that was directed at me while employed at UA.

Weird

I’m disappointed that Kamala Harris and those who support her are using the word weird to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance. Why? Because it’s ableist, normative language that’s long been deployed against folks who are different in any way, especially young people who are neurodivergent, who have values that differ from their peers, or who don’t fit neatly into the ready-made boxes that are used to define and limit them.

I turned off an NPR interview earlier today because the person being interviewed kept saying JD Vance was weird each time the interviewer asked legitimate questions about his positions and statements over the years, including inquiries about his sexism and racism. There was so much more to say than labeling him as weird and shutting the conversation down.

We have critical issues to discuss that can’t be captured by the word weird, and making it part of an attack line at once diminishes the issues at hand and encourages voters, especially younger voters, to call anyone they don’t like weird, which isn’t progress and doesn’t encourage people to avoid using language that dehumanizes and others their fellow human beings.

Here

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Do you ever see them?
Every day in every sunrise, every songbird, every sand, every silt.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are you now?
In the light, in the bird, in the sand, in the silt.