We have been carefully guarded by kind and zealous instructors from every averse wind of thought and every taint of evil to be met in a world of action just beyond us. Now our hands are unclasped; sorrowfully we separate to go our different ways, to live the lives to which we shall be called, no longer as a class, but as individuals. — Merry Mignon Thonton
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From my mother’s high-school valedictory speech given in Headrick, Oklahoma, in 1950, when she was sixteen years old
Welcome to this episode of My Stomach Hates Me. I’ve eaten nothing, taken no supplements, done absolutely nothing at all today other than breathe and walk and sit and put pants on, but stomach here has decided to glurb around inside me like the noisy, mischievous little monster with smelly feet in the children’s book Adopt a Glurb.
Adopt this Glurb: my stomach. Trade me for one of y’all’s. Any takers? Any givers? Anyone? Anyone?
Don’t miss out on this chance to have your very own Glurb.
Meanwhile, my husband is in the kitchen eating more of the rancid meat from the other day, and his stomach couldn’t care less. His reasoning? It’s expensive, and he doesn’t want to waste it.
Maybe he’ll trade me. This seems like one of those for better or worse situations: worse being my stomach, better being his.
Have you ever tried to swallow a pill but you have to cough suddenly at the same time and you end up choking on the pill and the water and then sort of cough-vomiting all over your new refrigerator and then you get a bronchial cough for the rest of the night that feels like aspiration pneumonia setting in but you think it’s just irritation from all the choking and cough-vomiting so you drink a bunch of zero sugar soda that the new refrigerator is keeping really cold oh so cold but it’s not helping with the cough so now you’re just wired and tired and mad at everything, especially your poems and somehow also the refrigerator, which didn’t even do anything? Me, neither.
I just renewed my Ancestry subscription, and the first new piece of information about my father and his brother is that they performed in blackface in a show called the “Red Shirt Minstrel” in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, November 12, 1946, directed by Maybelle Conger. There are photos. There is a list of “character” names that includes some of my father’s favorite racial slurs. He would have been seventeen years old. He and his brother are listed as “Gentlemen of the Chorus.” I am screaming. I can’t stop screaming. He is in the photos. I shared a fraction of the image in the comments. I couldn’t bear to share the actual photos of the event.
I’m not going to tell you how my arms are tingling and why, how a patch on the back of my head is tingling, too. It was the dream. The dream would have been enough. But it was also the nightmare. I won’t let the dream become words yet. I won’t let the nightmare become words yet. They are both doing their work inside my body as crickets or something like crickets sing outside my windows in the Southern Utah desert.
The crickets sing on the other side of a world taken by humans, wrecked by humans, a brackish world like parts of Lake Texoma where nobody ever drowns except those who do.
In the dream, a girl felt pure love and lived for the first time. The girl wasn’t me. She was me. In the nightmare, children are gathered around my dog Fifi at my fifth birthday party. Ruthie is there. Her brother. Sara. Lola. Corey. I am there holding a stuffed bird who sings “Fly Me to the Moon.” I am dancing with the bird, spinning in circles. Sara is petting Fifi. She looks bored or scared or both. We all do. Fifi turns into my father. He’s doing karaoke. He’s drunk, gaze untethered above his mouth and nose. He’s looking down at us, on us, at whoever’s holding the camera. My party father. My gilded father. I want us kids to scatter like balls on a pool table. I want us to glide across the table and fall into pockets where we can hide. We don’t. We’re stuck, frozen. I wake up, leaving the other children there. I wake up tingling.
My nightmare is three photos from three different times. The birthday party. The bird. My father. The last one was taken long before I was born. It was another party, different children. Maybe no children. I’ll check the photos when it’s light out, when the crickets are quiet and the world has been returned to the living. These are the dead hours. They are for and of the dead. Too many dead. Too much unnatural death. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. Children in Gaza. My country ’tis not of me. Saccharin land of incivility. False freedom blings.
Content warning. I dreamed the leader I call Rumprot invented something called IUEDs, which stands for intrauterine explosive devices. He was booby trapping us, and he had a monstrous way of both placing and checking for these devices, which he passed off as absolutely necessary for national security and which he joked was like enacting a reverse breach birth. When he tried to check me for an IUED, I startled from the dream with an abrupt, layered utterance like a baby grand piano dropped from a penthouse the moment it hits the pavement. My strings are taut. They’re still vibrating. Good morning.
In this collection you are saying something that needs to be said and you are saying it in language that cannot be ignored or hidden from. The truth told with a very sharp knife. Yet part of this truth is that women allow this shit to go on. Do we not allow men to have the power you describe? It seems to me that as you rip men a new one—the same needs to happen to women. What in the hell are we doing—why do we let our power go? Without this emotional component the collection walks close to whining (in my opinion) which always occurs from a place of weakness. Yet this collection would seem to be aiming at a recognition of the power imbalance between men and women and the way men frequently force their will on us—and then a turn toward a new balance. But the only way that will happen is if women acknowledge their complicity in the imbalance.
The publisher of one of my collections, which dealt with CSA, including my own experiences and those of my best friend when I was young, made the comment above about it in 2011 after soliciting the work from me. I never should have allowed them to proceed with publishing the collection. I just came across the comment again while searching for something else in my email. That publisher was a woman, and it wasn’t Juliet Cook or Margaret Bashaar. It speaks to myriad ways in which some women and female-bodied poets who believe they’re empowering themselves and others can be misguided and do harm. It’s not just men in poetry who harm others and the community as a whole.
Through her lens, my work about CSA walked close to whining and needed to discuss power dynamics that don’t apply to children who are being harmed, including dynamics forced into the strict binary of male and female, one that’s oppositional, not dialectical. The speaker and others who inhabit the poems aren’t even male or female. That isn’t called out ever. As a nonbinary person (who was publicly identifying as trans at the time), it’s not how I envisioned them.*
And this was from someone who wanted to publish and ultimately did publish my collection. Again, I should have yanked it. She ended up quietly removing the collection at some point without telling me or preserving the files in any way. It was a digital collection with custom artwork. I would have liked to have had it, even just for myself. I believe I know why that happened. In any case, it was another form of erasure of me and my work.
Also, to those who say things like, Your work just isn’t for everyone, and that’s OK, please see that this assessment isn’t about the work, nor was that the case with the poet I just had the dreadful, unwanted interactions with. It’s fine for work to not be right for someone. These kinds of interactions go deeper than that, so please quit uncoupling literary assessment (which isn’t even what this kind of thing is) from personal attacks and assessments that go far afield of the work.
* The word nonbinary wasn’t yet in use, and trans felt like a better fit than saying I was bisexual. I knew gender was involved, not just sexuality, and the binary nature of the word bisexual wasn’t a good fit for me anymore, either. I knew both gender and sexuality were on a continuum. I was trying to find the language for my place on those continua as language was evolving to be more inclusive and less oppositional. Also, people can move around on these continua over the course of their lives. For instance, I’m asexual at this point, which used to be the last letter in LGBTQIA+, though it has largely been truncated away, along with the interior T, which has disappeared for political reasons. I never would have identified as asexual in my 20s or 30s. But bodies change, minds change, and age changes, which changes a lot of things about body and mind—in my case sexuality, hence my move to the term queer, which covers the waterfront where gender and sexuality are concerned. More specifically, thanks to a friend, I’ve started using the term neuroqueer because it’s not only inclusive of all my forms of neuroatypicality, it also suggests a relationship between my neuroatypicality and my sexuality and gender. For me, that relationship is real and meaningful.
The one thing I agree with in this publisher’s assessment is that I should not have allowed her to frame my work the way she did. It was a great publishing company. I didn’t think I’d ever get an opportunity like that again. I sold myself, my work, and my values, and I fawned at her the way I learned to in order to survival the unthinkable as a child. That will never happen again. I’d rather live in one of DT’s camps than live a life that’s bought and sold, one in which I’ve been bought and sold.
I will add this one last thought: I recognize that some of the same forces that shaped me in my life may have shaped this publisher in her life. I realize she’s been through it, probably for decades now, the way women, those who are female-bodied, and other oppressed and marginalized groups have been and continue to go through it. But she was still wrong in this instance. She foisted a huge thing on me and my work. Anyone can be misguided. I understand that more when someone isn’t coming from a place of completely (or at least largely) unexamined privilege. That means I do have empathy for her. I still shouldn’t have published with her.
A poet asked to see my manuscript Crude after praising my writing and telling me I should write a whole collection about my family history. (That’s exactly what Crude is.) After I sent it to them, they asked me if I wanted feedback on the collection. I told them I did not.
But they couldn’t resist giving me feedback they knew I didn’t want. Today, I received an email with the subject line felt like I had to give SOME kind of a response. They led by saying they were almost sorry they asked to read Crude. They then infantalized me using an image from the collection, characterizing me as a little girl who’s always ready for a fight, suggested I rewrite the collection as poetry alternating with prose, said I should add a poem about my father’s death, provided instruction about where to put that poem in the collection, and, as a capper, shared a poem they wrote based on my life and experience, titled “Oklahoma Crude,” I guess to show me how it’s done, since I apparently don’t know how it’s done.
Some of you really don’t see what you’re doing, do you? How you’re coming across? What impulses you can’t contain and how much you’re reacting to your own anima, not the women and female-bodied folks around you, who you confuse for that anima. You really think we’re just super upset out of nowhere all the time for no discernible reason, which is proof we are like children, not adults, not fully grown women or female-bodied humans. To you who see us this way, we are, as this poet said in their email, Silvia Plath [sic] drowning in Lake Texhoma [sic]. *
No we aren’t. We aren’t any of that. I’m here as a witness and as a testament to the fact that you have us all wrong and always have and always will. As long as there is past and future, you will have gotten and will continue to get us wrong.
We deal with this shit from you all the time. All the freaking time. We are tired. I am tired.
So that’s the other part of how my day is going. The first part is the extermination order directed at those who are unhoused, have mental-health issues, and have substance-abuse issues. I mean the executive order. My bad. Incarcination and institutionalization aren’t extermination. At least not yet.
Here’s the thing: You don’t get to angle to move a conversation from a public to a private space using the false pretense of wanting to read my poetry collection, use that privacy to say things that are inappropriate, then claim that private space is privileged and protected and that what you say within it can’t be called out or shared. That’s not how things work. You certainly don’t get to frame me as doing something even worse to you than what you did to me or pressure me to remove your name from my assessment and commentary about what you did. And I didn’t share what you did with friends. I shared it with our mutual writing and poetry community because it’s important for people to know what men like you are doing within that community. They can make up their own minds about you, as I have.
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* It’s Sylvia and Texoma.
From the ACLU. This is appalling. Link in comments: President Trump signed an executive order yesterday directing states to criminalize unhoused people and institutionalize people with mental health disabilities and substance use disorder.
The order, titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on American Streets,” directs the Justice Department to expand indefinite forced treatment for people with mental health disabilities or substance use disorder, and those living on the street who “cannot care for themselves.” The order also purports to eliminate federal funding for evidence-based programs, like harm reduction and housing first, that save lives, and directs federal funds toward cities and states that criminalize substance use disorder, punish people for sleeping outdoors, or enforce other laws targeting unhoused people.
The order also calls for sweeping federal data collection on unhoused people and those with mental health disabilities, raising serious concerns about surveillance, privacy, and how such data could be used to justify further criminalization. Instead of funding services or support, the administration is prioritizing profiling and control.
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Headlines about the executive order and the name of the order itself are misleading. It’s going after those with mental-health issues AND those who are unhoused, not just those who are unhoused and also have mental-health issues. Both scenarios are noxious, but the latter is even more noxious. The EO encourages the involuntary commitment of “individuals with mental illness who pose risks to themselves or the public” and does not specify a time frame for such commitment, only that it be “appropriate periods of time.” It also provides funds for state and local governments to implement this plan, meaning round up folks with mental-health issues. All of this should terrify you, enrage you, and be distilled as outrage that, when intersected with love, allows you to act.
The EO also requires those receiving funding to “share such data with law enforcement authorities in circumstances permitted by law and to use the collected health data to provide appropriate medical care to individuals with mental health diagnoses.” In other words, a registry of those with mental-health issues that must be created at the local and state level and shared with the federal government.
This is a criminal state criminalizing those harmed by the criminal state.
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The executive order applies in part to those with mental-health issues who are deemed unable to care for themselves. You want to know one of the things that makes folks with mental-health issues unable to care for themselves? Overmedication, especially with high-dose neuroleptics or polypharmacology that leaves folks living inside clouded, plodding bodies and minds.
This approach to treatment is exactly what the EO will reward local and state entities for foisting on people with lived mental-health experience. It will create a cycle that justifies continued institutionalization for the rest of people’s lives. This kind of overmedication is sometimes called chemical restraint. It’s basically moving the architecture of control and coercion inside the patient rather than having it surround the patient within a facility.
This EO wants both: chemical control and coercion, as well as external control and coercion. Look who will benefit from this dual approach. It’s not those living with mental-health issues. It’s not their families. It’s not their loved ones. It’s not our communities. It’s not our institutions. It’s not our arts. It’s not our places of worship. It’s not our spiritual centers.
It’s business, big business. We are what’s being manipulated, destroyed, within big business. And, oddly, within a government that’s getting bigger and bigger under this newfangled Republican rule. Police states are always big. They have to be.
It rained ash on and around our home last night. I haven’t experienced anything like that since 2011 in Walla Walla, Washington, when a flaming tumbleweed breached a controlled burn line and set a field, then more than just the field, ablaze. Even then, the ash-rain never reached our home. We just ended up in it one day when we went walking in a nearby town. Ash-rain isn’t real rain—of course not—we’re in a drought. It’s just rain in the sense of raining down, the way water does but isn’t.
The smoke is affecting wildlife, including a juvenile Bullock’s oriole who hit a clerestory window this morning on the north side of our house, despite our following the method David Sibley uses at his home for protecting birds from window strikes. We have custom screens on all the large windows to protect the birds, but we draw vertical lines every four inches on the outside of the clerestory windows with a Sharpie. (As of this writing, those lines are now two inches apart.) This allows birds to see the windows and thereby realize they aren’t passable. They also interpret the vertical lines as branches, so they tend to steer clear of them. This method works for us, or at least it did until this morning when the young oriole, perhaps disoriented or otherwise weakened from the smoke, tried to fly between two of the Sharpie lines.
It was a hard hit. We heard it throughout the house. We have a protocol we follow when wildlife is in distress. Within minutes, the nearest wildlife rescue had been called, the bird had been placed in a special container we use for transport, and I was on my way to Wild Friends, a subset of Best Friends, over in Kanab, Utah, so the bird could get medication to prevent brain swelling and gabapentin for pain management—that is, if they survived the eighty-minute drive.
I would never drive to Kanab, especially not this time of year, because the only roads there and back are festooned with wildlife who rest on the asphalt, cross the asphalt, fly over the asphalt, and otherwise end up in harm’s way with every passing vehicle. Right now, many of these critters are young, or littles, as I call them. They’ve never seen cars before and don’t know the danger they pose. Juvenile birds don’t fly well and haven’t learned to stay above the cars. Baby squirrels think the roadways, which are cool in the morning, are a great place to hang out and socialize. The roads to Kanab are human intrusions into lands that belong to critters. We don’t belong there. I didn’t belong there. But I knew the oriole, who lives in my yard and fledged recently, would die without help. So I took the risk and drove carefully and stopped when animals were sitting in the road and slowed down and veered this way and that as needed and even slowed nearly to a crawl at one point with my hazard lights on because there were too many animals for higher rates of speed to be safe.
I nearly hit half a dozen animals. I navigated around, beside, and under another hundred or so. Then, right where Arizona turns back into Utah and the speed limit jumps from 25 miles per hour to 45 miles per hour, I saw what I thought was a rock squirrel sitting up in the middle of the oncoming lane. I slowed but couldn’t stop because the guy in the truck behind me was following me too closely. As I approached, I assessed the situation. The squirrel didn’t move. I thought I could continue, slowly, in my lane, and everything would be OK. It wasn’t. The squirrel darted in front of my car just as I passed, and just in time to be hit by both my front and back left tires. I heard it. I felt it.
I stopped to collect the squirrel and take them to Wild Friends with me if there were signs of life. There weren’t. And it wasn’t a rock squirrel. It was a stoat, a kit at that. Not even an adult. I killed a tiny, beautiful stoat, one of my favorite animals on Earth, whom I’ve never seen in the wild until today, when one was lying in the road where I hit them.
I should say lying in the road lifeless. The kit was dead. Body trauma, head trauma. I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling through the Dark,” only this was daytime, and it was a stoat, not a deer, and I’m the one who hit them, not just the one who came across the body. I also thought about how every being that lives causes other living beings to die. Today, that fact was laid bare. I, a living being, helped an oriole live, but in doing so, I caused a stoat to die.
I moved the stoat off the road so ravens and vultures wouldn’t end up getting hit while trying to feed on the body and so people wouldn’t swerve trying to avoid ravens and vultures because to swerve might make more dead, as Stafford says. I also didn’t want the stoat’s body to be hit over and over again. That sort of thing makes me sad.
I apologized to the kit and said a small prayer before returning to the oriole, who needed to get to the rescue for treatment.
About eleven minutes from the rescue, the oriole roused and wanted nothing to do with being inside a box inside a car with me. It was a good sign. The rescue staff said the bird was old enough to get a full dose of all their medicines and that, based on how they were acting, they would most likely make a full recovery. I said Jon and I could come back for the bird and release them at our house. Wild Friends likes to make sure that happens whenever possible. I’ve known that bird since they fledged. I know their whole family. The wildfire here may make coming back impossible, which I understand. Fresh air is important, and we don’t have that right now. But I hope they recover and can come home.
May the fire stop burning. May the smoke clear. May ash-rain be replaced with real rain. May the oriole survive and come home to Toquerville. May the stoat rest in peace. May love restore what we fear we’ve lost forever in our lands, our hearts, and our minds.
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The birds who sound like they’re laughing at funny jokes are actually Western kingbirds, not Bullock’s orioles. My bad for providing inaccurate information about that in earlier posts. Bullock’s orioles sound kind of like they’re saying, Oh, no! I dropped all my marbles or Look, my marbles! Right here. They are here, here, here.
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The drive back from Kanab, Utah, through Arizona after dropping off the injured juvenile Bullock’s oriole and hitting a stoat. Highway 237. Outside Pink Coral Sand Dunes, July 11, 2025.
[Add Images]
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I found out there’s another way to get to the wildlife rescue in Kanab, one that doesn’t require driving through the area that’s so densely populated with wildlife. I didn’t know about the other way. I should have known. Friday would have gone very differently. I wouldn’t have hit and killed the stoat. I also found out that another wildlife rescue has opened in Enoch, which is much closer to my home. I don’t know if they take small birds or if they have the medicines needed after a window strike, but I’ll call them and find out tomorrow. It’s hard to be the reason another living being is no longer living.
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Some deaths hit me hard. Andrea Gibson’s is one of them. I didn’t know Andrea, but I knew their work and their heart and the spaces they created for others in this world. I haven’t really moved since I learned Andrea died. I want the world to be kinder than it is, as kind as Andrea was. My heart is with all living beings and the Earth we share, which means it’s with Andrea, who is everywhere now.
In the morning, I’m bringing the Bullock’s oriole home from the wildlife rescue so she can join her family and the other orioles who are summering along our creek. Jon is coming with me. We’re taking the long way, the one that avoids the most sensitive wildlife habitats between our home and Kanab, Utah.
The oriole made a full recovery thanks to the rehabilitators who cared for her. She’s enough to get me moving again. Life is motion. Love is motion. Everything is motion.
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We just got back from the wildlife rescue in Kanab and released the Bullock’s oriole. She flew right into the tree where her family has been hanging out. It might be the tree she was born in. The other orioles were in that tree yesterday evening singing their comical tune as the sun set. Orioles always sound like they’re recounting funny stories to one another, then laughing hysterically. It feels like they’re making fun of humans, which is fine by me.
The orioles didn’t know they’d soon be reunited with the juvenile female they thought they’d lost. They didn’t know she’d return at all. Five days is a long time to be gone and then appear again seemingly out of nowhere. She’ll never be able to explain what happened, and they wouldn’t believe her if she could.
When we got close to the tree and she could hear the other birds, the oriole started to dart around in her enclosure, eager to fly free. Then she did. All I saw were her spread tail feathers as she flew away, her body a noisy propeller trilling through the air.
I’m actually not certain the oriole is female or a juvenile. That’s what the rescue believes, but it’s difficult to tell immature males, immature females, and mature females apart. She’s duller than I would expect a mature female to be, and she lacks the eyeliner I would expect to see on an immature male. There’s no hint of black on her throat, which immature males can have, though probably not birds as young as I believe she is. She had the same clumsy flying behavior I’d seen the fledgling orioles, presumably her and her littermates, exhibiting a few days earlier. Taking all these factors into account, a juvenile female is also my best guess.
Her age matters because she needs to get back to learning how to be a bird and gain as much experience as possible before migration this fall. Five days is a lot of time to lose when you’re new to the world and need to get everything figured out pretty quickly in order to survive. She also needs to decompress from the stressful experience she’s had. I hope she has the time she needs to recover, learn, grow, and thrive.
We have bird-collision film approved by the American Bird Conservancy on order for our clerestory windows since the lines we drew on them didn’t prevent this strike. In the meantime, we’ve covered each window with a thick layer of soapy film. We can’t really see out of them, but that’s fine. I will wrap my entire house in blankets if it keeps birds like this oriole from being injured or dying.
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Two Bullock’s orioles, a male and a female, just landed in the shrub in front of my window. I think the female is the one I took to the wildlife rescue for treatment after a window strike and later released here at our home, which is also her home. If you felt the ground shake a little wherever you are, it was from my heart exploding with love and joy. The epicenter of that seismic activity was Toquerville, Utah, latitude 37.2310016, longitude -113.2756992.
Dana Henry Martin 