Arizona highways are so bad that several screws on our desk vibrated all the way out and feathers wriggled through our sofa cushions. We brought an antique piece back with us that partially turned to sawdust.

Facebook just showed me an ad that says I can become a certified sound healer in just fourteen days. My first thought was: Aren’t poets sound healers? My second thought was: Doesn’t it take several decades to become skilled in the art of sound healing through poetry? My third and final thought was: YOU MEAN I COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING IN FOURTEEN DAYS AND POETRY WASN’T EVEN NECESSARY?

The thing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatening to bar scientists at the National Institutes of Health from publishing in leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet is that it totally sucks. That’s it. That’s the post. It totally sucks.

Because someone thought this, I should also think this is not a thought I think I’ve ever thought.

Tonight, I stood beneath seven common nighthawks as they caught insects midair. I’ve never seen so many at once. They were flying so low they barely cleared my head. One of them called rhythmically, as if they had an invisible tempo they had to follow and he was in charge of keeping time. A bat fluttered between them for a bit like a soloist who didn’t quite know her part. What was my part? None. I watched them because I wanted to. I did not write myself into their world or write them into mine.

I like a lot of birds together but not a lot of frogs together. I think it comes down to texture. Not the way they feel but the way they look like they feel.

With words, we make and unmake the world.

Others can debate whether poetry is therapeutic until the cows come home. I have no need. My cows came home a long time ago. They’re poems, and they don’t charge me for spending time in their pastures. More cowbell, please.

Dear moon, dear man sprawled across my bed. I wake to you and your intrusion. Now you’re gone like you never happened. I mistook you for light, not your cold body that set me spinning. I’m not a tide rising to meet you. But of course I am. Tonight, I’ll pull the shades and sleep in the dark, the near dark, while bright predators dangle in the sky.

She who typos first thing in the morning will typo all day long.

Early morning, the moon spills across my bed like it’s too tired to get under the covers after staying out all night.

I exist in two states: having just peed and having to pee.

I’m too young to be this age.

This is the first time I’ve heard my neighbor laugh since her daughter died.

My dog threw up in my hands last night. It was everything she’d eaten since her dental cleaning. If her system is still shut down this morning, we’re heading to the vet. She’s in my arms right now. We’re listening to some bird who doesn’t quite know how to sing.

One thing I dislike is a fawning AI. You’re right. I was bad. Give me another chance. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. Where is this coming from? Who taught AI to interact like this? Oh, right. Us. We did.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

Creative writing entails taking risks. That’s hard. Attacking people doesn’t. That’s easy.

I didn’t read that poem. That poem took me inside it. It became my habitat. I dwelled in it as it dwelled in me. Old ghosts, those trees, a haunting, that land. I was reading the poem, then I was in it, around it. I’m still there, floating in its waters, drinking in its waters, face to the sun, belly to the sun, toes to the sun. I almost can’t see the world I actually live in. I see it through this other cross-eyed world. World of the lost, world of thorns, world of watery devils coming closer with every ripple.

—

A response to the poem “Down in the Gully,” by Dominic Leading Fox.

Good morning. The laccolith is purple right now, the reddish-purple I always imagined the majestic purple mountains being when singing “America the Beautiful” as a child. It was hard to work that out when I was young and didn’t have a nuanced understanding of color. How could mountains be purple? It took some time to see tints and shades and anything beyond the bright colors foisted on kids in books and toys and clothing. Everything that wasn’t bright seemed to be sepia-toned, almost, including my father’s El Camero, whiskey, and mountains, which I rarely saw anyway outside the Arbuckles, since we lived in Oklahoma. But yes, indeed, mountains can be any of the colors we loosely describe as purple, namely at dawn and dusk. My laccolith is comprised of fifty-six mountains. Think about that. Fifty-six mountains purpling all at once in the blush of a new day. Tell me you could look away.

Looks like I’m graduating to shoes with a big-ass toebox.

Al-Anon needs a counterpart called AI-Anon for those who have folks in their lives with an artificial-intelligence problem.

Thanks to Chansonette Buck, I’m putting shallow dishes of water around the house for our resident spiders so they don’t get dehydrated.

One bloom at a time, two lesser goldfinches tear up the desert marigolds outside my bedroom window. They methodically toss petals onto the gravel and sandstone below like unnecessary thoughts, throw-aways. It’s safe here. No cats. No snakes. No roadrunners. Not in our yard, at least, which nestles a great surrounding wildness that seems to have no end.

The mess of spring doesn’t just happen. The wind makes it. Plants make it. Animals make it. Every living thing makes it. Things grow, fall, rot, renew. That last part is nearly invisible, but the evidence is all around in that sand, that leaf, that wing, even in you, wherever you are. Your very existence is renewal.

One of the goldfinches flies to the front of the house. The other bobs on a trio of clutched stems and sings. We are all the bird that flies, the bird that sings, the bird that feeds.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

When I was young, I didn’t think Billy Idol was hot, which is how I know I’m not entirely heterosexual.

Every time I want to love nobody, I end up loving everybody.

What music did I listen to when I was processing difficult emotions as a teenager? Samuel Barber, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Gustav Holst, Carl Orff, Led Zeppelin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Simon and Garfunkel, and Tears for Fears.

I ache for this place as if I weren’t in it.

I want to tell the rat who lives in my rock wall that he’s safe. But the snakes, I think. But the hawks and roadrunners. But the neighbor’s pesticides. But the other neighbor’s cats. The rat wants to tell me I’m safe. But the memories, he thinks. But the body. But the mind. But the others. So we do not speak. We watch each other making a home out of nothing, in a crevice, in a house, each of us building a little future, a place with a scoop of light, a dollop of air, so we can sleep and wake and build a little more, a little more, until a mouth envenomates the memory, until a wing casts shadows on the body, until poison enters the mind, until the cats or the others get hungry and become a single thing that eats.