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.
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.
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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.
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.
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This post was initially a response to a comment on another post on my Facebook page.
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]
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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.
The last lines of Linda Gregg’s poem “The Girl I Call Alma” read:
Tell me we are one and that it’s the others who scar me, not you.
But the first edition of the book, which I have, has a typo. Those lines read:
Tell me we are one and that it’s the others who scare me, not you.
For years, I thought the poem with the typo was the correct version. It resonates with me because of my trauma history. Being scared. Being scared. And wanting the person who’s scaring me not to be the person who’s scaring me. Father, mother, like the parents in Sharon Olds’ poem “Satan Says.” Like that. And more. And others. And this always-fear like the fear Hannah Gadsby talks about, only it’s not just a fear of rooms full of men. It’s people. People do such harm. They are terrifying. Maybe Jon’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t write poetry because poetry puts me in the world, and that’s hard for him because it’s hard for me. And he doesn’t like it. And I’m not scared of him, at least there’s that. But I’d rather face my fears than hide from the world even if the latter makes him happier or “us” happier, as he says.
Scare. Scar. I’d rather be scared than scarred. Both work. Both versions of the poem work. I’m probably scared and scarred. At least I no longer think I’m a monster or the devil, both of which I was pretty certain of a couple of years ago. Because I am of my father. Of him. Of that. I was always his. And he was a monster, a devil.
I wake from a nightmare into a nightmare. The first is personal. The second is global.
I want to put giant googly eyes on my refrigerator.
Jon and I were talking about what skill we’d use in the apocalypse. I said I could weave garments for people. Jon said he could impregnate people.
What do we see in each other? Ourselves.
You can’t blindly promise people hope. You need to give them reasons to have hope.
Hey, Walz: How’d that “He’s just weird” message work out for you and Harris? It’s ludicrous that you used an ableist childhood insult to frame Trump as nothing more than a schoolyard misfit, as if he didn’t have a massive political apparatus supporting him, one that has more funding than we’ve ever seen, an extremely detailed horrific playbook that will usher in untold suffering and eventually the apocalypse, and that’s steeped in and caters to the worst impulses humans possess. He was never weird. He was a monster, and that message wasn’t the one the American people needed to hear. They needed to understand the atrocities that were underway and on the horizon. I am just saying.
The Delusional States of America.
A mosquito got inside my pants and bit me. No, that’s not a euphemism. A mosquito really got inside my pants and bit me.
Is it wrong to call the firefighters every day to say there’s a snake in my house?
Lately, my Fitbit seems more like a Zoltar fortune-telling machine than a legitimate fitness and activity tracker. It says I’m sleeping soundly when I’m awake and swimming when I’m sitting at my computer and that I’m always ready to do things, which clearly I am not, ever.
I just saw two curve-billed thrashers ushering something along right outside our Arizona room. It was a large rattlesnake.
Correction, see comments: It was a large gopher snake.
Am I in a bad mood? No. I’m in all the bad moods.
So, gum is full of microplastics.
I dreamed hospital campuses were the new cities in our blown-apart country. As everything from democracy to the environment collapsed, people who could provide medical care and those who needed it congregated in these places where humans have lived and died, survived and succumbed, for thousands of years. Those who cared for others would invariably end up needing care. Many died. Sometimes, everyone died when a virus made its way through these improvised communities, turning each building into a mausoleum. This is what heaven is, I thought in the dream. It’s what we do here and now, what we choose to do or avoid doing, together. Yes, these hospitals were heaven in a time that looked like hell. And hell was those who refused to help, to care, to save, to die while saving. Hell was everywhere. It already is.
I woke up in the middle of the night after having a vivid dream. You know what got me back to sleep? Looking at my beautiful Trello boards.
My dog just wrapped herself up in the arms of her stuffed octopus and fell asleep.
Pliny the Elder threw salamanders into a fire to see if they could really extinguish flames. I love myths, but this is what happens when we extend them too far and take them literally. Don’t throw our democracy on the fire like a doomed salamander because your stories about the world have ossified into brittle truths.
Our HOA hired a landscape-maintenance crew to blow dirt away from dirt and onto other dirt.
I dreamed my internal organs were salamanders.
Here’s how much I love organizing my Trello boards: If I were at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) right now, I’d be sad that I wasn’t at home organizing my Trello boards.
Spring is a bird defending its nest in the middle of the night from a threat I can’t see or hear. It’s coyotes howling in the morning, a sound I mistake at first for my empty stomach contracting. It’s learning that a wombat joey named Petrie who was rescued after her mother was killed by a car has also died. Her leg was broken in the crash. She was too little to set it so it could heal. She was euthanized wrapped in a pink blanket that matched her pink body, her toes curled, her back legs crossed. I was pink like that, too, once. I had feet like hers, minus the claws. I was a combination of awe and sleep, dreaming more than waking or thinking or doing. I imagine Petrie staying in my spring forever, or maybe I’ll stay in her fall. Part of me. The part that splits off and remains where my heart beat faster, where I feel more deeply, where I love and yearn for love. Those parts of me peel away all the time, in every season, every state, in every universe if there really is a multiverse we all move through from moment to moment. Or at least in the endless blending of past, present, and future that makes this spring every spring that ever was or will be, which makes everything a process and an absolute all at once, including living and dying.
In my 20s, I worried I’d be bored all my life. In my 50s, I’m delighted when I get to wear my favorite underwear to bed.
March 24, 2025: Spring is two gila woodpeckers who blare like stuttering car horns from still-dormant trees. It’s the body that doesn’t want to wake or move or walk into spring or at least onto the patio, which is where spring wafts in through the screen. It’s the body moving anyway into the garish light, into what opens and what will open. Spring is remembering the first snow in Oklahoma that was heavy enough for making snowmen. Spring is remembering snow in spring.
I took another nap with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Apparently, I’m no longer a person who can read while lying down.
I don’t know why I’m here. This is total bullshit. The refrigerator vibrates like it wants to get out of its body. It’s not the only one. Outside, Gambel’s quail seed the brush with their calls. They’re a caravan of tiny feathered clowns, and I love them. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Spring is full of detritus and dust. I can’t stop coughing. My visions are sand in the eye, motes of awe. There, there, Buddha’s here. God’s here. I know because I feel them in my aching spine. Soon, it will be hot enough to sit around in underwear all day and call it grace, call it ease, call it devotion.
I wake with so many wrinkles in my décolleté that I could use it to grate carrots.
I learned a lot about mindfulness from my hamster, Tater McGee. She would sit up on her back legs for hours with her front paws hanging loosely in front as she stared into a distance far beyond her cage, the room we shared, our home. I swear she was looking into eternity or whatever approaches or approximates eternity. Can a hamster be enlightened? I think so.
La-Z-Boy is getting dangerously close to designing a chair that you’re born in, live in, eat in, shit in, fuck in, die in, and are buried in.
Spring is two gila woodpeckers who blare like stuttering car horns from still-dormant trees. It’s the body that doesn’t want to wake or move or walk into spring or at least onto the patio, which is where spring wafts in through the screen. It’s the body moving anyway into the garish light, into what opens and what will open. Spring is remembering the first snow in Oklahoma that was heavy enough for making snowmen. Spring is remembering snow in spring.
The vultures and the storm arrive together. Below, the dead, waiting. Below, the dry land, waiting. Famine, feast. Drought, water. A blue tractor pushes a single bale of hay across the pasture just before the rain begins to fall.
Time to eat a whole thing of dark chocolate dessert hummus.
Poets enter into themselves to create and enter into poems to be created. — Dana Henry Martin
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Adapted from Thomas Merton’s quote: “The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.”
I dreamed the Target in Southern Utah was bought by Christian Nationalists. They would call their customers all day and all night. Target loves you, an associate would say. Target is protecting you. Target is watching you. Target can see everything you do. Don’t do anything Target wouldn’t want you to do. They even had a makeshift radio station between 103.1 and 104.1 where you could hear Target sending faint messages through the static. Have you visited your Target today? Have you tithed to your Target in the form of a voluntary but strongly encouraged ten-percent upcharge on all your purchases? Do you carry Target in your heart? They called the program waferboarding, a love- and commerce-driven religio-capitalist form of waterboarding. It was inescapable. People couldn’t sleep because of all the calls and the fuzzy radio station blaring from houses 24/7. Whole neighborhoods roared like holy tornadoes. People couldn’t work. They couldn’t eat. They couldn’t even have sex. Poets couldn’t write. Nobody could do anything but shop. We wandered in a daze, half hallucinating, half wishing for a silence we would never hear again. When we tried to escape, we drove and drove and drove but always ended up at Target. Bless us, Target, for we have sinned. We’ll do better, Target. We love you and are not worthy of your love. Forgive us our transactional transgressions. Target, our word. Target, our lord. Target, our savings. Target, our savior.
I misread thoughtful as thoughful and imagine a sea of qualifiers, of despites, of even ifs flowing like blocky lava into my field of vision until I can’t see anything but the letters t-h-o-u-g-h piled on top of each other, shifting, creating friction, even though I know that’s preposterous, even though it’s not what the writer meant, even though my brain is trying to write itself, even though I want to come back to the actual sentence and stop all this lava, all this flow, all this heat, all this darkness, all this uncertainty, even though.
I avoid places that have too many people and not enough birds.
Cue lighthearted meme from 2020: I had a lot of things to do today, but you know what I did instead? I DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. IT WASN’T A VERY NICE NAP BECAUSE I DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. I DIDN’T GET ANYTHING DONE AND I ALSO DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. 03.12 You turn the object into a woman and the woman into an object.
I call this sleep position someone threw me out of a small plane and this is how I landed on my mattress and nothing is broken thanks for asking but I can I get a couple of Tylenol.
Poetry was dead to me yesterday. I couldn’t read it or write it. Every word sounded like a gong struck while someone was holding it. Dead like that. Sound dead. Sight dead. This means I was dead in the world. I refused to believe my skin touched air, exchanged molecules with it, was in conversation with it all day long. Thunk. Thunk. That’s the sound I made when I moved, so I stopped moving. Thunk. Thunk. I stopped speaking. Thunk. Thunk. My body did not tingle here and there the way it usually does to communicate with me in its peculiar buzzing code: around the left side of my heart when I feel love or anticipation or concern bordering on worry, in my forearms and the center of my chest when I read something that astonishes me, around each ankle when I’m scared or suddenly want to run. The language of my body was dead so of course I was dead and everything was dead, even as three coyotes slinked past our house, even as the Gambel’s quail came over and over and over the hill like footsoldiers, even as the singing bowl tried to call me back to the world and my place in it. I am not alive yet, but I’m getting there. The door to life is cracking open. I won’t barge in, but I’ll enter quietly when I can.
Did you hear? Love has been transformed into a supersolid. It’s light, actually, but I misread the headline as love.
Facebook, how would I watch two rescued prairie dogs eat grape tomatoes without you?
My neighbor has two big red onions, a can of soup, and a straw hat on top of his dashboard.
You turn the object into a woman and the woman into an object.
I dreamed I met the two women who were going to save the world. Their names were Maya and Nissa.
Woke to rain here in the Sonoran desert and birdsong from curve-billed thrashers and Northern cardinals. The pip of a Costa’s hummingbird sounds like water dripping on metal from a distance. Now the water-slick trunks and branches darken. Now clouds muffle the sky like batting. Now the trill of a bird whose song I don’t know plays on repeat. You can know something without knowing its name. You can. In the senses, in the body, in the heart. Now more rain. Good morning.
With my eyes, I have tasted the world’s first ambers.
Good Trouble
I don’t like to eat my cookies when anyone’s in the room with me. I like to eat them alone.
Without horse how can you imagine running like a horse? Without shadow how you can imagine falling like a shadow? And so forth and so forth until you’ve named all the things you can name because they exist and you exist through them and as them though you are not them even if you are a little them. Without horse give yourself a name. Without shadow give yourself a name. What do you fall on, darken? What do you run with and on, and to and why? Why do you run I mean? Why do you run? Toward or away.
I love the way branch shadows fall across the body of a wild horse, making the tree part horse and the horse part tree. And, somehow, making me at least part love that brambles the world or is brambled by it or both, back and forth, for as long as there are horses and trees and trees and horses so I can imagine myself in those terms.
Once, my house was almost a library. Then, I donated all my books and started going to the library. Now, I want my house to be a library. Also, I want to keep going to the library.
𝐶𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑙𝑢𝑚 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑎 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠. That’s terrible Latin for “My cookies as a whole are divided into three parts,” a play on Caesar’s quote 𝐺𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑎 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑎 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠. What I mean is, I’m eating no-bake cookies for the next three days. Technically, I started a little early by having some yesterday evening, but the three-day undertaking officially starts today. Yesterday was kind of a pre-event event like the ones literary conferences have.
I have some spines for sale if anyone needs one. They make great gifts.
I accidentally ordered six cases of Bubly water instead of six cans. Between that and the coconut water, almond milk, Muscle Milk, Cherry Coke Zero, and Jon’s kombucha and diet Mountain Dew, our entire grocery order for the week is almost all liquids. And no-bake cookies. Plus, the debit card got locked while Jon was picking up the groceries. He was trying to get cash for the poetry reading we’re headed to so we could buy the reader’s book. The machine took the card and wouldn’t return it. He came through the door announcing: I’ve worked out my anger about this, and I’m in control of my emotions, just so you know. Then he showed me all the beverages and told me the debit-card story. He’s trying. He is. I’m eating a bunch of cookies, some of which taste like deodorant. Good thing I have a selection of beverages to wash down whatever it is I’m eating.
I keep reading the MedPage Today headline Smartphones Assess Cognition as Smart-Ass Cognition and thinking it’s a condition I suffer from.
I dreamed I was invited to a party and was all like, “Wait. Let me get my infographics!”
I dreamed I was the handle on a mug.
In the “Oh Look a Strawberry” meme, the United States is currently the fourth strawberry. We’ll be lucky if we can get back to being the third strawberry at this point. First strawberry? Forget it. Second? A long shot.
I had a friend who was sexually attracted to a mannequin. He’d walk over to the window where it was displayed and look at it during his lunch break. He took me once to show me what the deal was. I didn’t get it. The mannequin had no head. He had a wife with a head. Was the head the problem? He liked its breasts, the way they looked in sheer clothing. Its nipples, the way they defied gravity. He liked its white skin, its arms with no hands. His wife had hands. A head and hands. Skin with color and texture. He never went inside and looked at the mannequin’s ass. I would have if I’d been into it. You always have to look at the ass. Everyone knows that, even if it’s a mannequin. Why did I just think of this? Of all things.
We do not want this on their tongues any more than we want it in their hearts.
Not a good day for democracy, poetry, or marriage.
My feet are bleeding all over. I used a compounded cream on them that was apparently meant only for my heels. My heels are also bleeding, though, so yeah. This pain pairs well with the loss of our democracy. On fleek, as they say, or as I think they say. I have no idea how to slang anymore. Or walk. Or American.
Fill my bones with henbane seeds.
And the award for most interesting way to die goes to the man whose brain was turned to glass through high-temperature vitrification during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It’s the only case like it in the world. I’ll include a link in the comments. Have at this, poets. This is premium subject matter.
I dreamed my pillows were clouds, and they ate me, but in a good way.
I dreamed I was lying in bed dreaming that I was lying in bed dreaming that I was lying in bed dreaming. This went on and on until I woke up. Somewhere, I am still dreaming this nested dream of dreaming.
I dreamed Donald Trump was sitting in a sandbox using a play shovel to dig up rare-earth elements. They’re here, they’re here, he kept saying while all the children backed farther and farther from him in a perfect expanding circle, like rings pushing away from Saturn, that oversized gassy giant with its 146 clueless moons, some of which have names like Hesgeth, Kennedy, Musk, and Vance. Soon, Trump and his little moons were all alone. He had torn up the entire playground and found nothing. And there was nobody other than the little moons and one Russian planet called Uranus left to faux worship him. Everyone else had fled. It was not enough. Trump needed more attention. Trump always needs more. My kingdom for attention, he wailed, then drove an armored Tesla full of his little moons right off his flat earth.
Windy day. Outdoor restaurant. Downtown Tucson. Wind-driven menu turned weapon, its laminated edge a blade headed straight for my neck. I ducked and was unscathed. But I could have been done in by the lousiest of all texts, the uninspired casual dining menu. Decapitate me with John Donne, with Gertrude Stein, with Anne Sexton, with Jack Gilbert. Anything but Ben’s Handhelds.*
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* That’s literally the name of one of the restaurant’s menus, which is actually pretty entertaining.
Zelensky’s not the one in that room who’s unsuited.
I can’t see the entire landscape in American poetry. I just can’t. Its lowlands, its highlands, its rivers and plains. Its coves and quicksands. It would help if I could, if I had more information than what I see from my position and in my experience. Without that broader perspective, I’m liable to either over- or underestimate how much generosity, inclusion, and kindness there is in poetry. And having a good sense of that matters as I navigate poetry and try to find my community or communities.
He’s the demon Mara. Time to touch the Earth.
I would go all the way straight for Zelensky. This is not the time to say that, but I’m saying it. (Jon knows. It’s fine. He has Olivia Munn.)
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.
To make matters worse, Ville-Évrard was in the occupied zone, which meant that the patients had insufficient rations. Stephen Barber points out that “in each of the final two years of Nazi Occupation, nearly half of the asylum’s inmates died” from starvation and related complications. Sylvère Lotringer explains that more generally that there were not many other treatments available at the time, and no psychiatric pharmaceuticals available so psychiatrists simply let their patients waste away in overpopulated psychiatric units. The incurable ones were referred to as “asylum rot.“
—
I could have been asylum rot if I’d lived in a different era. I could become asylum rot if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets his way with his health camps.
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.
What if waking is just what we do because we need to survive and sleeping (and similar states) are where we actually live? I’m serious about this. We may have started out as sleeping organisms and evolved into wakefulness for practical reasons: to evade predators, to mate, to eat seeds and spread them around so whole forests could shoot up around us.
What if wakefulness is a form of survival and reconnaissance, where we gather what we need, including sensory information, memories, and emotional experiences that we can distill when we’re not awake. How can we say sleeping isn’t the ultimate reality, or at least the richest one we have access to as human beings?
I’ve thought something like this for a long time. Hypotheses jostle in my head like sugar-plums, one of which is related to states like mania and is based on my lived experience. (I think extreme shifts in mood, energy, and intellect can cause or be caused by an entanglement of sleeping and waking states, especially in folks who already have more semi-permeable membranes between the two.)
Carl Jung was right about the importance of dreams and the states they allow us to enter, including those that both extend the self and extend beyond the self. The architecture of my life draws largely on my dreams: what I learn in them, what I understand through them, and how I become and become again through them. Of course, dreaming necessitates sleeping. The closest waking approximation would be deep meditation with periods of theta- and even delta-wave activity. Those are also important states. Unfortunately, they’re the equivalent of fly-over states for many of us in the United States, who are driven away from them because our culture forces us into the quasi-democratic late-stage capitalist framework turned fascist oligarchical business government regime that demands we be “on” all the time, hence we’re routinely shifted into gamma-wave riddled states of mind.
I’m in that state of mind right now, hence that last jam-packed, convoluted fifty-two-word sentence. My theta and delta waves are quaking in fear right now. They don’t know if I’ll ever come back to them. I will, you two. I will. Here’s my commitment to them and to myself: Today, I will collect what I need for the worlds I will inhabit in my dreams tonight. I mean, I’ll do this purposefully and consciously as part of a self-experiment in which I flip the script on what being awake and being asleep mean to me and what roles they play in my life. Then I will live in deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep for eight hours or so before I wake to collect more for tomorrow night. Sleep, I’m out here doing what you need me to do. See you soon.
Dana Henry Martin 