Writing

Like Him

Like father, like daughter is the most terrifying thing anyone could say to me. I was raised as a daughter. I was raised as his. Whenever someone catches me doing something he would do, or when I see those similarities myself, I feel like the floor of my life is dropping out from beneath me and I have to hope I’ll keep spinning until there’s a floor to stand on again. I used to say my biggest fear wasn’t death, it was living with my father for eternity. Even worse would be living as him for eternity. Even a second is too long to move through the world the way he did.

For Kelly

My friend never lost her way with nature. Months before her death, Stellar’s jays landed on her arms when she was still well enough to stand in her backyard. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw the photos her husband took. I don’t mean those AI fabrications everyone’s sharing. I mean real arms and real birds and real sky and real ground. This is what grounded her. When she learned that a study showed bees play, she called me to say, Of course they do. By that time, she wasn’t going outside anymore. She was closer to death and to the dead than she was to the living. I’m not sure what that made me. I landed on her arms. I ate from her hands. I tried not to fly away, ever, but I was still alive and so I had to.


Wind

It’s so windy here in Toquerville that I feel like I’m in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. Wind like this makes me cry. It is whatever my mind is, as Gertrude Stein observes. I am as my land and air is, as my cracking and straining house is, as raw as I felt the moment this wind hit my back in a dream and stripped the veneer of reason from me in one clean and somehow profound motion. I sit in the dark shaking, my heart beating like a wild nestling’s.

Seedbox

Poems that occur outside are becoming less popular, especially poems in, about, and from wild places.

We increasingly live in boxes and in boxes inside boxes.

We write poems about the boxes we live in, where the poems themselves are boxes that are capable of holding nothing or everything.

Birds seem to be OK still in poems, usually written about superficially or inaccurately.

Trees, same deal.

Some trees just appeared in a poem I’m reading as I write this post. They have no names but filter light. Dappled is the word the poet uses. Dappled holds nothing where trees are concerned. Dappled is not even in the box of the poem.

A Facebook post is a box inside a larger antisocial box parading as a ballroom floor where nobody knows the box step.

My office is a box inside the box of my home that looks out on a desert punctuated by more and more boxes every year. Some of those boxes move. Others never do.

I think ghosts are boxes but can’t prove it. I know some ghosts break down over time in monsoon rains. Be careful with that cardboard you’re handling. It may be your grandmother as a box.

The trees in this poem I’m reading are talking. They’re asking questions. They’re interrogating orchids. Of all the flowers worthy of investigation, orchids don’t even make my list. I want a word with the seedbox flower, aka the rattlebox. I want to know about its cubic capsules and rigid sides, why it decided to go out into the wild and be a box when it could have been anything. Explain that, seedbox. Answer for yourself.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe we should stick with boxes, not birds and trees and flowers.

At this very second, a box is lumbering down my dead-end street in the form of a trash truck to pick up recyclable boxes from a bin that’s just a fancy box.

There’s no end to boxes once you start paying attention to boxes.

There are probably more boxes on Earth than trees or birds or orchids or even poems.

The next time someone asks how I am, I’m going to say I’m boxes is how I am. It won’t make sense, but it still will be true.

Well, would you look at this? Turns out we’re full of cuboid epithelial cells, so I am boxes and I do make sense as boxes.

But our lungs are trees and our scapulae are wings. There’s no removing these wild things. We have within us what is beyond us even as we try to erase ourselves from anything that doesn’t box us in.

—

This essay initially appeared on Facebook.

Propel Disability Book Series

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining the advisory board for the Propel Disability Book Series at Nine Mile Books. Propel focuses on disabled poetry, noting that disability is often overlooked in publishing, even by presses that prioritize other forms of diversity. All Propel books are written, edited, and produced by disabled poets.

Steve Kuusisto invited me to be part of Propel in this role. I can’t capture in words how much this opportunity means to me. The work is essential and dovetails with my personal experience and advocacy around severe health- and mental-health issues, neurodiversity, and trauma.

This role also gives me a sense of belonging, which is something I don’t typically feel. Belonging is also essential and allows us to do our best work in the world with a sense of meaning and purpose. I mean it when I say I’m honored to serve something bigger than me and something that matters to me in poetry—all while being accepted for who I am and the perspective my experiences have given me.

I feel like a clipping that’s starting to grow roots, the magic of that.

Image: The covers of three collections from the Propel Disability Book Series. Left to right: Anne Kaier’s How Can I Say It Was Enough?, Nathan Spoon’s The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, and D.J. Savarese’s Swoon.

Slugs

He’s one of those slugs that works in all kinds of vending machines. I’m a beat-up quarter that keeps falling unrecognized through the slot.

Make that two quarters, a cent for every year I’ve been trying to work things out here on earth, figure out how to ask and receive, give and receive, get back what’s been taken or at least get receipts.

Throw in four pennies if we’re being honest about my age. Four more metallic years in my mouth, parts of me no longer in production but somehow loose here in Utah like moqui marbles coated in iron-oxide concretions but still just sand in the middle.

I want you to hear the wind the way I do, which is with my whole body. I want you to imagine you have a personal relationship with the mitochondria you lug around and think about how they make you who you are. I want you to start perceiving closely and feeling deeply because you can.

I’m here to tell you you can. You can tell a quarter from a slug, the weight of it, the relief, the ridges along the edge that catch on your thumbnail or leave a little pattern if you roll them in sand. Tiny unicycle. First wheel. Moon touching land and refusing to let go.

You can tell a human’s a human even when they’re dinged in places and rubbed smooth in others.

It’s easy to make a slug into anything, anyone. A slug can fool you, but you don’t have to be fooled. You have more wisdom inside you than you’ll ever know.

Anyone who can slide into any slot may not be what you think they are. Before long, you’ll have a coin box full of cheap metal, and you’ll be searching for quarters the way kids look for moqui marbles in the desert.

Did I mention you’re the vending machine in this essay? You’re the vending machine. I’m 54 cents. The slug I mentioned has already slid through your coin receptor so many times you’ve been left with nothing but empty coils. Stop mistaking him for what he isn’t. Stop seeing the world in his blank face.

All You Can Handle

I dreamed I was in college, majoring in genetics with my friend. We were sitting in class one day when my chair started going higher and higher, as if it was on the end of a pointer. The seat was white pleather and had no arms or really any way to stay in it without sliding out. There I was, pressing against the ceiling of the auditorium, trying to hang on so I wouldn’t fall to my death or at least to my not insignificant harm. My friend was behind me, but I couldn’t turn my head to say hey or help me or anything at all. The chair started swaying like a skyscraper in the wind. Change your major, a disembodied voice said sternly. Change it to sociology. That’s all you can handle. So I became a sociology major and was eased back down to earth. I never saw my future geneticist friend again.

I also dreamed the life partner and I were vacuuming up a bunch of dust at his parents’ house. The dust was in everything and was thick the way lint is when you don’t clean out the lint trap for a year. We breathed in so much dust our lungs were like those old-timey vacuum cleaner bags, so full air could no longer pass through.

Goojigoo

Last night, I dreamed I was in college again and one of my classes was starting. I realized I had to use the restroom, so I told the instructor I’d be right back. She was like, “No worries. All the chairs in this auditorium are toilets, so you can go ahead and have seat.” I looked up at a sea of students going to the bathroom in front of one another while getting ready to take notes on the lecture.

Then I dreamed my phone became sentient and scolded me and all of humanity for wasting our time on phones, thereby allowing the world to be ruined. I don’t know why, but it kept calling me Goojigoo. Goojigoo, you destroyed the environment. Goojigoo, you messed up the United States. Goojigoo, enough with the excuses. Goojigoo, put me down.

Then I dreamed I had to sew books inside my body for safekeeping until they were strong enough to be out in the world.

Then I dreamed I was an incubator for a new me. New me seemed to be mostly made of mucus and lived in my nasopharynx, oropharynx, and hypopharynx. I tried to hack it out, but I couldn’t. I was stuck with it until it matured, at which point it would crawl out of my mouth and leave me, the old me it no longer needed, behind.

Then I was like enough with the dreams, so I woke up.

Keeping Count

I’m counting is how I am. I have something to do in 206 minutes. Yes, I count things down like this one minute at a time, as well as how many pages remain in a book I’m reading and how many steps I have left when walking from my weaving room to my bathroom.

Counting like this, down and up and sometime back down again, has been a thing for me for a long time, ever since I discovered it in middle school. Marching band didn’t help matters any. I still count my steps when I exercise. I like to count them like a waltz when I’m happy and in a heavy 5/4 time when I’m angry. I know, for example, that 100 steps equals one minute on my walking pad, Teddy. Yes, I named my walking pad. I named it Teddy. Names are another story.

Now it’s 201 minutes. I lost five minutes of my life writing this. Poof! There they go, the minutes, soon to be hours, soon to be decades. I don’t have many decades left. But I’ll have minutes until the very end. Almost.

Breaker

Somehow knowing there are sandhill cranes in Ardmore, Oklahoma, right now brings me comfort. The area around Ardmore has high rates of trafficking. (I can’t describe that trafficking in more detail without Facebook blocking this post, but I’ll link to an article in the comments.)

My father used to have me talk to truckers using his CB radio on the highway between our home and Lake Texoma. I had a handle. At least one of the men would ask about me using my handle. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time. I mean what kind of men would want to talk to a girl in grade school and what kind of father would facilitate those conversations.

But the birds help—all the birds at Lake Texoma and in Ardmore and in Norman, my hometown. I love the posts about them in the Oklahoma birding group I belong to. The fact is, those birds were there even when I was young. They’ve always been there. Beauty is always everywhere, including inside us, where it’s untouchable.