Writing

Sunny Southern Utah

Toquerville, Utah, is only thirty minutes from the Arizona border, so it’s pretty much like I’m not even leaving the state. That’s how I’m going to think about it. I’m uneasy about returning to an area that has so much embedded trauma.

Like the women and girls who were sex trafficked across a four-state area by way of a horse trailer that Samuel Bateman carted them around in. He was the father or husband of all of them. In one case, he was both their father and their husband. They were as young as twelve years old. He made them have sex with men while he watched. He said it’s what God wanted them to do and their hymens would grow back.

Like the man in Enoch who killed his mother-in-law, wife, five children, and himself because his wife filed for divorce. He didn’t want the embarrassment and shame that would bring upon him. Better that they all die than live as a broken family. Like the graves of the children and their mother lined up in the cemetery three minutes from Toquerville. Like his unmarked grave in some secret location.

Like runners who are trying to escape the compound Warren Jeffs still operates from jail but are found by other followers and dragged back inside the makeshift metal walls surrounding parts of the community.

Like the FLDS woman in substitute teacher training who met up with her husband during a break and returned with a badly split lip. How blood dripped onto her white eyelet skirt. How she cheerfully struck up a conversation about poetry while she bled.

Like the man patrolling BLM lands with a gun and a knife who calls women hikers he meets c-nts and tells him their presence is threatening so he’s justified in killing them. How the sheriffs say he’s within his rights to defend himself if he feels threatened. Besides, it’s a he said, she said situation, they say.

Like the youth who’ve died by suicide after coming out as LGBTQ and losing their whole families, their whole communities, everything they’ve known. Like the LDS church’s response, which is to be even harder on trans members, denying them opportunities the way they denied opportunities to Black members in the 1970s before they almost lost their tax-exempt status for doing so.

Like the outdoor adventure camps for children and young adults with behavioral issues that are riddled with abuses, devoid of accountability, and often run by staff with more unaddressed mental health issues than the children and youth they’re purportedly trying to help.

Like the seventy-year-old man who meets you in a state park and grooms you alongside his wife so he can later send you a photo of himself naked in his bathtub.

Like the mental health professionals who say your issues have absolutely nothing to do with trauma. You just need to go home to your husband. They write in your chart that you’re involved in trafficking, as if you’re trafficking others, when the truth is you were trafficked, sex trafficked as a child, by your family.

Like the therapist who lays her hands on you in a session and pulls the evil out of your body in long, expansive motions, the one who asks you to accept Jesus Christ as the one true savior, to renounce things like yoga and Buddhism because Jesus is the only one, the only way. Like your insurance paying for this session. The gaslighting of that. The mindf-ck of that. The absolute where the f-ck am I of that.

Like the things you still won’t put in writing because alt-right extremist groups are involved, militias are involved, ties to Cliven Bundy are involved, and these groups have thousands of local members who’ve gotten ahold of the Koch brothers’ playbook for destroying communities at the hyperlocal level. And they’re doing it. And it’s working because they have guns and rage and more guns and more rage. No end to the guns and rage. Someone has to pay for whatever’s made them so g-ddamn angry.

Like derealization as the only way out of that place, that inanity. Like insanity as the only sanity within insanity. Like nobody talking about any of the things that are happening. Like none of it even exists. Like trauma doesn’t girdle the area the way the lacolliths and sandstone formations do. Like abuses and suffering don’t rain down like summer storms, penetrating everything that can be penetrated and roiling from the creeks before they make their way elsewhere.

Wrapped

Our home is wrapped in thin plastic. We can’t get out or in. The doors are sealed, windows masked and covered. This is what happens when you can finally afford to pay someone to paint your house for you. You sit inside feeling asphyxiated.

I almost taste the plastic pulling into my mouth when I breathe the way it did when I was a child experimenting with airlessness—that “I know I’m not supposed to do this which is why I’m going to try it a few times and see what happens” feeling.

Oh, the rush of air pulling in with more than ordinary force and the way the mouth heats that air, then the alien sensuality of the bag connecting with the lips all the way around, followed by that sudden, hard stop when no more air can get through, the shock and aftershock of it all at once, like a symphony going silent after roaring from the stage at full volume, the timpanist’s hand held high above his instrument, the conductor’s arms hanging in front of her as if invisible wires control her wrists and the whole orchestra rigid, focused, tingling from head to toe and back again, the only thing keeping them in place is the downbeat, the one that’s coming, coming, coming, any second, any second, just as soon as the conductor gives her orders.

Then she does. She is me. The downbeat is the moment I pull the plastic from my mouth and air flows in, unrestricted and urgent and wanton. That cool air, that life-giving air oxygenating my body and bringing my brain fully back online. You could almost call it a form of rebirth if children who play with plastic bags are capable of such a thing. I was, or at least I think I was, but I’m not your ordinary child. Or perhaps I’m too ordinary. One can never know what one is or is not in comparison with others who may or may not be what they are or are not.

Light still penetrates the plastic-covered windows but it’s gray and gauzy like one of those days that happens all the time in Seattle but never here in Tucson. Even during monsoon season, storms make the sky dark, not the color of cement or that dull, not-quite-elephant color nobody uses in the forty-eight pack of Crayons. Do forty-eight packs still exist? I remember when I got my first set. It was thrilling to see all those colors lined up tidily in their box. It felt like as many colors as the world could hold. Then the sixty-four pack came out, and I suddenly needed those additional sixteen colors. Capitalism has had its fingers in my heart my whole life.

Some of the plastic is off now. That’s a relief. I could leave through the front door if I wanted to. Now that I can, I don’t want to. When I couldn’t, “I must leave now” was the only thought in my head. It pounded in 4/4 time as I wrote this, a percussive accompaniment to my hollow key clicks that only I could hear.

Maybe I felt like I was in the womb when all that plastic surrounded me. Maybe I felt like I was a cell inside its wall. Maybe I felt like I was going to turn into ooze and transform into a moth. Maybe I felt something darker, something only my body and animal brain remember, like my recurring dream of men who are wolves who are coming for me, and I’m inside a house but there are no walls, no locks, no doors, only gauzy drapes, so I wrap myself in them but the men see me, and I can’t run because the drapes only tighten when I try.

Falling in Love with Places

I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.

Heartbreaking Wombat Poem

I will describe the heartbreaking wombat poem I wanted to write last night when I was too tired to write because I’d been messing with poetry submissions for fifteen hours straight. (I actually submitted zero poems after all that effort.) The time for actually writing the heartbreaking wombat poem has passed. But here’s what I kind of think the poem would have done. Keep in mind, I never know what the poem will actually do until I start engaging with it for real.

—

The Poem Has Some Kind of Title

The poem opens with something about how a wombat can’t survive in the wild with only three legs.

The poem goes into detail about the kinds of things the wombat can no longer do because of the missing leg, making reference to an individual wombat who’s experiencing this situation. Evading predators. Foraging. Climbing.

(The poem’s not sure wombats climb. The poem will look that up.)

The poem starts to talk about the wombat in ways humans can relate to, especially those of us who are growing older.

The poem turns to humans explicitly and all the things we can’t do. The poem provides lists here because they can cover a lot of emotional territory. Accretion can be an effective technique in the poem and help the poem avoid sentimentality and other gobbledygook that mucks up poems and may muck this one up despite the poem’s efforts.

Here, the poem may take a turn toward the emotional things we can’t survive, not just the physical things. Traumas. Losses. Unimaginable suffering. The poem will provide some examples, perhaps those pulled from recent news or perhaps from the poem’s past.

The poem might move out from individual traumas to larger traumas by talking about groups of people who are like wombats, ones who’ve lost their lands and are being driven from their homes into the harsh reality that the world is no longer designed for them if it ever was. It’s for others, many of whom want them gone the way they want wombats gone.

The poem may bring up Marky Mark and the way he brutally beat two Venezuelan men when he was sixteen years old, namely how that’s not dissimilar from people attacking and harming wombats, though of course the comparison is problematic because humans aren’t wombats and Marky Mark does whatever he wants, and it’s funny how the history of celebrities always seems to be getting lost, as if it’s all being tucked inside the pouches of wombats never again to see the light of day.

It’s risky, but the poem might talk about the emotional lives of wombats, perhaps discussing how we can’t know the interior lives of nonhuman species, but we can make some educated guesses. And we really don’t know that much about our own interior lives, do we, and that doesn’t keep us from talking about ourselves and each other, so why not allow the stretch here. It’s a poem, after all, not a scientific lab that experiments on animals. (And thank goodness it’s not.)

Now the poem may list a bunch of stuff a wombat can’t do after certain types of emotional damage, like being attacked or run over or left in the road or being burned or losing habitat or whatever. The poem may feel this is an effective way to bring you into the animal’s life quickly, before you can stop reading.

The poem wants you to feel all of this, both for the wombat and for other humans, but its mechanism of action is to get you to feel. You must feel what the wombat feels so you can feel what you feel and then extend more compassion and understanding to those around you.

That’s what the poem wants.

The poem will end but not before it tells you the wombat died. Humans made the decision to euthanize the wombat once they realized the leg couldn’t be saved. The poem may offer a kind of prayer here for safe passage from this world, but the poem knows it’s better if there were safe passage within it.

The poem will leave. It will disappear into the margins because the poem always has safe passage into silence.

Morning Prayer September 21, 2024

In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.

The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.

It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.

The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.

Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.

May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.

Incrementally, Tenderly

Morning Prayer September 21, 2024

In the fall, Tucson smells like mildew, dirt, and cold metal. The wildlands behind our home are full of mouldering plant matter, animal matter, too. Every morning here is like an episode of my favorite series ever, Sunrise Earth, which aired on PBS years ago. The earth wakes up the same way everywhere: incrementally, tenderly, and without assistance from humans.

The coyotes are howling. They’ve been like this for days. They made it to fall. They’re anticipating winter, perhaps, bodily if not consciously. The moon has been big and glorious, which has affected us all, especially, it seems, the coyotes.

It’s like Sunrise Earth here with the birds calling and singing and buzzing, first the curve-billed thrashers, then the northern cardinals, then the house finches and the cactus wrens and the gila woodpeckers. A northern flicker even joined the crowd today, a rare treat.

The birds sing more as the sun rises higher, until it’s above the saguaros and palo verde trees. They sing until they stop, either because the sun is where it’s supposed to be and singing time is over or because the Cooper’s hawk has made an appearance. The birds are alarm clocks. They have a collective circadian rhythm that’s entrained on dawn. They help me keep my body clocks in sync and in working order.

Human sounds are here, too, which is where these mornings diverge from the Sunrise Earth episodes. Cars, too many of them, speed along Old Spanish Trail anticipating or dreading where they’re headed. Someone operates a chainsaw next door, an undertaking that started before six in the morning. If only humans would stop and watch the sunrise for five minutes and be part of the earth rather than setting themselves apart from it. I don’t know what that might change, but it might change us.

May we all be part of the Earth today. May we find a way to anchor ourselves on this planet and the lands we inhabit. My we be of this world, not separate from it.

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.



Morning Prayer September 16, 2024

Trees don’t move in the wind. They’re moved by the wind, the way we all react to unseen forces, unseen faces, unseen lives, and unseen lies. But I digress. This isn’t about deleting and inserting letters to stumble on real or imagined connections. It’s about how, wherever I’m standing, I want to be standing somewhere else. A foot over, a mile, a state, a bioregion.

There, where I saw my first Blackburnian warbler. There, where I learned the name scissor-tailed flycatcher. There, the mud. There, the sand. There, the untidy rows of cows. There, tidy rows of roses a girl could hide in if it weren’t for the thorns.

I’m trying to stand still for ten minutes every morning while I watch the sun rise and listen to birds. Yesterday, a western screech owl. Today, a pyrrhuloxia, as in red or tawny, not as in pile of wood for burning the dead.

I’m trying not to think about how the northern cardinal should be the one named pyrrhuloxia, not the pyrrhuloxia, or about how that must mean the person who named the pyrrhuloxia had never seen a cardinal, or about how the person who named the pyrrhuloxia must have felt the first time they saw a cardinal after having named the pyrrhuloxia pyrrhuloxia.

I’m trying not to think, which is always the biggest impediment to not thinking. I just want to stand for ten minutes with my feet planted, my body unstirred, like palo verde trees on a calm morning after hard rain. I want to be here, with these birds and these trees and these cactuses in this desert. I want to feel safe enough to remain still for ten minutes. I’ve seen cottontail rabbits do as much, though their mouths were working incessantly because they move their jaws up to one hundred twenty times per minute when they chew. That’s twice my average resting heart rate but nowhere near the four thousand times a hummingbird’s wings beat per minute.

I’m trying not to think about facts and comparisons. This more than that. That less than this. Living beings are not just math, so I’m trying not to tilt my head and scan for rabbits or add up my heartbeats as they batter my chest or make a futile attempt to count the wingbeats of the Costa’s hummingbird who’s zipping past me.

I’m trying not to worry about Valley Fever and global warming and poisonous toads and communities in crisis and birds falling from the sky from avian influenza and assassination attempts and wildlife without habitat and unseen lies and unseen lives and unseen faces and unseen forces and my father and my family and my childhood. That’s what lies in stillness. All of that and more.

So I count. I compare. I slot things into more than that, less than this. I learn facts. I look around. I take in. I fill my head with details. And I move. I have a head full of analysis, a body full of terror, and the trauma to justify both.

Those last three things on my list are the crux of the matter: my father and my family and my childhood. They’re the real, lived dangers that tie me to the rest of the dangers in the world, the rest of the heartbreaks in the world, the rest of the injustices in the world. The broken wing. The dry lake. The toxic dust. The highway. The swimming pool. The bedroom.

My father didn’t have any guns. He’d had enough of them in Korea. We had an empty gun case built into a wall at our lake house. I wanted to fill it with flowers. He wouldn’t let me. It had to be empty, a sign for anyone who saw it that he meant them no harm.

My father was the weapon. He ultimately turned himself on himself but not until he destroyed everyone else. I mean us. I mean his family. I say his as if we belonged to him. Belonged as in were owned by, not as in were members of. He owned us all. Kin from the Old English cynn, which sounds like sin. To kin, to sin, to skin, again. Buckskin and doeskin and firing pins and deadly sins. No win, no wins, no whining, no whinneys.

I stood still for five minutes this morning. Five minutes in which I didn’t keep vigil, in which I watched the sun rise and listened to the birds. It’s not ten yet. I’ll keep trying for ten.

May we all be free from suffering for ten minutes today.

Good morning.

The Egg

I had a dream that all male software engineers were held in such high esteem that they became their own class that was positioned just below the richest tech billionaires, who had become the ruling class.

Elon Musk hatched a plan to get these engineers everything they needed to be comfortable and live a life of satiety. He developed what he called The Egg, which as the name suggests was an egg: a really big, high-tech, egg-shaped thing not unlike Mork’s egg on Mork and Mindy.

The engineers could spend as much time in their eggs every day as they liked. The eggs were designed for work, rest, restoration, and learning, but they were also virtual reality spaces where the engineers could create any immersive AI scenario they wanted simply by providing a verbal description of what they were interested in experiencing.

Guess what happened? The engineers did not work or rest or learn in their eggs. There was no restoration. The AI technology wasn’t used to expand on their horizons or as an expression of their imaginations.

They masturbated. That’s what they did. They made endless AI porn and went to town on themselves.

They masturbated over and over and over until all The Eggs had to be gathered up and disposed of in a mass landfill out in the West somewhere because they had become biohazards. Whole communities were redolent with the smell of ejaculate, which upset all the other classes. (Well, not the ruling class. They didn’t care. They were busy in their own souped-up versions of The Egg.)

In the dream, my husband had The Egg. Of course he did. He’s a brilliant software engineer (both in real life and in the dream). Musk loved him and personally delivered The Egg to our home, which as you can imagine was not as fun of a time for me as it was for the two of them. Musk offered to impregnate me and almost made it a requirement for giving my husband The Egg. Being menopausal saved me, though Musk said he’d try to cure menopause (?!?!), and he’d be back once he did.

Sadly, my husband was not an exception to the rule. I mean, he read some graphic novels, took a few comfy-cozy naps, and did some guided meditations. He even tried to use AI responsibly for a while. But ultimately, he succumbed and did what everyone else did inside The Egg. He defiled it from within. It had to be destroyed.

The Egg had to be destroyed, and we both had to live in the real world knowing full well what had happened in The Egg, what The Egg had brought out in him, and how The Egg had changed everything, every damn thing.

Listen, Listen

Morning Prayer September 14, 2024

Do not see the horrors of the world. Do not speak the horrors of the world. Listen, listen to the horrors. We only need to listen to know them in our bones. Then we can see. Then we can speak.

Cover your eyes until you hear. Cover your mouth until you hear.

I mean bomb. I mean siren. I mean gun. I mean blade.

I mean hand. I mean voice. I mean footsteps. I mean heartbeat.

I mean fire in wildlands. I mean fire in territories and cities and countries. I mean whole areas turned into carbon. Trees. Structures. Animals. People.

I mean the horror we hear coming and the horror we don’t hear until it’s come, until it’s sitting on our chests, pinning us down. To the bed. To the floor. To the sopping ground.

I mean flames and thermal winds roaring like jet engines, what feels like the whole world rumbling.

I mean horror like bones breaking because horror often breaks bones but also sounds like bones breaking when no bones are broken.

The horror of wrong death, wrong place, wrong time, wrong turn, wrong war, wrong leader, wrong policy, wrong hope, wrong prayer.

The horror of wrong family, wrong father, wrong town, wrong time, wrong words, wrong body, wrong hands, wrong home.

I mean bomb turning brick to sudden dust. I mean siren screaming aimless into night. I mean gun bucking in eager hands. I mean blade causing muscle to burst like distant thunder.

I mean hand turning body into target. I mean voice lulling child into trust. I mean footsteps like percussionists pounding out time. I mean heartbeat like another person inside the chest trying to tear themselves free.

The horror of why. The sound of that question as it sits on the tongue croaking like a toad.

I mean horror as gunshots down a long hall. Then in a room. Then in a library. Then in another room. Then back in the hall.

Horror in the school, in the business, on the base, in the place of worship, in the car, on the street, in the parking lot, in the neighborhood, on the highway, at the train station, on public lands, in the bedroom, at the splash pad.

The always-more of horror. The never-endingness of horror. Our faces like dry pools. Our skin dull as powder. We want no more of this screaming horror.

Now we hear it. Now we don’t. Now we do. Now we don’t. We are children, every one of us, playing games with our senses.

May we listen. May we see. May we speak.