Writing

Yesterday, I somehow managed to make one OK three-part poem out of what started as a single absolutely hideous poem. It was like fashioning one of those do-it-yourself wire tree sculptures that were all the rage in the ’80s. You had to keep twisting and untwisting until something at least passably treelike emerged, then you had to hang little leaves from the wire branches, which was its own surgical undertaking. I was the only one in my family who had the patience for that kind of thing. It wasn’t patience, though. It was something else: the need to destroy and create, to pare and repair, to make what I saw in my mind a reality in the world, not a poor approximation of my mindplay.

Compulsion was on my side as well, not just with the tree sculpture, but in all aspects of my childhood. I loved picking the tar bubbles in the road that formed on hot summer days and solving complicated puzzle games everyone else gave up on and memorizing impossibly long Simon tonal and light sequences because there’s no stopping, ever, until you absolutely can’t continue—maybe you’re out of tar bubbles and have to wait for the sun to make more or you can’t crack the stupid puzzle’s stupid code or your infuriating working memory deficits won’t allow your brain to hold onto any more BEEP BEEP BOOP BOOP BEEP BEEPs.

I stuck with that hideous poem yesterday because I’m an adult version of the child I once was: stubborn, driven, perhaps a little dysfunctional. That poem was a pig, and I put some better-than-Walmart earrings on it, dressed it up a little by tearing it apart line by line and reattaching those lines to create a different creature entirely. Half of it lay on the table by the time I was done. Word, words, words. So many words. Sometimes words are too much with us. They’re like metal tree branches that need to be trimmed or tar bubbles that need to be picked or puzzles and toys that need to be put away and silenced.

Quirky

One year and three days ago today, Jon and I went for a hike in Snow Canyon, located in Ivins, Utah. A couple approached us. They were in their 70s. They asked to take pictures of us because they liked how I was dressed. They even got another hiker to take photos of us with them.

The man started talking about polygamy and all his polygamous relatives. He said I looked like his sister, who is very pretty. He asked me to pull up my dress and show my legs. Everything he said was funny, lighthearted, girdled in puns. It seemed harmless, especially coming from someone his age who was with his wife. But it didn’t feel harmless, not if I’m honest with myself. My body knew it wasn’t harmless. The body always knows.

They love-bombed us with all the things we had in common. She was an English teacher who loves literature and weaving. He was that everydad kind of guy who noodles with electronics and technology. They were just like each of us, so similar it was uncanny. The wife, C—, even noticed that she and I both have moles on our right cheeks. Family, she said. We could be family. You could be my kin, he chimed in.

We exchanged email addresses because C—, whose nickname was Queen, wanted to send me images of a woven rug she’d purchased. We still weren’t registering the kind of danger that we were in, that I was in. I was trying to flex in Southern Utah, to meet folks where they were at and to be open to everyone. Danger wasn’t on my radar, not until later that day. I was leading with love and trying to survive in an inhospitable culture.

Later, I emailed Queen about the weaving. I got a reply back from Quirky instead, one year ago today. That was his nickname. His response to my email was a photo of him naked in his bathtub with a bottle of lavender essential oil on the tub’s rim. His accompanying text was: You have to promise me that if I send too much, just tell me!! Off to Bear Lake after I get out of this bathtub!

It was too much, Quirky. Way too much.

This is the day: August 31, 2023. This is the day one year ago when I became terrified of everyone, the day my C-PTSD and bipolar 1 swooped in to save me, as implausible as that might sound and as inelegant as those protective mechanisms appeared to me and to others. They saved me from terror, from abject terror about being fundamentally unsafe in the world, even in super-safe family-friendly sunny Southern Utah. They saved me from not recognizing that I wasn’t safe, that Quirky and Queen weren’t safe.

C-PTSD saved me by making my body scream when I couldn’t hear it whimpering. Bipolar 1 saved me by giving me something other than sheer darkness as the only thing left in my existence. Bipolar made me think maybe, just maybe there’s something other than and beyond evil in this world—something unlike the Workys or their earlier counterparts: the Coolidges, the Yoders, the Swains, the Whites, and last but not least, my family, the Guthries.

Quirky and Queen are real people who really did live in Utah and who really did what they told us they did for a living. I looked them up after I received Quirky’s email. I looked Quirky up again today. He died at the beginning of 2024. He was active in his LDS ward, loved gardening, was charismatic, and made everyone feel welcome. A real gem in the community. No cause of death is listed.

I am walking out of that chapter of my life now, that near undoing (or unbounding, to extend the metaphor). Welcome, August 31, 2024. I’m happy to be here, or at least moving in the direction of happiness and healing.

Ween

Carbs made me love you. I love everything on carbs.

I saw a palo verde tree wearing a green tie today in Tucson. Nothing else. Just the tie.

He is dying. He will not tell me what he would carry in the pocket of his spacesuit if he were walking on the moon.

Jon is home now. Last night, his father asked him why he had to leave, and his dying brother begged him to stay forever.

Me Crow Wah Vay. That’s how an automated voice on a TikTok video pronounced microwave in a video I just watched. Me Crow Wah Vay.

Perhaps life is just a process of cyclically confronting the unfathomable until it’s fathomable, and then we die.

I just found a 20-pack of thong underwear for $27 on Amazon. I’m sure workers had safe working conditions and were paid fair wages to make them. I tried to make my own underwear years ago. I do not know how to do that. I forgot to use elastic, and the pair I sewed fell off immediately. Never have I failed so splendidly outside of a poem. Most of my poetry has no elastic.

My therapist made me feel good about myself, and it got me all messed up.

If you don’t understand trauma, you can’t create trauma-informed spaces. Studying trauma, theorizing about trauma, and following the rules about what is and is not trauma-informed isn’t enough. You have to know trauma inside and out or you’ll end up creating environments that are traumatizing, which is detestable when you say you’re trying to do the opposite. Worse yet, you’ll bring people into your “safe” spaces and harm them.

The world is not how I left it.

I saved myself from myself for myself.

Neil Armstrong carried two artifacts in the pocket of his spacesuit when he walked on the moon: a 1.25-square-inch piece of muslin fabric cut from the Wright Flyer’s left wing and a piece of spruce wood taken from the plane’s left propeller.

Maybe I’d carry my mother’s high school valedictory speech, which she wrote when she graduated at age 16 so I won’t forget where my ability to write comes from. And I’d carry my father’s Sigma Chi ring so I never forget who he was, what he did, how he wielded power, and what I overcame.

If I could, I’d carry my mother’s heart and my father’s brain: the first so I could feel through her, the second so I could resist thinking like him.

Hope is just a nope whose ascender grew over time.

He didn’t show emotion because he’s neurodivergent. He showed emotion because he’s human.

Trauma set my body clocks

It’s not death I fear. It’s spending eternity with my father.

I dreamed a poem last night that was either terrific or terrible. Either way, it’s lost now. The waking world devoured it.

We no longer have the luxury of moving mountains one tablespoon at a time.

While watching the apocalypse unfold, people will be pissed that there aren’t snacks. We want to nibble while Rome burns.

Out of nowhere, I started playing the melody from “In Trutrina” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on my new toy piano. And just like that, I’m healed—at least for today.

Ableist culture, go fuck yourself.

I bought a toy piano. I will John Cage my way out of despair.

Sometimes, in our misguided endeavors, we fly a one-winged unicorn into the side of a crystalline mountain. That’s OK if our intentions are flawed but genuine. Sometimes, we have a crew of willing or unwilling riders with us, and our carelessness sends them careening. That’s not OK regardless of our intentions.

Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all.

I just realized they’re called pancakes because they’re little cakes you make in a pan. WHO KNEW? Dyslexia’s fun like that. I can identify complicated words with Old English or Latinate roots, but I can entirely—for most of my life—miss obvious word combinations such as the conjoining of “pan” and “cake.”

I write quickly so my fingers can stay ahead of my thoughts. Removing thinking from my writing is my best hope for experiencing, understanding, and communicating anything meaningful.

Wear sequins today, even if they’re just imaginary ones pasted on your heart. Wear red, the deep shade tinged with black ink. Wear a slogan on your chest written in invisible letters. Be ferocious. Be affable. Be any instance of yourself that you want to be. Good morning.

I came across all the microforms for The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands at the library yesterday. Here’s what the National Archives says about that bureau:

Bureau functions included issuing rations and clothing, operating hospitals and refugee camps, and supervising labor contracts between planters and freedpeople. The Bureau also managed apprenticeship disputes and complaints, assisted benevolent societies in the establishment of schools, helped in legalizing marriages entered into during slavery, and provided transportation to refugees and freedpeople who were attempting to reunite with their family or relocate to other parts of the country. As Congress extended the life of the Bureau, it added other duties, such as assisting Black soldiers and sailors in obtaining back pay, bounty payments, and pensions.

Be full of care today. Be full of love. Be full of kindness. Remember to breathe even when you don’t want to breathe. You are here, solidly, in this world. It breathes alongside you.

My favorite thing I’ve done with my life? Survived it.

A poem about obsessively removing the insects that have invaded my home because I can’t do anything about the cancers that have invaded the bodies of those I love.

The body is an inpatient facility.

Our militarized mindsets will be our undoing.

The problem is we think communities exist in order to be policed.

Facebook thinks I should be friends with some guy named Ween. No last name. He’s just a big old Ween.

Oil

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea.

Lake oil. Sand oil. Animal oil. Plant oil.

Oil with a Southern accent. Oil beneath troubled waters.

Oil in another tongue is still oil, oiled and oiling.

Oil on the lips that bite you. I mean me.

I mean father oil, mother oil, oiled mouths, oiled skin, oiled hours, oiled days.

I mean the coffin. I mean the verb. I mean the action.

Run, oil, run. Run from brother oil, from big brother, oiled.

He will draw you up from your dark earth with his skipjack pump and sell you to the highest bidder. A cop. A friend of your father’s. A man. A man.

Or he’ll keep you in a little bottle on an oak shelf until he can refine you, until you brighten, until you slink back and forth in the little jar like the little golden child you were supposed to be, oiled and oiling, body like an O.

O, brother, O brother, hallowed be your O.

My brother spent years locating crude oil, first in Oklahoma, then in Texas, then in the Black Sea. But, long before that, in me.

Purple Martins

I watched desert purple martins last night in the glorious saguaro near my home on Javelina Way. I was surprised that there are still nestlings who haven’t fledged yet. They need to get going so they can prepare for migration.

I love birds as dearly as anything on this earth, which means I love them imperfectly. I initially studied them so I could write with more detail about the natural world. I didn’t want to always say bird in a poem and leave it at that. Bird. Tree. Sky. Not good enough. Poets are not children naming things generally and statically for the first time. (I’d actually argue that children are more creative than that and could teach poets a great deal about how to encounter and describe natural worlds.)

I wanted to know the birds’ names, their habits, their struggles. It was a fact-finding mission. But then I loved them, suddenly and completely. I was done in by their delicacy and resilience and incomprehensible beauty. I loved them. I remember where I was when I realized that was the case: watching a house finch on my fence at my home in Overland Park, Kansas. I at once loved that particular bird and all birds. Their gorgeous or silly calls. The myriad ways in which they walk or fly or run or crash into branches or come to an inelegant stop on glassy water.

I watched birds for seven years and kept daily logs, took photos, fed them, gave them water, checked on their roosts and nests out by lakes and in apartment complexes around the city. I knew where every eagle’s nest was located. I watched. I worried. I hoped. Those vulnerable days on the ground before first flight. The slinking neighborhood cats. The poisons neighbors used for rodents. I watched one—a trumpet swan—slowly freeze on Wyandotte Lake in Kansas City, Kansas, when a cold snap hit during migration. My dear friend, also a poet, was with me. All we could do was watch and hold vigil until death came with its white gloves that to anyone else would have looked like gentle snowfall.

I did all this while I wasn’t writing poetry. I was never going to write poetry again. (So much for that.) Did I impose my love of poetry on birds? Probably to some extent. I had a lot of love inside me. It had to go somewhere. Love always has to flow out and out, forever, endlessly, the way Pablo Neruda describes it.

“The Martins,” a poem I recently wrote, isn’t just about the community I live in or the sprawling development on the other side of Old Spanish Trail. Ultimately, it’s about me and death and family and love and the natural world and conflict (internal/external, individual/collective, natural/designed). And it’s about birds. Desert purple martins to be precise.

Ableist Culture, Go Fuck Yourself

Folks with mental-health issues are encouraged to create emergency plans for when things go wrong, but scant attention is given to wellness plans that prevent things from going wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, emergency plans are behavior-driven, when we should instead focus on the dozens of easily trackable biomarkers that indicate the presence or absence of metabolic/circadian homeostasis and that precede behavioral issues by days if not weeks.

Why don’t we do that? Because those with mental health issues are routinely dehumanized, discriminated against, abused, maligned, written off, and seen as incapable of attaining health, wellness, and happiness. The system doesn’t even try to help us be fully human and to live full, productive, creative, enriching lives.

We aren’t as far away from locked rooms, back wards, lobotomies, electric shock, insulin shock, and chemical lobotomies as we think. The medical establishment still treats us like that’s where we belong and that’s what we deserve. (And in the case of electroconvulsive therapy and chemical lobotomies, they’re still happening, just not as barbarically, one could argue.)

So when I resigned from my role at the University of Arizona and passed a vehicle on my way out with a bumper sticker that read Ask Me About My Lobotomy, I was understandably livid. That sticker encapsulates all the sanist* comments I heard while working at UA, from library customers being called meth heads and trash humans to the word crazy routinely being used to describe people and situations to the phrase homeless people being used with derision.

Fuck all of that. UA culture, go fuck yourself.

—

* Sanism is a subset of ableism, so these are more examples of the ableism I witnessed or that was directed at me while employed at UA.

Yesterday, I was discriminated against when I disclosed my dyslexia—a documented, ADA-protected disability—to my coworkers. I’d been struggling all day to do my work but was unable to do so because of a modifiable issue in my immediate workspace. The employee I share a cubicle with was gathering with others. They were engaging in loud, boisterous conversations, including those that did not pertain to her work or to work at all. This went on for hours.

Eventually, when I was trying to send an email but was unable to accurately type a single sentence because of the noise and distraction in my immediate vicinity, I decided to share my diagnosis with the folks who were gathered in my space. I thought explaining how noise affects my ability to read and write would help them understand and be supportive. Instead, I was met with dismissiveness, sarcasm, and a refusal to be supportive. When I said, “I’m dyslexic,” one employee threw a hand in the air and sarcastically replied “Congratulations?” then staring me down as if I’d done something inappropriate. It was the equivalent of saying something akin to, What do you want, a medal?

I can’t imagine anyone responding that way if another documented, ADA-protected disability had been disclosed, such as a physical disability for which someone was requesting a ramp when only stairs had been provided. The response was unfathomable and unacceptable. I realized then that I will never be able to advocate for myself in that workplace or to feel a sense of safety, inclusion, and belonging there.

Immediately after this incident, I attended a one-on-one training that was not accessible. When I disclosed my disability to the instructor:

1. did not treat it as a disability,

2. made comments that were not acceptable and would never have been made if it were a different type of disability,

3. continued the training despite my having explained why it wasn’t working for me without modification to the way it was taught and what was being asked of me.

One comment the trainer made when I told him I needed my own keyboard and mouse—which are assistive technologies for me—if he wanted me to do extensive typing as part of the training, was that “everybody” has trouble with that keyboard and mouse. Even after I was clear that dyslexia is a disability, that it’s protected under the ADA, and that it’s not the same situation others without a learning disability may have with the keyboard, he continued to make that statement. It was minimizing, dismissive, and uninformed.

Again, if this were another form of disability, that would not have happened. His approach was no different from telling someone in a wheelchair who can’t use the stairs that everybody has issues with the stairs, then continuing to expect the employee to scale the stairs somehow without any other alternative.

I cannot take on the responsibility that job requires within a culture that is discriminatory in general and toward me in particular. Even with an accommodation request, which I’ve never had to make before in my career, the culture will not change quickly enough for this to be a tenable workplace.

I will not continue to subject myself to comments like the ones those employees made, and I shouldn’t have to. I invested a great deal in this position financially, emotionally, and otherwise. I turned down one offer and terminated the interview process with another potential employer to be at UA. I’m not going to be able to see my brother-in-law before he dies because I needed to be present at work. I started work two days after being in the emergency room for a serious, chronic medical condition that’s affecting my heart. I did all of that because I thought UA and UA Libraries lived their mission and would be safe places where I could learn, work, grow, thrive, and give back in spades to AIS, UA Libraries, and the University of Arizona as a whole.

In addition to the issues I’ve recounted above, employees use ableist, sanist, and otherwise dehumanizing language regularly. I was subjected to instances of discriminatory language, behavior, and attitudes multiple times a day. As someone who was supposed to be helping to shape the culture there and ensure the library is a trauma-informed space and community, I didn’t have the ability to effect change because I wasn’t empowered to do so. That was clear from day one. I was literally told by a high-level leader to just keep taking notes about what was happening. That’s right. Discrimination is occurring. Ableism and sanism are occurring. But all I could do was take notes that I kept to myself. Until when. When would something be done?

The reality is that I am a queer, female, trauma survivor who thrives despite having multiple disabilities. Only some of my identities and statuses are currently being protected at UA Libraries. This queer-positive environment is sorely lacking in inclusion in other areas. It’s always the disabled, the disenfranchised, and poor, the silenced, the struggling, and the utterly destroyed among us who continue to be harmed by people’s dogged adherence to bigotry, as if it has to be funneled somewhere rather than being eradicated entirely.

Can’t be racist anymore? Be ableist or sanist! Can’t be sexist anymore? Be ableist or sanist! Can’t be transphobic anymore? Well, it’s your lucky day. We’ve got some fancy schmancy ableism and sanism right here for the taking!!! Step right up! We’re running a two-for-one sanism sale! Buy one ableism, get a sanism for free!

But here’s the thing: Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all. Since this country was founded, ableism and sanism have been part of its fabric. And now, they appear to exist in order for bigots to express their generalized bigotry in the only way that’s currently palatable, which is by attacking human beings based on their disabilities.

Ableism and sanism affect the most vulnerable folks in our communities. We need to do better by them. All of us. And that includes the people working in our academic libraries.

I expected equal protection across statuses, but ableism and sanism appear to be endemic at UA Libraries. It’s unfortunate. It’s actually devastating.

Some acts of bravery require resignation. My act of bravery this morning was to resign.

P.S. On my way out yesterday, I saw the bumper sticker on an employee’s car. It read, Ask me about my lobotomy. Fuck that noise.

Dark Water

Content warning: This content contains content.

This morning, a woman at Fry’s stopped me to ask for help finding food for her husband, who’s preparing for chemotherapy treatment. She described the kinds of things his doctor said he should have. We walked and talked and found some good options for him.

It’s easier to remember being young than it is to imagine growing old.

Eight years ago, I thought we were post-narrative, post-storytelling. Now, I fear we’re post-community.

The problem is poetry isn’t part of our daily discourse. I’m serious.

Write the poem you want to see in the world.

The birds are acting strange today. The humans, too. And the dogs.

I’m the dark water, but I’m also the buoy cast into the dark water.

Again, I’ve dressed for the wrong desert.

I like having two houses. If I die, my dog will think I’ve just gone to the other house and she’ll see me soon. I’ll be away, not gone.

Weird

I’m disappointed that Kamala Harris and those who support her are using the word weird to describe Donald Trump and JD Vance. Why? Because it’s ableist, normative language that’s long been deployed against folks who are different in any way, especially young people who are neurodivergent, who have values that differ from their peers, or who don’t fit neatly into the ready-made boxes that are used to define and limit them.

I turned off an NPR interview earlier today because the person being interviewed kept saying JD Vance was weird each time the interviewer asked legitimate questions about his positions and statements over the years, including inquiries about his sexism and racism. There was so much more to say than labeling him as weird and shutting the conversation down.

We have critical issues to discuss that can’t be captured by the word weird, and making it part of an attack line at once diminishes the issues at hand and encourages voters, especially younger voters, to call anyone they don’t like weird, which isn’t progress and doesn’t encourage people to avoid using language that dehumanizes and others their fellow human beings.

Here

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Where are your friends?
Dead and buried.

Do you ever see them?
Every day in every sunrise, every songbird, every sand, every silt.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are your friends?
Here and here.

Where are you now?
In the light, in the bird, in the sand, in the silt.