Writing

Wayfinding

When you feel trapped inside rooms you didn’t willingly enter, I’ll draw clouds on the ceilings so you can remember the sky.

When they run, they run away. They are us or us in other bodies.

Your heart will speak to you one thousand times today. Let it.

It’s hard to find your way when you don’t know where you are, and that’s pretty much how I feel every day: lost and longing but also curious and free—moving instinctually toward where I think I need to go, who I need to be, what I need to feel, and what I need to do.

Terror and Awe

The terrible reality is that health is more expensive than disease in this country.

Trauma is a wound of the present, every day. — Anonymous

A member of a support group I belong to wrote this, and it is hitting me hard. I want to lie on the floor and repeat this sentence until it inhabits every cell—until my whole body knows that I understand, that I understand. That I hear it, feel it, sense it. That I know what it has lived through and still live through, often elegantly, nearly always silently, and sometimes madly, madly.

Dreamed I attended my own funeral. I looked good.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, if the suffering I’ve experienced will, somehow, be transmuted to beauty, to love, to healing—for myself or for anyone else. But tomorrow must come like kelp wrapping its lithe blades around marine life and glimmering bits of trash alike, and I must be there with it, bobbing at times, gasping for breath at times, wishing the water was colder or hotter or shallower or clearer and, much less often than I’d like, simply floating without fear in my heart, without terror in my mind.

Terror and awe. The lulling sounds of those words. Terror. Awe. Terror. Awe. A swing twitching in winter’s wind. A wooden metronome on an upright piano. Gauzy drapes sucked into and spit out of an open window.

I did not tar hope’s feathers.

Euphoric from the propofol used in this morning’s colonoscopy, I flop into bed to dream of cake and human kindness.

Wooden Cathedral

Why do I keep finding my words on your tongue?

Don’t quiet quit your life.

My mini-writing retreat ended up being a retreat from writing, one I needed.

Life: Losing a shoe and finding a sock.

Your studio is the middle of three, with a purple flagstone walkway and an image of a tree on the courtyard gate. Perfect. I’m on my way.

I keep listening to the Contagion soundtrack. Music for our times.

Brevity is the hallmark of someone who only writes on a smartphone.

All the ways things could have ended but haven’t.

I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.

I eat dark cake in the dark.

These days, writing retreats are just me in a room I don’t have to clean myself.

I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.

Woke from a nap looking like a combination of my mother, my sister, and The Elf on a Shelf.

I love every bird who is singing and every bird who is silent.

I feel like I swallowed a guillotine blade.

I’m not sure why, but I keep looking around stiffly as if I have a cast on my neck.

I suppose one can be at motion, as in standing on the cusp of it, as in looking onto or into.

In motion, not at motion.

My inconclusive heart. My errant clavicles. My wandering womb. My basted spleen. These parts of me at rest, at motion, steeped and parched. I thank them. I give thanks for them. I’m honored they’re here with me now.

I’ve just misread the phrase basted spleen as bastard spleen and bastion spleen. I’ve just typed spleen as sleep and peels. Dyslexia is my collaborator.

If the man who sexually assaulted me could see me now. He’d be so proud.

For those in Utah: Activism does not equal satanism.

The day I led you to a wooden cathedral in the field and, mid-air, hummingbirds flashed their jeweled feathers.

I was all typos this morning. Being wildly ill is affecting what my thumbsies do.

The wind’s blowing.

I found a little pie and ate it.

You don’t need someone to tell you the wind’s blowing.

I thought I could only raise my voice if others did the same. But they were silent. I had to raise my voice first, then they raised theirs.

My master of fine arts program offered free bonus coursework in trauma dissociation.

Imagine screaming for your life when trauma has its palm on your omohyoid muscle. And that trauma is other people. And they’re telling you to shut up. And they’re crushing your neck. And they’re calling it massage.

I’m at the weight-loss stage of my illness where people want me to eat anything: an exoskeleton, a hoof, teeth.

Ruin is my safe word.

Living in southern Utah means having a second chance at everything I did thirty years ago.

Let’s get some better language, folks.

But her emails, I say every time I send an email.

I never stopped writing when I left poetry. I just started composing elaborate Tweets and Instagram photo captions.

I don’t like it when the wind wheezes like a child with untreated asthma who’s just tried to run a fifty-yard dash.

The kind of wind that uproots thoughts.

Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.

Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.

If you don’t love me once you learn I’m nonbinary and sexually fluid, then you never loved me.

One large organism. That’s what we all are. When part of us dies, part of a whole dies.

All the earth ever wanted to be was the earth.

I hate the poem “The Mower,” by Philip Larkin. The hedgehog wouldn’t have died if the speaker had checked the lawn before mowing it.

You didn’t bring me back to life. You brought me back to a trauma state that I used to associate with living.

I’m listening to sad songs. They’re all sad songs.

I’m getting tired. This question just popped into my head: “If you were my sandwich, what kind of sandwich would you be?”

Note to selves.

I used to think the internet was an oracle. Now, I think it’s a monster.

And yet I think it’s beautiful.

I can totally write a single sentence and stop there. But why?

The trinity I knew was guilt, shame and fear.

Finding joy. It’s like holding an extinct bird in my hands.

And if the sun doesn’t come up, I will never die. Nothing will die. Not one person, not one idea, not a single living being. Even the earth will be safe from death.

Until the sun comes up, I’m rejecting death on every level. Death of the mind. Death of the spirit. Death of the body. Individual deaths. Collective deaths. The death of democracy. The death of polyvocality. All deaths fitted neatly inside another death like death nesting dolls.

Imp, quit saying “The End” to shut down conversations. You’re neither a child nor a god. Children think they control beginnings and endings. Gods, as we imagine them, may have that ability. You don’t. You’re just someone acting at once childlike and godlike, a putrid admixture.

A living being is a living being is a living being.

I’m trying to stay alive until the truth comes out, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.

Brands are people now. They act like people, interact like people, react like people, and are informed by people.

Brands are people now. They have an insecure attachment to us, and we have an insecure attachment to them.

Brands are people now. They talk to us as if they are our teachers, philosophers, sociologists, leaders, gurus.

Brands are people now. They self-consciously expose their psyches, including the marketing tricks they use to lure us in, to keep us in conversation with them, and to make us experience ourselves with and through them.

Brands like Steak-umm are people now. They assume a teacherly, philosophical role. They tell us exactly how they’re manipulating us and how we’re being manipulated by other brands. And we do what they predict. They can’t shake us.

But they can Steak-umm and bake us. Or maybe we’re just there for the baking (and the taking).

I love Steak-umm, by the way, it’s one of my dearest friends. Because brands are people now.

Brands are people now. They act unkind toward us. They act indifferent toward us. Spokespeople like Sarah Silverman explicitly tell us they don’t even care if we buy what they’re promoting.

Brands are so people now that I want to avoid them the way I avoid all people.

What are brands if not a conglomerate person that arises from the human tendencies, limitations and impulses of all the people creating any given brand? And where does our consciousness and brand consciousness begin and end? Do we know? Do you know?

Who are you wearing? I mean that blouse. Who designed your ottoman? Did you get it at Target? Studio McGee? Oh, I love that perfume. What a great car.

Brands have been people since people have been in the business of creating brands. But brands are meaner now. They’re just as cruel and indifferent and loathsome as we are, which means we’re getting meaner. I mean, that’s obvious, right? That we’re getting meaner.

And more cynical. Look at how cynical brands are. That’s a clue about how cynical we are. Because we’re all brands, and we’re all people. And brands are cynical people now.We’re not buying the world a Coke these days. And perfect harmony? Try cacophony. The brands are people, and they know it. They know how much trouble the world is in.

Brands! You used to make me feel safe. You gave me hope. You were like the lyrics to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” As a child, when I’d see you on television, you made me feel like I could live, like it would all get better.

You don’t know anymore, do you, brands? You don’t know if we can live, if things will all get better.

Brands, I believe every word you uttered when I was young. I got through being abused, being molested, being raped because of you. I got through all of it because of you. Now where are you? What kind of person have you become?

I know you don’t have any easy answers, brands. I know you’re scared, too. I know, I know. You’ve done your best. You were always a stand-in for religion and spirituality, for relics and icons and talismen. I know it was too much to ask of you. To play that role. To be all that.

Ace Hardware feels my feels. It just sent me an email that reads: “Let us help you.” Of all the brands, I believe Ace Hardware is the one that actually could help me. Ace isn’t cynical. It’s doesn’t antagonize. It doesn’t tell me my future is iffy at best. It doesn’t scare me.

In short, Ace Hardware is a good brand friend to have. But it’s not my best brand friend. Honestly, I think Ace is a little naive, especially these days. It has some things to learn about being a person-brand. I might need to seek out some new person-brands to befriend.

I would love to be a hippopotamus named Fritz.

I wish I could show off my feet and make someone love me.

No expression without digression.

Be inconvenient and all else will follow.

A picture of the hamster I had seventeen years ago came up today in my photo memories. I loved that hamster. Her name was Tater McGee. I’m a wreck now.

I need a better elevator pitch for telling people I’m not straight. Apparently, saying “I’m not straight” isn’t clear enough.

Imagine being dead for one hundred years and people still leaving books at your grave.

I feel the dead close. Closer than the living.

Water, water while away your sighs, spiral through my ridges. If today is a window, it’s a way out.

When I darken like wild rain in a quixotic moment, the shores of my life reluctant to wake.

When I see the sunset tethered, tamed. When I hear wood moving on a smooth creek.

The dock remembers water. I remember the feel of escape—dry as land, quiet as mercury stretched and spread and hardly here.

Across an afternoon, the boats away and away. I linger like a canyon, like someone’s love or lies.

Ruin.

Basalt: even darker after rain.

Listening to what screams outside in the deep dark.

Beauty, I can’t leave you.

Deep Crimes

I drove past the gorge and smell like the gorge.

All this land and yet no healing because of all these people.

I’m always moving inside the wrong water.

My local hardware store has a copy of The Iliad.

His mind is a gas burner that won’t light.

It’s like my clothes have been spending time on other people. They smell very good and not at all like me.

The burst of adrenaline that occurs shortly before someone destroys me.

Again, but without the pathologizing language.

Don’t make a long story longer by stating that it’s going to be a long story.

My wind is full of rocks.

Feel free to throw tomato soup on my poetry.

I used to think I was experiencing ennui. Turns out I just have a bad heart.

Mihi in odio est. It is hateful to me.

Do not give up. The earth needs our palliative care.

We live in a post-humane world.

Night of deep crimes. Day of mirage ceilings. During each, an orchestra of fire between my ears.

I’m some sound like a crow or crowbar, a cheap closet door fisted open.

Here, it’s an afterlife of branches and ancestors and hands on my shadows.

This autumn is unmetered, a dream of wind and shovels.

These ethics really get in the way of a good time.

They’re not unfriending you because they’re not paying attention to you.

You. Your tongue. Your bell-clap. Your drumming. Pull fistfuls of everything from my dress, my drawers.

Driving home, I blast rock music for the cows flanking the road.

Tonight, they got to hear AC/DC.

I met a Gila monster today.

My favorite hawk just ate my favorite lizard.

No Hands, No Eyes

I’m dealing with so much trauma that it’s been destabilizing twice now in the past year. I’ve lived with trauma and the sequelae of trauma my whole life, but learning more about my childhood trauma over the past twelve months has been too much for me to process, cope with, or even understand.

Being in Southern Utah triggered a deeper understanding of my trauma. It’s an extremely traumatized and traumatizing place. Living there was like living in a vivid dream, a scary one, one that showed me more than I could process about my childhood, my family, and my father. An alt-right extremist leader who crossed boundaries with her own students didn’t help. A seventy-year-old who sent me an inappropriate photo of himself didn’t help. A trucker who tried to solicit me for sex at a family restaurant didn’t help.

People’s behaviors were so unreal there that I felt like I was being gaslit all the time. Reality didn’t feel like reality. Things that happened on a daily basis were unfathomable.

Law enforcement being sexist, dismissive, and steeped in LDS beliefs and values didn’t help. The domestic violence center only doing phone intakes and scheduling those intakes three days out didn’t help. Their failure to keep their intake appointment with me didn’t help. Not having anyone believe me about any aspect of my trauma or the unfolding situation with my husband didn’t help.

Nothing helped. Nobody helped. Even my therapist violated ethical boundaries by touching me during sessions, almost like she was laying hands on me to remove trauma from my body. She said she could do so because she was also a licensed massage therapist. That’s not the case. She also proselytized heavily during our sessions, diagnosed my husband without seeing him or treating him as a patient, and told me to leave him. When I needed my therapist, she pushed me deeper into fear and exploited my vulnerable state to foist a religious message on me and to dictate what I should do with my life.

My husband didn’t get support, either. Not really. He was shoehorned into the same theocratic system as me. He got messages about the man being in charge, husbands monitoring what their wives do, and so forth. He got a message about everything I was perceiving being untrue. And that’s just not the case. I have legitimate concerns about my husband’s behaviors, including those that also pushed me deeper into fear.

I ended up having a brief reactive psychosis/mania twice, once in February and again in September. That can happen when current traumas are too much for me to bear and my whole complex PTSD web is activated. I’ve been dealing with far too much medical trauma, community trauma, and domestic trauma for far too long. It’s been more than two years since I developed long COVID and the slew of health diagnoses that followed. Two years since I started writing and speaking publicly about the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community in Southern Utah. Just under two years since so much more of my childhood trauma came to light. More than two years of solid stress with my husband, and before that the destabilization within our relationship that the pandemic caused.

I tried so hard to make things work in Utah, to find a place for my voice, my writing, for me as a person. I tried so hard to fight for others so they could also have a place in the community. I tried so hard to overcome diseases and conditions that leave most people homebound. I tried so hard to fight for my marriage and for my husband. I tried so hard to heal from traumas that I now fear I’ll never be able to heal from.

I don’t know what to do. I know I can’t go back to Utah. I know I’m too physically ill and too emotionally destabilized to make it on my own here in Oklahoma. I know I can’t leave my husband behind because he’ll languish in that environment, which he doesn’t deserve. Despite some of his behaviors, he also deserves a chance to grow and heal. I know major changes need to happen so I don’t panic, dissociate, and have brief psychosis every time something else happens that’s traumatizing.

I’ve really never been more terrified, day by day, moment by moment, second by second. My whole world is gone. My whole life is gone. I’m like the speaker in one of my poems who loses everything a little at a time until there’s nothing, not even hands with which to write or eyes with which to read.

To Gutting and Back

Wherever you find yourself, even if you find yourself lost, you can always map your way back with love, which is greater than any one man.

In parting, try to choose love. Because without it? What are you and what is anyone to you and why are you even on this glorious, broken Earth that we all need to share and share alike, not just with each other but with all living beings, all lands holy and desecrated, all trail leading out and out, away always away, but also back again.

I’m going home. I’m going home. Oklahoma, I’m coming home.

Take a little ride on my donkey, which is my surrey with the fringe on top, which is an American Airlines ticket and my seat in its belly. Don’t wail. I’ll be alright. We all will.

Nevermind. I don’t mind. I tried here. I really tried.

O as in zero, which is all, not none. I’ve said this all before. BefOre. Don’t you feel it here in Southern Utah, in our ore? Or …

O of want, that old bone Pinksy saw on the shore of his imagination. O of openness. O of passage.

No binaries or even trinaries. One. One. All one. AllOne. OneAll that reduces to our single sound, our collective O.

Yin yang. Here there. One space that is t/here. I’ve said this before. All of this before. BeforeAfter. T/hereT/here. LightDark. YinYinYangYang. Chitty chitty bang bang.

You’ve no choice if you choose to love. It does not tip the emotion wheel to one side, the one you like. Joy grows its roots in hell. Jung said that, or something like it. And grows its leaves in heaven.

Love is like just like that. We don’t have to know why. It’s precocious. It’s in the garden right now gleaning fallen pomegranates so others can eat, even birds, even slugs, even you.

Love scoops us clean and makes us more, more than whole, overfilled, stuffed.

To wreckage and back again.

To gutting and back again.

Because love is ruin. Love is ruin. All love leads to despair and back again to love, a Mobius strip, topological.

When we live through our deaths, we are reborn. When we live through the deaths of those we love, we die. Repeat. Repeat. Ad astra. Ad nauseum. Ad infinitum.

Despair: The hummingbirds have left. Joy: The white-crowned sparrows have returned.

I just got really excited about a cute pill sorter.

My heart is a grenade.

I love the land. I’m just tired of being with it all by myself.

Here we are in no-time, living with what seems sudden and what’s been moving within and between us for years, decades, generations.

Now, there aren’t even fireflies to distract and enchant. There’s only darkness, even in daylight.

How slow and fast it feels all at once: both like a river carving a valley and like a blinding cataclysmic event.

All was hope and promise, soft-bodied and flashing.

Words buzz through the air like the fireflies I watched for hours on summer nights in Oklahoma during my childhood.

None of this is right. None of this is love.

Some processes take so long time is imperceptible. Some events occur so quickly even words like “instant” can’t capture their speed.

I find your orientation toward time unhelpful.

May we hold each other’s shame with care until we realize there is no shame. Our delicate shame. Our gentle shame. Our terrified shame. May we gather around our collective shame like it’s a heart(h) where we can meet and greet it for what it is: s(h)ameness and name(less).*

* also known as love

My dog smells like the desert.

Currently, in Utah, people are screaming about California condors being released in the state. They don’t want any more “Californians” here. Sigh.

Sure, you’re free to denigrate one another, but why?

A short sentence came to me suddenly, as if uttered from afar.

I dressed and groomed myself gently, as if I was tending to someone else, someone I dearly loved.

The gorge was below, just as I knew it would be. The gorge that is a fact. The gorge that is an emotion. The gorge that is a process.

My MRI earlier this week reminded me of telephone dail tones. I’d completely forgotten about that sound.

It was all a sea: the river a sea, the sand sage a sea, conscience a sea that surrounded me, that surrounds every living being.

Remember when we didn’t know if someone had hung up on us until we heard the dreaded dial tone? We’d wait, hoping it wasn’t so, then the signal would start: callous, cold, indifferent.

One thing I won’t do: Go quietly.

I saw two cups and, in my haste, mistook them for a single cup. In my mis-taking, I divided my perceived single cup and suddenly had two cups again. But they were crucibles. Contaminated and useless. Each half couldn’t contain anything, not even contaminants, without the other. We are ore. We are bright, sometimes. We are chlorinated, sometimes. We are isotopes, sometimes, that glow hot like embers, like iodine-131 or it’s cousin, I-123.

Then the bots started controlling the narrative.

Boxcar Mama

My mother was named after a vaudeville dancer and circus performer. That performer also had a Pullman boxcar named after her. That means my mother was named both after the performer and after the Pullman car. So I can legitimately refer to my mother as Circus Mama, Vaudeville Mama, and Boxcar Mama.

I’m going use all three nicknames when referring to her.

My mother would absolutely adore these terms of endearment if she were still alive, especially Boxcar Mama. I can see her laughing and taking a drag off her Virginia Slim then tapping her too-long ashes into the amber-colored cut-crystal ashtray before picking up the cordless phone to call her two oldest children and let them know their little sister is at it again with the wordplay and, as a result, she will henceforth be known as Boxcar Mama.

Ikigai

Whenever I play chess with my body, it always wins by making me vomit or have diarrhea or both in a phenomenon I aptly refer to as diavomarrhea. Let me give you this example:

Me: Let’s go to sleep now, body. The second half of the night was hellacious. We really need to rest.

My Body: How about, instead … just hear me out … we have violent diarrhea all morning long? Hmm? How. [claps] About. [claps] That? [claps] Let’s to that. [Jumps up and down with glee]

And here’s the thing: My body never bluffs, ever. It’s down to destroy me. It really is.

Clare, last night I saw horses, more than a dozen of them. First, I saw the dust they were raising as they ran, then I heard their hooves on earth, that dry drumming, then I saw them through the trees just on the other side of the Virgin River. They weren’t wild but they had enough space to act wild. There they were in the sage and dry grass moving like the river when it’s boated, fluid like that and strong, wanting nothing but this moment, nothing but each other. Keep writing your horse poems, Clare. A horse is a heart outside the human body who reminds us we each carry a heart within us, one that beats like a hoof hitting dirt. We need horses more than ever. We need your poems.

I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.

Me: I’m going to stay up late. I do my best writing at night

Also Me: In bed at 9:29 p.m.

I’d rather be trampled by horses than trammeled by poets.

The word of the day is ikigai, the convergence of one’s personal passions, beliefs, values, and vocations, translated loosely as one’s reason for being. What’s your reason for being?

As long as there are poets, something will survive.

There are lots of ways to lose if your focus is love. Lots of ways to gain if your focus is power. Pay attention to what you’re losing and what you’re gaining.

Bleary, I just misread “The Middle Ages” as “The Middle Oranges.” Now, I can’t stop thinking about The Middle Oranges, that period in history that can be divided into Early Oranges, High Oranges, and Late Middle Oranges.

Maybe, in all those words Frank O’Hara wrote about orange, he said something about The Middle Oranges. We’ll never know, will we?

I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

— Frank O’Hara, from “Why I Am Not a Painter”

Gray wind. Gray branches. A horse on the hill and no ships in sight.

My suffering dies inside Ocean Vuong’s poems.

Lay it all aside and love.

To those who live with trauma: I’m glad you survived; I’m sorry you lived through what you lived through; I see you; I love you; I carry you in my heart.

It’s OK to buy blueberries and not eat them all. We all love imperfectly.

Morning: fire. Evening: fire. The first, literal, accidental, and brief. The second, metaphorical, intentional, and eternal.

Emotion is consistent. It’s only specific emotional states, which we perceive as separate from emotion as a whole, that are inconsistent. We learn that. We learn that we feel happy or sad or joyful or sorrowful or, or, or, ad nauseam. We cleave and cleave emotion until it’s all these little slices of pie sitting beside each other or across from each other. We’re doing the separating. We’re creating the binaries, the opposites. Emotion is emotion. It’s a whole. And, as a whole, it’s a constant.

I saw two cups and, in my haste, mistook them for a single cup. In my mis-taking, I divided my perceived single cup and suddenly had two cups again. But they were crucibles. Contaminated and useless. Each half couldn’t contain anything, not even contaminants, without the other. We are ore. We are bright, sometimes. We are chlorinated, sometimes. We are isotopes, sometimes, that glow hot like embers, like iodine-131 or its cousin, I-123.

Take a Message

So I’m ill again. The usual with a side of falling to the floor hard this evening when my lower extremities tightened and everything from my toes all the way to the middle of my thighs contorted until I looked like something with gnarled roots—maybe Donne’s mandrake—that had been unearthed and hosed off before being tossed to the ground until it could be transplanted elsewhere or fed to the wood chipper or cut into little slices as part of a fiber-filled culinary adventure.

I mean, I know I’m not fibrous. I’m meat and bone. But I’m doing an extended tree metaphor thing here, so just let me be fibrous for the purposes of this essay.

My floor routine went on for several excruciating minutes and I couldn’t get my legs under me and I couldn’t pull my legs and feet and toes back into their proper shapes and relationships with each other and I couldn’t massage the tension away and the pain was like someone had exposed me to a nerve toxin and I couldn’t reach my phone to call my husband for help and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he’d misplaced his phone and so I had to scream as loud as I could and don’t worry the neighbors never come when I do that and my husband burst into the room and found me splayed and broken like a cow that’s about to be scooped up from the fecal mud and dropped onto a truck headed for the rendering plant because she’s too sick to walk herself to her own death like all respectable—all good—girls should, even ones with spongiform encephalopathy.

I’m just working the cow metaphor with that encephalopathy reference. Don’t worry, I don’t have mad cow disease. My diseases have other names, and so far at least one has eluded naming. That disease is all experience, the way Hellen Keller’s whole world was before water ran over her fingers and forever changed the way her body and mind met the world.

Reuven Tsur talks about Keller in his theory of cognitive poetics. I’m not making baseless statements about her just to illustrate my point, so please don’t get all, You’re being ableist and using Hellen Keller to do your dirty ableist work, Karen. The name’s Dana, and I’m trying to tell you how bodies break and how we live in them anyway. I’m trying to tell you I took a little spill. I’m trying to put that spill in a larger context that some of you may find important. Bear with me. Bear down. Grin and bear it. I’m trying.

My husband panicked the way he does when he has to confront the fact that I’m seriously ill. He got me up off the floor, then went into a fugue state in which he forgot about everything other than his lost phone. He flitted around in flight mode looking for the phone because it’s easier to be upset about the phone than it is to live through more than two years of thinking your wife could die, on top of fifteen years of intermittently thinking your wife could die, let alone this very moment when you’re seeing more evidence of your wife’s potential death on the horizon or at least more data that suggests whatever’s going on with her isn’t going to go away any time soon, if ever. And what do you do with that as a spouse? How do you live with a splintered wife for the rest of your life?

I almost said upper thighs in the first paragraph of this essay, but we don’t have tiered thighs. We just have the one main set, one main set of thighs. It’s the way I also think I have two noses, when I just have the one nose with two nostrils and the way I always think I have two butts because I have two butt cheeks.

The body is confusing. Taking inventory isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At one point in American history, a window was considered a single pane within a larger window. So a window with six panes counted as six windows. Why? Taxes. Taxes were assessed per pane, so each pane became a window. At least I think that’s true. My rhetoric professor, Dan Mahala, told our class that in college. This was in the ’90s, when institutions still taught actual history—or at least tried to—not the ticky-tacky history being peddled today.

If U.S. politics applied to bodies—which of course it does, mainly those of women and trans and nonbinary folks, but bear with me again for the purposes of this essay—we might very well have been taught that we have two noses and two butts, especially if that meant we could be charged more for lugging all that flashy and fleshy gear around. Two butts! Two noses! How indulgent of you. One of each is subject to the luxury tax! You clearly have spares that are purely ornamental. (Don’t tell the tax collectors about the set of kidneys dangling in our trunks or the lungs or whatever else is doubled up in there like sets of animals shuffled onto a dingy for safekeeping during what looked to be the makings of a pretty big storm.)

All that contrived body taxation would be a real pane, wouldn’t it? I mean pain. And trust me, the body is definitely a pain.

But I digress. Who turns to stone? I’m asking because that’s what my body felt like today. Sisyphus, maybe. You could argue that pushing stones turns him into the very thing he’s pushing: Something that moves but that isn’t quite alive; someone whose stony but who isn’t quite mineral.

Demosthenes filled his mouth with stones to learn how to speak clearly. But that’s not the same thing as turning to stone.

Oh, I know, I know! It’s those who gaze into Medusa’s eyes!

Whose stare must I have returned to be cursed this evening? It must have been someone in my dreams. I’d just woken from a nap when the compacting began, soles first, a crushing invisible force making me denser and denser. I felt the hardening creep upward. The stiffening. The molecular tightening. I couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching a virus spread through a computer taking out file after file after beloved file and replacing them with junk code.

I realize I can’t make the stone metaphor work alongside my earlier tree metaphor. Adding the computer-virus reference is making things even worse. Let’s just acknowledge all of that and move on. I don’t have time to put the right slant on this truth. (My apologies to Emily Dickinson.) I’m sliding downhill, and everything I write is sliding with me. Besides, wood can turn to stone. I know. I’ve seen it. I have a chunk of opalized palmwood right here that makes my case for me.

That rock is science. It’s fact. And like science and fact, opalized palmwood is beautiful when you place it on a black light in a dark room. It looks like magic and could be passed off as such if your audience doesn’t know any better. A divining rock. A soothsayer’s stone. Not the soft, boring sandstone my body is becoming, the kind of stone miners here tossed to the side when looking for the good stuff like silver and uranium.

But guess what? I tricked you, and you didn’t know any better. Petrified wood isn’t stone. My science wasn’t science, and my facts weren’t facts. Here’s the truth. You ready: Though the phrase petrified wood or petrified tree comes from Ancient Greek πέτρα meaning “rock” or “stone,” literally “wood turned into stone,” petrification doesn’t change organic wood into stone. It merely preserves the wood’s shape and structural elements.

Sometimes language gets things wrong. Sometimes, even the Ancient Greeks got things wrong. Is it so hard to believe that sometimes we get things wrong? That we get things wrong most of the time, actually?

Maybe I’m not turning to stone. Maybe parts of me are just undergoing a change, being preserved. My shape. My structural elements.

My husband found his phone. It was in the garage. He went out there frantically looking for it like a prospector trying to lay claim to a seam of silver in a sandstone reef in a town called Silver City in the 1870s. He cast aside all the piled-up crap garages tend to take on as his world was reduced to two things: phone and not phone.

When he found his phone, the world made sense again. I was in a chair by that time live-tweeting the unfolding disaster. My upper body still worked, which meant I could be a writer and write things down. So I wrote things down just like Richard Siken says we should. What else would you have me do? Come unglued?

This is marriage. This, too, is marriage. Sometimes it’s broken. Sometimes there’s no diagnosing what’s wrong with it. Sometimes it’s all experience and no name and no remedy. Or maybe no remedy is needed because legs are not roots and flesh is not stone and a phone isn’t something jacked out of the Earth for profit or for prophets.

Sometimes a phone is just a phone, and we can use it to hear the voice of the person we love more than anyone else on the planet. Sometimes we can take that call. Sometimes we can’t no matter how much we want to. We just let it ring through to voicemail and hope the love of our life leaves us a message that we can receive when we’re ready.



Zion

Deliver me from the man who ran over a porcupine in broad daylight because of his need to thrust his way forward always forward always faster and always darker, coal smoke billowing from his tailpipe as he hits the gas hard.

Deliver me from that man who saw the porcupine struggling after his back legs were crushed, who didn’t stop, who didn’t take the porcupine to the wildlife rehab on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa, who didn’t care because black smoke because man because manly because grrrrr because move over here I come like it or not because get off of my road and out of my town and I’ll put my foot in your ass and I’ll mow you down I mean it I mean it look at me I really mean it look at my Gadson flag and my Dixie flag can’t you see I mean business look at my neck veins little lady, pretty little lady, lady why’s there a thought in your head a little tinkling thought about love that’s so silly so outdated so childish like a school bell hey little lady listen here it’s not God’s way for you to think or tell a man what to do a big man a strong man a fast man and you damned well know it so stop thinking just stop stop it right now.

Deliver me from what the porcupine must have felt there in the road on the hot asphalt in the heat so close to the soft sage flanking the road’s shoulder. He got so close but not close enough never close enough for speed for thrill for look I killed that varment woohoo hot damn and never enough blood left in the leaking husk never enough life left in the pressured heart and never enough limp left in the body nobody will ever gather for ever.

Deliver me from those who came after and also didn’t stop. The sedans and SUVS and minivans and trucks and semis and hatchbacks and Outbacks and Elements and motorcycles and RVs.

Deliver me from every one of them. Deliver me from my neighbors. They didn’t stop. They didn’t stop. My neighbors didn’t stop. Too busy doing God’s work to do God’s work.

Deliver me from my own absence as the porcupine struggled, for coming behind too late by hours, maybe, or maybe only by minutes which is even more self-hatred to be delivered from.

Deliver me from rewriting the story so I’m there, so I take the limp, quilled creature in my arms and usher him to safety, to people who care, to angels on this earth who spend all day helping the creatures of this earth. I almost typed heart. Heart is earth. Earth is heart. Same letters. How did I never see that before? Grief brings out glimmerings, doesn’t it? This is how and why we survive grief. No glimmering, no future. No heart in earth, no earth in our hearts.

Deliver me from those who have no earth in their hearts, no heart in their earths.

Deliver me from my revisions my impossible revisions my anger that story only takes us so far into the future because it never changes the past. Our stories are cursed that way as we are cursed.

Deliver me from the cursed. Deliver me from myself as one of the cursed. Curs-ed, say it with two syllables. Say it with me. Curs-ed. Clop along to that languid beat, that dirge. The march of what we’ll all be without love and without hope.

Deliver me from revisions existing only in our minds and not actually changing what happened, what really happened. The porcupine is dead. That’s what happened. In broad daylight. Visible on open road. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed. The driver could have slowed his hellbent smoke-infused take that world roll.

Deliver me from this iron-encrusted place whose heart was lost in the creek, in the canyons, up on the cliffs when … years, hours, minutes ago? How long? How long has it been? Since we came, since we named, since we shamed, since we couldn’t leave couldn’t leave couldn’t leave this place alone?

Deliver me from how long we’ve lived like this, baffled and battled and beaten and battered and branded and broken. How long must I writhe, I mean write, before I write my way out of this failing, flailing, hellish heaven on earth? A minute? An hour? A day? An eternity?

Zion—my great nephew, not the place—deliver me from this land whose name you carry in your pocket on your papers in your heart and in your genes. Yours is the real Zion. It lives inside you, little one. Never deliver me from who you are—from you, my kin, my kind, my kindred. [REDACTED] Pin me here to this tree, the only one that’s safe these days with all the fruit trees eaten bare. The family tree. My tree, our everlasting tree.

As for you, Zion—the place, not the great nephew—deliver me from you. Free me from you. Forget me. You don’t even have to forgive me. If you can’t reverse time and bring that porcupine back to life, if you can’t unwind the clocks that are all wound too tight here warping time and space and hearts and minds, then deliver me. I beseech you. Deliver me from what we’ve made you, from what you’ve become. Please deliver me.