Writing

Seedbox

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

We increasingly live in boxes and in boxes inside boxes.

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

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

Trees, same deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This essay initially appeared on Facebook.

Propel Disability Book Series

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

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

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

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

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

Slugs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All You Can Handle

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

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

Goojigoo

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping Count

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

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

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

Breaker

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

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

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

On and Off the Page

What my last post is leading me to is the understanding that I matter, meaning my voice matters, my perspective matters, my experiences matter, and my identity matters. That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. Reading Andrea Gibson all day yesterday led me here, to a place where I can say That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. In my case, those are easy words to say but hard ones to believe.

What’s also true is that I have a new intersection to consider, one that will guide me as I continue to share my poetry. I want to find publishers who like my work and also want to support my being in poetry. I want my voice, perspective, experiences, and identity to matter to those publishers, not just the work that stems from those things. This is especially important as I try to find homes for my manuscripts.

Right now, I feel that level of support from several publishers, including Chiron Review, Meat for Tea (both the review and the press), Moon in the Rye Press, The Nomad, ONE ART, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Each feels like it’s saying why I write what I write matters, not just what I write. Given what I’ve come through in poetry and in life, that’s important to me.

I don’t want to publish with folks who dislike me or just tolerate me. Once they know a little bit about who I am, I want them to feel like it’s important to include me in poetry, on and off the page.

Hi, I’m Dana

Hi, I’m Dana. You may wonder how I got myself into this situation. Not really. That’s just a silly introduction. Speaking of which, consider this my introduction post.

For starters, I’m trans, specifically nonbinary, also known as enby. I’m queer, specifically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That’s been shifting over the course of my life, but I’ve mostly landed on asexual with hints of bambisexuality.

I’m female-bodied and am treated like a female—at least in terms of what we’ve collectively decided female-bodied and female mean—including the very not good ways those perceived to be female are treated. In college, I largely wore tuxedos I found at thrift stores, and I had short, blond, young Mary Stuart Masterson hair. That’s the only period in which I was routinely mistaken for a boy, a little English schoolboy to be precise.

What you don’t know is that I’m in drag all the time, and I like it. The man in me likes it a lot but would also like a beard and a man bun and to be totally ripped, which is how I came to marry the man I wanted to be, who eventually lost his hair, so no man bun, but who has a beard that makes him a total snacc and who also has nice guns. I mean whatever those arm muscles are, of course. We are gun-free people. Biceps. I think that’s what I mean.

I live with complex trauma. I’ve experienced abuse and violence on too many occasions for me to count, in part because I have dyscalculia, as you’ll learn below.

I live with bipolar. I’ve known the world through the lens of psychosis, though only for a tiny fraction of my days, thus far, on Earth. That lens has taught me a great deal about terror and its origins but also about love and its origins. Extreme states are extreme but not without meaning. We are meaning-making creatures, after all. We do what we can with what we’re given.

I was given words, which is a tremendous thing. I took them, actually. They weren’t given to me. You’re about to learn about my dyslexia. What that means is language was a fight, and I fought for it. That’s why I won’t give it up again, not even when poets and writers and the systems they inhabit behave badly.

I have learning disabilities, including dyslexia and dyscalculia. (I told you I was about to talk about them.) My spatial reasoning skills are top-notch. I’ve been tested. But my body in space is another matter entirely. I knock about is what I do. I’m dizzy a lot. I fall, literally. I get up.

I just read dizzy as fizzy because of my dyslexia. That’s funny. The idea of being fizzy is a hoot.

When I was younger, I could do calculus but cannot count well at all ever, which is how I once ended up in trouble with the IRS because of how I subtracted something I should have added. They were very prickly about it. I’m not an institutionalist, but I didn’t like being treated like I was trying to rip off an institution, either. My father was a crook. I’m sensitive about being accused of similar behavior.

I’m neurodivergent in other ways and not about to give up that label because some folks in the communities I inhabit don’t like it. I’ve started using a Hannah Gadsby voice as I type this, just to illustrate one of the many ways in which my neurodiversity makes itself known, even if only to me. This introduction is a lot funnier in that voice. I like the idea of Gadsby being here with me right now. It’s been a hard night. Let’s get Andrea Gibson in here, too. There. Do you feel that? They’re the keto bread to my plant-based, thinly sliced protein, but not in a Bambi way, just in a support-system sandwich way. Nom nom nom.

Most of my name is not what I was born with. My other names are my dead names. My legal name serves me better, represents me better. I may not be able to vote because I changed my name and not because I got married to the man I wanted to be. He’s a good life partner after more than three decades of trying. I’m a good life partner, too. I’m serious. I’m not even sure I want to be him anymore. These days, I’m busy being, and becoming, me.

I forgot to tell you about all my medical issues, including rare diseases that pedal wave inside me like various and sundry nudibranches. Just imagine them like that, not like what some of them actually are, which is life-threatening.

Oh, and I’m a flutist, essayist, poet, birder, and weaver who loves the world and all living beings, which is why I’m so damn vocal about everything. I’m bound to frustrate you, confuse you, or piss you off at some point if you don’t beat me to the punch. Some of those frictions will be superficial. Others may cause deeper wounds.

That’s it. Me in a nutshell. My story or my personal brand or whatever. This is the poet you’re supporting if you support me. I think I’m worth supporting, so give it a go.

Fuck Sanism in the Writing Community

I just read one of the most sanist, ableist things I’ve ever seen on Facebook. I am awake and alone and it’s the middle of the night and why do I even try is all I can think. Why do I try when it makes no difference? When folks like me are detested, seen as less than human, when everyone piles on as soon as one person gives the green light to do so?

I don’t know what to say. I am crying and shaking. The person, a writer with whom I share almost 250 mutual friends, is upset because his friend is experiencing psychosis. Folks should read his post and his comments and the comments others have made. Then they should set their own biases aside and imagine someone talking about them that way.

I left my own response in the comments, which I’m sharing below. Fuck sanism. Fuck it. We deserve better, especially from our fellow writers. This writer is wrong. He’s doing immeasurable primary and secondary harm.

—

I’m an advocate for those with mental-health issues and have lived experience myself. I know you’re upset, but I encourage you to find your own center here and situate yourself within a framework of understanding and compassion.

I don’t always love NAMI, but they have support lines for loved ones who are dealing with situations like the one your friend, and by extension you, are going through. You can call them day or night. I encourage you to do so before you do secondary harm to others, like me, who are reading your words and feeling your disgust and hatred for folks like us.

If you wouldn’t say it about a cancer patient, don’t say it about someone experiencing psychosis. It’s dehumanizing and may take someone’s last hope and remaining dignity away. Your words are doing that for me right now. I’ve survived a lot. I’m in tears. You’re saying the part out loud that everyone thinks about us no matter who we are, what we do, what we accomplish, or how much we try to educate others through art and advocacy.