Writing

Origins

When I was young, a small town swallowed me whole. Now, I can swallow a small town whole.

Writing a poem is like walking a dog: It stops a lot when you want it to keep going, and if you’re not careful it will shit on your feet.

We have to stop assuming God is a capitalist who wants us all the be rich.

Go froth and conquer.

I am convinced we are less interested in saying something original than in saying something that has origins.

This poet generates a simple, random sentence.

One of the criteria I had for culling my Facebook contacts this morning was: If I saw you in public, would I hide from you? If I answered no to that question, you are still here.

I just misread the phrase Candid Camera as Candida Camera.

I derive my power in part from the fact that you don’t know what I am capable of, but I do know what you are capable of.

Two Sides

Weird things poets say: You’re not allowed to have an original voice unless we know who you are.

While editing, I misread edit as idiot.

Finally, I understand why I turn to poets.

From the Walla Walla Freecycle list: Looking for bottom half of mannequin or above the shoulders.

I’m so unsettled I feel like a Henry Darger painting.

There are two sides to me: one dark, one darker.

So much about religious interpretation seems to be about making sure women don’t give men a hard on.

Meditation realization of the day: Time does not exist in order for me to be productive.

Poems are like orgasms: never as good as we imagine they will be.

Your ignorance is not my bliss.

She Just Doesn’t See

I want to talk about touch, how it’s the only sense I fully trust. When I doubt my ears, my eyes, or both, I find the world with my fingers, skin and lips.

I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear.

I work puzzles by going over the edges of one piece with my forefinger and thumb as I hunt for the matching piece on the table. My eyes pick out the inverse of what my fingers feel, as if my hands and eyes together are what someone else’s eyes are without assistance from a secondary sense.

I have routinely felt my way over a new lover’s body with my face, chest and tongue. It was nearly always a sensual experience. But it was also a sensual experience—a way of learning, through touch, if this was a person I wanted in my life. I’ve even used my eyelashes to find out what my ears and eyes could not tell me about a partner.

For more than a decade, I felt my way through music. I started by opening the faux velvet-lined case of my new flute and running my fingers over its perfect, machine-made nickel keys. It took me days to bring the mouthpiece to my lower lip. Taking the instrument in with my fingertips was all I wanted or needed during those first encounters.

I am convinced, now, that I could have kept playing the flute if the notes had not been named after letters of the alphabet. I believe this connection caused my visual dyslexia to leak into my fingers, tangling them up like the piece of driftwood my father proudly displayed in our front flowerbed. I would play the note I had come to know as “E,” and my fingers would try to play the note I had come to know as “F,” most likely because capital E and capital F look very similar.

I made it a long way with music despite my dyslexia, most likely because touch was involved. When I relaxed my mind enough, to the extent that I felt I was no longer in my body, the notes became what they were: whole and pure sounds that represented, but could not be extracted from, the universe—sounds unadulterated by our arbitrary assignation to them of letters or our perverted desire to pull them apart the way a curious child might want to pull the wings off a living dragonfly.

I loved music enough to take it as far as I could. And now I know why, in the end, I had to set it aside. There was nothing more I could do. No matter how much I practiced or how hard I tried, I was never going to have perfect, or even relative, pitch—and I was never going to get my fingers right 100 percent of the time.

(When creating music, you only have one chance to position your fingers and mouth. If you miss that synchronicity, you sound the wrong note—or a disastrously shrill noise that lies between notes and is not unlike the wheeze I imagine being emitted by a bird shot in the throat. Composing with words is much more forgiving because you can backtrack and change mistakes or, when speaking, you can pause—and it’s OK because there’s no tempo or conductor or orchestra mercilessly driving you forward.)

There was also the matter of listening, of hearing. I was unable to separate chords into individual tones, a requirement of my ear training classes. I was also unable to hear any tonal progressions, save for the perfect fourth and minor second, the former popularized by “Here Comes the Bride,” the latter by the theme song for “Jaws.” Even with this imprinting, there were days when the perfect fourth and minor second were beyond me. I couldn’t hear them in my head, let alone give them voice.

While I feel a renewed sense of mourning with regard to my loss of music, knowing it was my dyslexia that held me back, I also feel more indebted to music than ever. I am certain that when I set music aside and gravitated to writing and literature, I recruited the musical pathways in my brain to handle all the reading, writing, speaking, and other visual and auditory processing my new interests demanded. I believe my ability to hear the rhythm and tonality of texts is an outgrowth of my language pathways taking up residence in my musical pathways. Sure, it’s a little awkward, kind of like steering a ship along a set of railroad tracks, but it’s working for me. Somehow, it’s been working for decades, without my even knowing that my ship was, in fact, on a set of railroad tracks, and that those tracks were not submerged in water.

In some ways, my heart wants to break where music is concerned. Look what it did for me. Look what it gave me, asking nothing in return. All so that, one day, I would be able to speak. And write. And keep speaking and writing. And to keep singing my tone-deaf song, my ugly little song that feels more precious than ever to me, the imperfect song that connects me back to my mother as if she and I are two diminished seventh chords standing side by side on a treble clef.

And there she is. I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear from Anthony’s department store, humming “The Girl from Ipanema”:

Tall and tan and young and lovely, / The girl from Ipanema goes walking, And when she passes / I smile, but she doesn’t see, / She just doesn’t see, No she doesn’t see

And I see my mother now. And I sing for my mother now. And I write for her now. And now her voice is my voice. And now I know her mind—one that always put the cereal in the refrigerator, that couldn’t balance the checkbook, that never wrote anything by hand, that loved to talk but not to read.

And I have her mind. And I am not sorry. And if I could reach out and touch her, I would. I would hold her hand and tell her it’s OK that she gave me this wiring, and I would sing her a lullaby and urge her to rest, just rest, and to please not worry about me anymore.

Controlled Falling

Soon we will come to see ourselves not as sentient beings but as digital beings.

One of my neighbors is a rooster.

Awkward Moments at Work: Misread Query Policy as Queer Policy in company manual.

There are people you pass the time with and people you spend your time with.

I think that, by being here, I might be trying to disappear, a little.

Search term that led someone to my site: conform my identity to time-related expectations of others.

Inside money is omen.

I work very hard at things I set my mind to. I work even harder at things I set my heart to.

Tonight, Walla Walla is hurting me. But at the same time, Walla Walla is comforting me. In this way, Walla Walla is a lot like my mother.

Living is controlled failing.

Amazed

I am not just leaving Seattle. I am leaving a life that I have not understood for a long time: one that has not represented who I am, who I am becoming or who I want, ultimately, to be.

Be a person who can say wow, someone who can be amazed. Be amazed today. Repeatedly.

What we believe we will see informs what we will see. What we believe we will think informs what we will think. What we believe we will feel informs what we will feel.

I want you to ache.

I passed a donkey on my way home tonight.

Driving to Seattle for the weekend last night, I passed Hanford as the sun was setting. The telephone lines in the area always remind me of crosses, grave markers.

I feel safe knowing where all the poets are right now, and that they are on the other side of the continent from me. AWP is like my ADT security system, protecting me from unwanted poet intrusions.

How I ache for land that has been abused, neglected and forgotten.

Tonight, I saw a dozen horses crowding one another on a small hill.

Since passing the Hanford site tonight, I can’t stop thinking about the Hanford site.

Until I Return Home

You travel on until you return home; you live on until you return to earth.

— Ethiopian Proverb

I want to tell you about the land in Oklahoma, how it was often impenetrable, how it did not rain for days that stretched into months, until adults started using the word “drought.” I did not know what the word meant, but I knew it did not sound good and nobody looked happy when they said it, therefore it could not be a word that stood for something good.

I want to tell you that we lived without water the way some live without light, that we took this as normal, that water was rationed, and that my father, being a god, had men drill deep into the land until they hit water. The water would become ours and we would call it well water and say it came from our very own well. I would tell my parched schoolmates that I had a well, welled up with satisfaction at having something they did not have because their fathers were not gods like mine. Mine had made something of nothing and refused to let nature dictate our family’s circumstances.

I want to tell you how my father, with his own hands and his nitrogen fertilizers, used our well water to grow a lush area of green that encircled our house. And then the earth was softer, and then I could drive my index finger down into it after parting the thick mat of grass. And somewhere along the line, I learned the word “aerate,” though my father pronounced it with nearly three syllables, not two. He leaned into the first syllable the way I had seen him lean into his tiller when he was preparing the garden for planting. I did not feel I was hurting the soil when I pushed my finger into it; I felt I was aerating it—which seemed to be a word akin to the word healing.

I want to tell you how I ached for the land farther south in Oklahoma, how I watched and watched every time we drove down I-35, trying to find the precise point where the soil turned from brown to rust red.

I want to tell you how much harder this soil was, the soil both my parents came from, and how dry. And when it cracked, it split open in shapes like the lines on the backs of my father’s hands, the same shapes I now see in my own hands. And I always felt sorry for the cracked soil because I could see how the shapes fit together and wanted to be together, not apart.

I want to tell you that my family warned me about this red soil, how it clung and refused to come out, even in the wash. But with time, I wanted it to cover me, to mark me as its own, a sign that I was from Oklahoma the way my parents were from Oklahoma. Near Buncombe Creek, I entered the water of Lake Texoma and let it leave a layer of rust on my suit and skin when I emerged. “Here, here,” the residue seemed to say. “Here is where you belong.”

I want to tell you that I gave myself over to that soil repeatedly, and that I made a pact to never leave it. I want to tell you that it hurts every day to know I will never set foot in my father’s yard again, let alone lie alongside the soil using my hands to care for it. And I will never give myself to the iron-rich soil that spreads over the southern part of the state, not in the same way. How could I? I have had other places in my blood, on my body. I have other lands in my future, not yet explored. Still, I long for my home, for my earth. I long to return.

Mismatched

If I were in a gang, my gang name would be The Bloodjet.

Today, I am trying to work out what bothers me most. I think it might be systems.

I try friendships on like clothing, and find most of them too small—or their overall effect unflattering.

My husband is going to find me locked in here with all this cake.

All my shames are mismatched.

The capacity animals have to trust, even after enduring unthinkable suffering and abuse, simply astounds me.

Staring out this window has everything to do with learning something about my life, and about living.

I just misread the words living room as Mignon, and now I miss my mother.

It is with the first look in a mirror that we come to know ourselves as a thing, as an object, and as something that—inexplicably—exists both inside and outside of us.

It is when we forget who bakes our bread, who processes our waste, who maintains our water lines, who buries our dead—it is when these people become anonymous that we can live inside the delusion that we have no attachments, no dependence, on others.

Living is controlled falling.

I am tired of egocasting: I want to write something else, read something else.

In the end, even our feces is turned into a commodity. We can’t take a shit without being sold.

I awake, reminded again of our dimity convictions and freckled human nature. So it is; so we are.

The signifier and the signified enjoy no relationship other than the one we impose through language. That bond can be broken as soon as perception is broken, challenged.

At first I felt like a trinket. For a while I felt like a person. Later I felt like a freak.

Search term that led someone to my site: senile warts and irritable bowel syndrome.

When I am an old woman I shall wear people.

Tomorrow, something will happen.

I am the voice of unreason.

I rise and greet this broken nose of a day.

They are coming to take my weekend—the minutes and the hours. I just know it.

This idea that everything must be solid, that everything must last forever, I think it’s misguided.

It seems to me that we are more committed to our own suffering than we are to just about anything else.

Whole relationships these days are representational rather than experiential.

You don’t need surgery to figure out the heart.

I am tired of encountering ossified minds.

I made a paper angel out of my trash. Jon made a square snowflake.

I feel small and dull and flawed.

Writers don’t have secrets; secrets have writers.

Rendered

I want to sell books labeled “self-help” so I will have no obligations to research, accuracy or integrity.

I think I have my day on inside out.

Craigslist want ad: Great Pay to $0K Immediate. Hey, they’re advertising my job!

Please think about what you say before you go splatting it all over the place like explosive diarrhea in an elevator at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas.

I love fast computers the way some people love fast cars.

The only thing worse than being around one awkward person is being around more than one awkward person.

How I feel: like I was invited to a party only to be sent home upon arrival for wearing the wrong dress.

It is only once we are rendered useless that we may come to know how much we are, or are not, loved.

I don’t think I have a reading disorder; I think I have a reading disease.

I want to be a painting. I don’t mean I want to be painted. I mean I want to be a painting. I think it would be nice: everyone looking at me and no expectation that I do anything in return.

Dear Hands, How did you manage to change the word glad into gonad in the email you just sent? Love, Dana

If I came with a dislike button, a lot of people would push it.

Everything I am doing right now is in the spirit of questioning and exploration. Deal with it.

My defense: They were 67 percent off, so I got 5,900 percent more than I needed.

Make love not waste.

Life is a lottery ticket, and most of us are losers.

I am fluent in two languages: English and LOLcat.

I have tried my entire life to dispense with any sense of urgency.

Soon we won’t even speak. We will simply mediate one another’s lives.

Nothing draws attention like attention.

Everything that can be turned into a word can exist in language.

Blowing out the candle isn’t going to help if the house is already on fire.

Loving me is the first step toward hating me.

I no longer have friends; I have personal associates.

Spent all day figuring out the story of my trash.

If people came with a dislike button, I would push it a lot.

When I was young, I was alone but wanted to have friends. Now, I have friends but want to be alone.

I have Barry White and 53 cans of Coca-Cola on this snowed-in Thanksgiving. What more could I want?

Another dead varied thrush at my house. Fell out of the sky, faulty. A man, a witness, walked into my driveway, picked up the bird and brushed snow off its feathers. He turned the bird, examined its body. Satisfied, he gave it a heave-ho into the air. The thrush flew, feebly, in the shape of an upside-down “U” drawn by a drunk’s hand, then went, clean, into a drift of snow—a missile leaving a bird-shaped hole.

Last night, I misread a line from one of Elizabeth Colen’s poems as: Here we take mattresses into our own hands. I was all, Wow. It’s like she really knows my family.

Decorative Tassels

If you’re going to say something, say something that’s worth repeating.

We are hurt. We are healed. We hurt. We heal.

I feel so basic, like a Yugo.

As the days become colder, I feel my heart warming up.

What we all want, more than anything, is meaning.

If I started talking about love and light and peace and healing, would that freak you out?

These decorative tassels are not the boss of me.

I will not be governed by metronome or meter.

Suddenly there is a dump truck in my driveway and a woman yelling in Thai.

What would we not worship or covet simply because of its materiality.

One cannot live in a heartless world without something that has a heart.

My tap water smells like a dog I once loved.

I have no idea how I went from a sleeping to a waking state today. One moment I was in bed. The next, I was standing in front of a full-length mirror wearing jeans and a bra, worrying about the state of my abdomen.

Quigly “Dubious” Terrington likes the smell of peanut butter.

Now that I have a hamster and two hermit crabs, who isn’t going to want to be my friend?

The world is full of poets with bold moves and bad manners.

I read language as if looking through branches.

I am not here to write things that will make you feel comfortable.

I am coming to believe the only person I was/am meant to converse with is my dead mother: Everyone else was/is just a stand-in.

I might start talking again sogon. To the living, that is.

I am busy removing the pleats from my invisibility cloak. They make me look bulky, even though I am invisible.

For every “discovery” you make, you leave hundreds, if not thousands, unearthed.

To provide effective customer service, one must work the library as if they are working the room at a party. Only without the alcohol.

Oh look. You made spam email into a poem. How original.

No, this is not something I normally do. It’s something I abnormally do. Thanks for allowing me to clarify.

I think the entire field of public librarianship needs to be put in the spanking machine.

My husband just aptly described my modus operendi: You hold happiness hostage, and then you steal all the candy.

No matter how many rituals I employ to frame, contain and contextualize my day, nothing negates the futility of existence.

If everything is futile, why do we continue? I think it is because someone told us we could love one another.

I think what I want more than anything is to have an open heart.

If I know when you’ve been naughty or nice, does that make me Santa Claus or God. I can’t remember.

Twitter’s Who to Follow suggestions should be renamed Who to Avoid.

I want to be open to wide views and visionary dimensions that can be fantastic, but not deformed.

To my credit, at every phase of my life, I have surrounded myself with those who are more talented than I am.

I am staring out the window, waiting for my husband to come home and walk me.

People say I’m just like my father: a pistol. Too bad I’m not loaded.

I have a passion that is greater than you.

When one cannot issue orders, one becomes adept at offering suggestions.

Because I could not disagree, I remained silent. This was the first step in the occupation of my life.

I remember touching David Lynch: His skin was soft and cold, like a Vietnamese spring roll.

Another Matter

It is from word groupings that don’t make immediate sense that a kind of sense arises, in part created by the reader. The beauty of this kind of sense is that it shifts, depending on the reader and the given reading by any one reader. What was on one reading might not be on the next.

When people ask me where my family is from, I should say, They are from the soil, and they have returned to the soil.

Poems will trap you if you don’t trap them first.

Creating a network of writers is easy; creating a network of readers is another matter entirely.

There is no answer to ‘Who am I?’ because nobody exists independently, but rather each of us exists only through everyone else. And who can understand everyone else? — modification of a Shunryu Suzuki-roshion quote

Dana Guthrie Martin: A self-taught being of the human variety who enhances her existence with various starting points and no end points.

Do you know what it means to unironize the word faith?

Sure, I’ll pray to the sunset. What harm could that do?

This sky is making me sad and beautiful.

How much of what we think and feel collectively dies with us individually?