Writing

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?

Viscosity

I wake with a wad of hair in my mouth, thinking about perception: its power in defining how we feel about situations and about people; its power in defining how we are perceived by people and how we come across in situations.

I slept hard. I dreamed hard. In one dream, a group of friends and I were asked to pass up and over a large mountain by way of an asphalt path. On the other side was knowledge. The scene was like an apocalyptic version of The Wizard of Oz. Instead of boulders, trees and greenery, we were surrounded by dark, featureless land, save for the mountain we were on. Instead of a yellow brick road, we walked on a path made from the sticky black material found in crude petroleum.

I have a relative who is a petroleum engineer. When I was a child, he gave me two glass bottles filled with oil. One represented the good oil. It was light, almost golden. The other represented the bad oil. It was dark, like blackstrap molasses. He explained what you could do with each type of oil, what they were good for. As he took a drag off his Marlboro, he explained how we wouldn’t have anything without oil, not even roads. Not even Vaseline. It’s in everything, he told me.

It was then that I perceived oil was a miracle, our miracle. We depended on it; society depended on it.

What this relative doesn’t know is how I would hold those bottles after he was gone, tip the liquid this way and that, judging the viscosity of each by how sluggish their movement was. One moved more like my father, darting quickly at any stimulation or in the face of any problem. The other moved more like my mother, who was slow to respond, slow to rise, slow to move across the room, often without pants on. She was also slow to dress.

How could I not marvel at something this relative gave me—these beautiful representations of the world we lived in and walked on and smeared on our chapped faces and the bottoms of babies. These beautiful representations of what, quite literally, allowed us all to move through the world, to float over it. To hover, to speed, to glide, to ride. Our family could not have had our days at the lake without oil. My mother could not have elongated her body on the speedboat for my father’s snapshots if we hadn’t had the gas to ride into the lake’s middle, where water and surrounding land could frame her.

Nothing on that lake was bad. It is the only place my family was a family. That boat was the only place where I had no fear, and saw no suffering. Until we caught a fish. Then the boat was all suffering. I saw something close to love on that boat, torn free from abuse, addiction and pain. In this way, my family depended on oil. We would not have existed as any kind of recognizable unit without it—both the oil needed to get us to the lake by way of car and the oil needed to suspend us above it by boat.

The bottles were marked with the name of my relative’s company, as well as drilling information. They were objects that stood as placeholders for who this relative was in the world, what he did. But they weren’t just that. For me, they represented love. He loved me enough to think of me, and to bring these bottles that represented him home to me. I could look at the bottles and remember who he was, and where he was, in the world. That he was out there, somewhere much safer than my home, and that he loved me, and that the roads I rode on were a way of being connected to him. Someday I, too, would be out there in the world, safe, perhaps loving someone who was trapped somewhere unsafe.

I started reading the labels of products I used, hoping to find “petrolatum” listed, just as he’d taught me to do. Every time I found that word, I would smile, having found another point of connection to him and his love.

The other day, I was with my partner at a poetry reading. The reading took place in an art gallery. There was a human art installation as part of the current show. I felt happy and safe in the space, and I was enjoying being out with my partner. Then I realized one of the women in the art installation—who was dressed in a costume and wearing a wig—is a poet with whom there is a history, and a deep dislike.

I was no longer in the same space. My heart began to race, I felt nauseated. I was ashamed to be there, didn’t want to be there anymore. The rest of the night was extremely uncomfortable. But what had changed? It’s not like this woman walked into the room, and I could argue that her appearance had palpably changed the room’s “vibe.” She had been there all along.

All that changed was my perception. Nothing else. This proved to me the power of perception and what it can do to our minds and bodies. If I could be happy in that space not knowing the woman was also there, I have the potential to be happy even when my perception shifts. But potential is only potential until it is realized.

Perceptions can change markedly over a lifetime, even if the actualities behind them do no shifting. The question is, what do we do with our shifting perceptions? How do we handle them? The relative who works in petroleum must have some reaction to a world whose relationship to oil is increasingly being called into question and in which more and more oil alternatives are being developed, even here in the oil-hungry United States, whose move to alternative fuels and technologies is as slow as a highly viscous crude oil.

As my relative moves along more and more paths over the globe looking for oil, does he still seethe when people make comments about its dangers and destructions, both to human life and the planet? Does he still rail against those who say we are running out of oil, defiantly stating that we will never run out?

My perceptions have changed during my own lifetime. I no longer believe a family is a family because of how it functions on a boat on a lake on the border between Texas and Oklahoma, aptly called Lake Texoma. What we are as a family depends on how we relate to one another every day—and includes what happens when nobody else is there to bear witness or keep our behaviors in check.

In the dream last night, the one where my friends and I were instructed to walk up over the mountain on our way to finding knowledge, I veered from the group and our issued instructions. I walked down and down to the base of the mountain. Around the back, it was open. The way it had been opened up, the mountain resembled a woman’s stomach and thighs. The opening resembled her partially gutted pelvis. It/she glowed red inside, as if the cavity was filled with blood.

I realized the red color was the glow of a giant fire. All around the base of the mountain were piles of trash and environmental waste. Some men were feeding refuse into the fire while other men stoked the flames. I asked one of them where the trash had come from. He gave no answer but instead told me that this was the real seat of knowledge, not the destination the path above the mountain led to, where the group and I were being steered.

Here is where you can learn everything about us, he said. Right here. He continued shoveling waste into the giant burning pelvis.

Suddenly someone appeared and yanked me back up to the path. When I rejoined the group, I tried to explain what I’d seen. They didn’t believe me. It’s just a mountain, they said. What are you talking about, they asked.

But my perception had been changed, and there was no changing it back. Wherever we were going, it had nothing to do with knowledge. We needed to go down, down.

my relative saw The Wizard of Oz, it was on a black-and-white TV. But something magical happened, he says. At the point where the movie turns from black and white to color, it did so on the television. For years, he insisted the movie turned to color, despite the fact that it was technically impossible for that to have happened.

Perception is everything. Perception is everything.

—

There are on average 2,600 oil spills per year. On average, 726 million gallons of oil are spilled annually. As of July 19, 2010, between 90 million and 170 million gallons of crude oil have been released into the Gulf as a result of the 2010 BP oil spill. But those are just numbers. I should say something about water, what it means to the body. I should say something about the body, how it yields to oil, succumbs.

First published at Poets for Living Waters.

Information Gathering

Last night I dreamed the librarians held hands and danced in circles and told me to put more grit in my poems.

When I get angsty, information gathering calms me down. As does putting cotton swabs in my ears.

I like certain things better than other things, and by things I mean people.

The public diction I once used seems foreign to me now, as if it is the imprint for a happiness I will never mold myself to again.

Attack my character and integrity once: Shame on you. Attack my character and integrity twice: Shame on me for allowing you do it again.

Character and integrity don’t really belong to me at all. Both are communally constructed, as are self and identity.

It’s interesting how the language of torture works its way into poetry, into everything.

There’s something vulgar about a sandwich whose bread is missing.

I am much more interested in studying people’s behaviors than being on the receiving end of those behaviors.

I fell down today and hurt myself. The fall was complicated and graceless.

My roller derby name: Sylvia’s Wrath.

Misread of the day: I care for impotent waiters.

My summary of status messages I’ve read this morning: I [insert verb] [insert direct object].

Once you realize your brilliance is a constant, the need to rush things will dissipate.

I wonder sometimes if rolling a radio onto a stage is better than writing the word “radio” on a page.

I have nothing to say about the radio that you can’t learn from a radio.

I would be a little nervous if people agreed with me.

My new boots are chick magnets.

Every time we write, it’s like a little bit of culture is extracted from the whole to stand on its own and say, Look at we think. Look at how we feel.

I aspire to virtual locality.

I’m not sure why poems need to make things clear. Why can’t poems make things muddy? Disorient as opposed to orient?

When the poem becomes strange, you know you might have something.

I feel like the read-write culture is going back to being the read-only culture because we figured out the read-write culture is just too much work—on everyone’s end.

I think clogs make my butt look smaller.

Poetry should aspire to be better than its authors.

Social media and digital communications allow us to communicate what we feel independent of feeling what we feel. Typing an emoticon smiley face might be an indicator or placeholder for a feeling that would lead us to smile, but it is often devoid of the actual feeling—a stand-in that serves only to fill space on the screen and to express to someone else an emotion that never took up residence in our bodies.

I would say I have been to hell and back over the past 6 years, but I am not quite sure yet about the “and back” part.

To open up the earth with a crowbar. To scale trees for their sacred fruits. To whisper Thank you, thank you only to hear no You are welcome. To drive elbow deep into whatever we think is ours.

To enter another day of “I” infesting our thoughts. To discern space with a dollar. To apologize, then do more wrong.

Today I measured time by switchbacks, not by minutes.

The triumph of the human spirit is in the striving, the very fact that we strive. It is not in the success or failure of that striving.

Time falls away inside breath.

It is in writing about nothing that we might stumble upon something.

Dana Guthrie Martin :: Now with more mobility and diminished functionality.

That’s it. No more robots in the living room. Period.

My husband tries to sneak little robots into every room, as if I won’t notice.

A gang of crows just flew by my window. Cackling, they have no respect for the sleepy. And I do mean gang, as in street gang. As in, deadly.

If I were oil, I would be crude oil. I would not be the light substance we covet and over which we are willing to compromise ourselves and the earth.

There are too many people in my spanking machine. I think it’s broken. Everyone is just sitting in it having drinks and socializing as if it’s a lounge.

A friend said I would be happier If I valued things beyond people’s mistakes and flaws. Making note of and valuing are not the same thing.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you need to accept them and what they do to you in order to be happy.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you where your happiness lies. Don’t ever let anyone make the assumption that you are, or are not, happy.

Interrogate the word happy. Interrogate the assumptions of others. Interrogate everything.

Interrogate the word value, and define for yourself what your values are. Don’t let anyone tell you what you do or do not.

The impulse to create is merely the impulse to live—not the impulse to live well.

What have you accomplished today? What have you accompliced today?

Sometimes people make so many requests of us that we no longer feel like human beings but instead like walking task lists.

Looking for the topic sentence in this essay is like looking for an Easter egg on Halloween.

My process for writing is to write things down.

My defense: They were 50 percent off, so I got 4,700 percent more than I needed.

Sometimes when you see something a certain way, someone will come along and tell you your perceptions are wrong. Please remember you are under no obligation to alter your perceptions on this basis of another’s.

If as Foucault states the soul is a product of culture, that explains why we re-create the culture we know in those potentially revolutionary moments where we are able to remove ourselves from what “is.” Rather than creating something new, we revert to the culture we know not out of habit or because we can’t conceive of something else but because we must re-create what “was”—and in doing so re-create our souls. We are bringing our souls back into being, from the nothingness that threatens to consume them.

If the poem is going to have a chance, we must energize the paper.

I want to unfold everything and see what it—all

Little Universes

We share nothing but our humanity. And sometimes we share our lunch.

My implosion is my confession.

Sometimes the slow dance of poetry needs to pick up its tempo—or change tunes entirely.

Who says poetry is the best way to communicate? It is probably the worst way. Depending on how you define “poetry.” And “worst.” And “is.”

When we say, “There you have it,” we rarely know where “there” is or what “it” is.

I’m waiting for the day I fall on my face—then I’ll have an excuse for getting a nose job.

I’ve reached the existential moment where the question “How can I do the most good?” has been replaced by “How can I do the least harm?”

I looked at my poetry today and felt lonely, alone. Then I thought, “Yes, this is how it’s supposed to feel.”

If public libraries want to be relevant, they need to identify and address issues relevant to their communities, not hide from those issues.

I like books because they age with me.

I am more interested in curating content than creating it.

My preoccupations betray my privilege.

Clever is the new dull.

My not watching TV has its advantages: It keeps nonsense framed as just that, instead of giving it a sense of meaning.

Geeky T-shirt I want to have made: “Don’t blame me. Blame my social network.”

As soon as I see an ampersand in a poem, I stop reading.

I love libraries because you can find books you like—and walk away with them.

When poets are no longer relevant, they construct little universes in which they appear to be.

When reading Pablo Neruda, one might forget that the past tense exists.

A dark planet is not the solution; a sustainably illuminated one is.