This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.
And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.
This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.
These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.
In a world of ribosomes (poets) crowding the nucleus (poetry establishment), live reeflike as the smooth endoplasmic recticulum on the outskirts of the cell. This is where synthesis happens, and much-needed detoxification.
Shown: Image of a cell I altered so the labels apply to poets and poetry: Establishment Poetry, Barrier, Poets Girdling Establishment Poetry, Reeflike Synthesizing and Detoxifying Poets.
More notes on how and why I’m at an impasse with poetry. I’m amending my previous statement about my poetry and writing not being strong enough to continue with either. I think both are strong but that my poetry in particular is not aligned with what editors and publishers are looking for and that shaping my work so it’s better aligned with what contemporary editors want will destroy something fundamental in the work, in the process, and in my healing.
I don’t want to slot my poems into this or that mold. I don’t even want to be aware of what the molds are. Poetry is as much about breaking molds as honoring those that have a history of serving poems and their readers well, even if it’s just because familiar molds create one less barrier for the reader. But new molds do something for the reader as well, and for the poet. And barriers aren’t always a bad thing. Some of the most rewarding poems require thoughtful consideration on the part of the reader. New molds are important and shouldn’t be rejected because they’re unfamiliar. Not everything new is bad. Not every outsider poet has no idea what they’re doing.
The highly endogenous nature of poetry doesn’t always serve poetry well, as folks tend to gravitate to the names they know and the styles of poetry that sound a lot like the other poems they’ve been reading. How many voices are being missed? My guess is a lot.
I think poetry has moved in some disconcerting directions in the past few years in terms of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed, which extends to which voices are included and which are excluded. I’m not down with any of that. I’m down to write—and to write from my embodied self as it relates to the world. I don’t want to see my work altered to the point of being unrecognizable so that it can get published. What use do I have for a poem that doesn’t look or feel like me anymore? I don’t want to see my work or my life or my mother’s life gutted for the sake of having an easier or more palatable or less complicated poem or understanding of the world or understadning of things like psychosis.
I also recognize that if I had more talent or if my poems were challenging in the right ways (whatever that means), there would have been some evidence of it by now. That evidence doesn’t exist. As I move into my mid-50s, I have to consider what I’ve invested in poetry over the past three decades and whether I can continue to invest in it. Workshop fees, contest fees, manuscript reviews, submission fees, and more add up, as does traveling to read my work, assuming I could even get an invitation to read anywhere. I don’t have the time, energy, or health to keep up with the financial and other demands of poetry, all while waiting years for something, anything, to happen.
Then there’s the sexual assault I’ve talked about more than some of you might like. That experience in itself was awful, but worse, perhaps, was the poetry community’s response years later when information about that poet came to light from several sources. Hundreds of poets were involved in discounting the poet’s actions and claiming he couldn’t have done what he was accused of doing. By that I mean: hundreds of poets I respected up until that collective public outburst were involved in discounting the poet’s actions and claiming he couldn’t have done what he was accused of doing.
This is what I mean when I say pathology is systemic. In this case, it wasn’t just one poet doing harm. It was many, including editors and publishers, the very people I won’t placate now with easy-to-slot work that doesn’t raise anyone’s hackles or that only raises certain hackles the right way (again, whatever that means). There are too many of these poets to avoid. They live in every part of the country, teach at numerous institutions, and have published with just about every publisher out there. I remember what they said. It’s triggering to see their names throughout the day when someone brings one of them up or quotes their work or drops their name into a group chat I’m in.
When I crept back to poetry cautiously in 2022, I thought things would be better. They aren’t. The kinds of things that happened to me are continuing to happen to other poets. Poets are still largely silent about everything that happens in poetry and protective of those who create and sustain systems that lead to inappropriate exertions of power.
Navigating all this is weighing heavily on me. I told myself in 2022 that I’d go as far as I could go in poetry and that I’d stop if it became clear I needed to. I would just stop. I said this to myself as if it would be simple, stopping. It isn’t. Continuing isn’t simple, either.
A poet from Kansas City berated me today after I posted about needing to evaluate whether to continue writing. The post made him angry. He said he’s still upset that I disappeared from poetry in 2015 after he’d been invested in me and my work. He felt I owed him an explanation for that decision and treated my post today as an affront to him, as if my leaving poetry would cause him more pain than it would cause me. As if my leaving poetry is a situation he’s at the center of.
I don’t know this man. I certainly didn’t owe him anything, including telling him that I left poetry because I was sexually assaulted by a poet who was working with me in the role of mentor. That it had happened on the way to my MFA and that it derailed my studies. That the poetry community was sputtering and vitriolic years later about that same poet but also about anyone who said he’d harmed them. That I had just been diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening form of immunodeficiency. That I had thyrotoxicosis. That I had cancer. That my marriage was close to ending and in a scary place. That I ran. That I had nowhere to go. That I had a nervous breakdown. That leaving poetry was the only way I could save myself, so that’s what I did.
Yeah, I didn’t tell someone I’d only met in person once for a few minutes and barely knew at all any of that, just as I kept most of that information from everyone I did know as I tried to sort through the detrital state my life was in.
This is part of the problem with poets and poetry: The way people feel like they can make demands on the poets whose work they even superficially engage with. The way their parasocial relationships with poets make them feel like they know those poets, like those poets owe them something, like there’s intimacy there that doesn’t exist, like it gives them the right, even ten years on, to verbally attack a poet they’ve concocted a relationship with. The way parasocial relationships tend to be directed at female-bodied poets. The way female-bodied poets have to endure this kind of dynamic on top of trying to do the work of writing. The way social spaces become especially unsafe for female-bodied poets because of dynamics like this.
This is not about you, Kansas City poet. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s not.
What I said from another body in a dream: What I’ve brought to the new art is my name, known only by its syllables.
Said to me in a dream last night: Everyone is a draft of curses.
I figured out the pet bathroom spider I give water to every night is a desert recluse, so I now have a pet backyard spider.
I’m tired of barely treading water while folks laugh from the shore. My whole life, this water. My whole life, that shore.
I’m renaming the Pouch of Douglas the Pouch of Dana. Deal with it.
My sleep score was an all-time low of 65, so I’ll just be over here getting crushed to death by air.
Because so many folks conflate the vagina and vulva, I’ve decided to start calling the whole kit and caboodle the vavu.
I’m gonna organize all my cabinets, drawers, cubbies, and other things like that now. My dopamine levels are rising in anticipation of this undertaking.
My face is always an overinflated balloon or an underinflated balloon. The days of my face being a properly inflated balloon are behind me.
I just untangled all my husband’s cords, CLR’d the limescale-encrusted fixtures in his shower, and used a razor blade to cut through and remove the soap scum from the ledge where he keeps his bar soap. What else will I discover while he’s away?
My husband left for three days. He has a work thing at his company’s headquarters. This means I’m alone here in Utah, which scares me far more than being alone in Oklahoma. That’s saying a lot, given that most of the traumas I’ve experienced happened in Oklahoma. It’s still a safer place for me emotionally than Utah. We’ll see what happens. This may be immobilizing.
The word trauma can actually be a problem, too, in part because it shifts what’s happened from something that’s external to something that’s internal.
Them: I’m a huge supporter of the Constitution.
Me: Quote any of it.
Them:
I dreamed I was a dodo on the island of Mauritius twerking on the beach to the song “Chris Jennings Is My Blood Boy.”
Half awake, I misread something as: Our President is an orange BarcaLounger.
Lines from a dream:
because toys die outside of graves and there are no burials for childhood
I wrote a blurb and filled my soap dispenser and rage-purchased six fuzzy animal hats and washed my hair and body all in the same day. Huzzah.
Somehow, I’ve written a song titled “Scott Jennings Is My Blood Boy,” and I rather like it.
Only DEVO will get me through this panfuckalypse.
Those sirens I heard last night were in fact fire trucks rushing to a nearby fire. Someone in Leeds tried to remove the weeds in their yard by burning them. They set their house on fire. Don’t burn anything during a drought. Just don’t.
One year ago today. I mean it even more now. Sanist culture, too: Ableist culture, go fuck yourself.
When I met the woman who knew my mother, I felt like I was with my mother through her and she was with my mother through me. That energy was powerful, and the experience was profound. We live on through those who know us, see us, remember us. My mother didn’t die when she was 71. She’s still with us at 92. She’s not trapped. She’s not a ghost. She’s not suffering. But she’s not dead, either, and won’t be until the last person who knew her, saw her, remembered her is dead. That might be me. I will be lonely when there’s nobody else on Earth other than me who knew her, who loved her.
Another flower and card were left on the bridge yesterday near my home, the one people jump from into the river below. A hot spot, the media calls it. A s______ hot spot. The flowers and cards are attempts by local teens to give folks a message that might keep them here on Earth another day, a message about being loved, about belonging, about their lives having intrinsic meaning. We need to think like those teens every day and in every interaction we have with others, especially here in Utah. Telling people they need to change, to hide who they are, to conform, to cloak themselves in guilt and shame, doesn’t make them want to live. Telling folks they should die—either literally or figuratively through being disowned or by saying they’ll lose their eternal life with their family if they continue to be the way they are—also doesn’t make folks want to live. Don’t make young folks do this heavy lifting alone. Follow their lead.
Nothing in the universe is stupider than a human being who has forgotten human beings are part of the universe.
I dreamed I went into a forever poetry residency in a strange building in Kansas City that looked small from the outside but whose floors each opened to a different continent. Not a rendering or ensmallening of a continent. The actual continent. I liked the floors where I could access deserts.* There was a secret floor that was the moon. A woman was there who seemed like God. A man was there who seemed like an old man. He gave me paper so I could print my poems. He gave me a wrap so I wouldn’t go hungry.
* That’s all the floors, by the way, but I didn’t realize that in the dream.
I watched videos all day of foxes eating carrots is how I am.
When belonging is dependent on self-censorship and self-effacement—on weaving someone else’s shame and guilt into fabric and wearing it like a garment—it’s not belonging.
The old dump is on fire near our home. That sounds about right.
True pathology is systemic.
I don’t burn bridges, but I know when they’re on fire.
There’s not a room I can enter here in Southern Utah that is safe, welcoming, and accepting of me and folks like me.
Somehow, my mother has inflated around me and is keeping me afloat, along with Oklahomans and a few poets who know who they are.
I’m really starting to think love is not enough. Not now. Not in this world. Not in Utah. When you break someone’s will to love, you’ve broken the whole world. I refuse to be broken. I will keep loving you, even if all you know of yourself is hate. I will not hate you. I will not hate you. I will not hate you.
Back to Utah. Back to psychic death.
You know how people’s compassion has limits? I live beyond those limits. I can tell when folks realize their compassion doesn’t extend to me. It’s an awful feeling.
I expect few to be kind, even fewer to be supportive, and next to none to be understanding.
I followed my intuition today. It led me to a woman my mother trained at Central State Hospital in 1966. We talked for a long time. It was incredible. I found out something about my mother that I never knew before, and I literally walked the same hall she walked during her last hospitalization for mania, which was right before she started taking lithium. I didn’t know before today that she was hospitalized at the same community mental-health center she’d opened.
Dear Utah: You know what’s really lonely? My time on this Earth with you.
So W— said to me, they said, “You could cut someone’s head off with a shovel and almost make it look nice.” I’m going straight to them if I ever need a book blurb.
Y’all, I have both Oklahoma fever and Oklahoman fever. I love Oklahomans. They have smarts and gusto. Some might say moxie.
You broke me Utah. Congratulations. I’m done.
I don’t have money, but I have moxie, which should count for something, but sadly does not.
There is a TOWN in MISSOURI named LITHIUM? Why don’t I live there?
Nothing makes me feel safer than a local man with a Confederate flag for his profile photo in my friend suggestions on Facebook.
Watching a video of someone meticulously cleaning their home and vibing hard on it is how I am.
Memes: stereotyping those with mental-health issues since the invention of memes.
Ranking my body fluids by viscosity is how I am.
Who’s playing all these sad songs oh I am is how I am.
I divide the world into two parts: vitriol and love. They’re like curtains, these parts, both heavy. I stand between them. Which one I touch is up to me. Which one you are is up to you.
My eyelashes are too heavy is how I am.
Listening to Alphaville is how I am.
Eating a block of cheese is how I am.
It is always Black Sunday in my ancestral lungs.
I smell like salt if salt smelled like fear.
I should write a collection titled Unwanted because I am. I would dedicate it to Utah or to poetry or to the United States of America or to my brother and sister.
I am seriously unhappy in poetry right now. The culture, the barriers, and the othering are destabilizing and threaten my well-being. I may get over it, but a pattern is emerging that is quite literally nauseating at times. My body wants me to run.
I have to find a cute name to call my husband so he’ll go get zero sugar soda for me right when he wakes up. How about Soda Daddy?
Sometimes, a poem is just telling you something you didn’t know but should know.
Too many Substacks!
When I read your poems, today is yesterday is always.
Another day, another erasure by the poetry community, this time the local community. I feel like my heart’s in a grinder.
I could sit up in bed so I don’t spill zero sugar vanilla Coke on my chest when I take a sip then have to sop it up with my tank top in order to avoid getting out of bed like a functional adult and properly cleaning myself up, but why? This seems fine. Just fine.
We need to decolonize our language. — Nawal El Saadawi
And we need to decolonize, decapitalize, depoliticize, and debiomedicalize our language around mental health. Some schools of thought maintain that language creates thought, so changing language changes thought. I would argue that bringing language into awareness rather than simply using it unexamined leads to thinking, an active process we need to live meaningfully, not just exist, perpetuate, survive.
Describe your relationship in two words.
Me: Romantic companionship.
Him: Huggy baby.
Upon waking.
Me to Myself: Good morning. Let’s have a great day!
Also Me: [begins sobbing]
How it’s going.
Me: Give me the strength to get through this Monday.
Him: It’s Friday.
There’s a juvenile house finch who appears to believe she’s a lesser goldfinch. She’s hanging out with about a dozen of them, doing everything they do, or at least trying to. Some of the stems they land on aren’t strong enough to hold her. (She weighs more than the goldfinches.) I love this house finch so much — who she believes herself to be, how she’s trying to fit in, the way she’s somehow surviving without any other house finches around. Who am I to tell her she’s not a lesser goldfinch? I’m going to name her Lesser Goldfinch.
I dreamed someone in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, was either trying to create or destroy the world.
It’s not easy to write about some of the situations I’ve encountered in poetry. I do it because most people don’t talk about their experiences. Certain things happen and happen again and happen again without anyone knowing what’s happening or that it could happen to them. Or something similar has happened to them, and they feel alone in that experience, unnecessarily so because they are not, in fact, alone. Silence just makes them feel that way.
I support poets and poetry and presses of all kinds, including small presses. I will also continue to advocate for myself and my work. Part of that means speaking out when necessary about problematic situations and encounters. I hope my accounts will help others navigate their own situations and know they aren’t alone if something similar happens to them.
I dreamed I was in Kansas City and was back in school as a flute performance major. A poet and I were sharing a dorm room. It was great at first. I had the room done up like a little Hello Kitty store, full of the kinds of snacks and supplies we’d need, all presented vending-machine style. The poet was funny like he is. It was all good.
One evening, I went to a party in the library. All the conservatory students sneaked in after hours. It was getting late, and everyone was falling asleep in a tangled pile on some of the vinyl furniture we’d pulled together to make a giant sleeping pod. I decided to go back to the dorm room. When I got there, the poet started screaming at me, reconstructing the past in ways that didn’t reflect reality, accusing me of things I hadn’t done, and calling me sanist.
I left and went to a bedazzled cube suspended at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. The cube rotated slowly on a horizontal axis, the moon coming in and out of view as it spun, like a restaurant called The Skies that’s no longer open in Kansas City.
There was a woman in the cube, my flute professor. She told me we could stay together if that’s what I wanted. I said it was.
Can I tell everyone, I asked.
I’d rather you not, she said. I want you to be my secret.
Secret. Othering. Erasure. Being hidden. The same old story, only this one suspended in time for all eternity.
That’s not what I want, I said as the cube started free-falling, heading toward Earth. This is the end of times, isn’t it, I said.
Yes, she replied, adding that I knew that on some level. You must have known.
Send me back to Earth, I said. I want to be with the planet and all living beings when the end comes, not here with you.
But here it will be painless. You will continue, she said. And there are humans there.
I know, and I am of them as they are of me, I replied. I belong with them, not you.
With this, John Lithgow appeared. He explained that, like the woman, he was God, who is distributed across everything but is also one thing. He would take me back to Earth because that was my wish.
As we floated down, he said, There’s going to be fire, heat. Stuff like that. Hot and not in a good way. Do you still want to go? The cube is very comfortable.
I still want to go.
Fine. Have it your way.
When we got to Earth, it was peaceful. It was beautiful. It was like I was seeing everything for the first time. Birds. Lizards. Water. Sand. No heat, no fire, no end of anything.
I went to my dorm room, and the poet sat up in his upper bunk. He said, Everyone is a draft of curses, before lying back down.
I woke up, recorded those words, then fell asleep and lucid-dreamed the whole dream again because I knew it contained important lessons my mind was working out.
After replaying the dream, a woman appeared in the dorm hallway. She was dressed like a Weeble Wobble and came over to me. I recognized her as me and me as her because each human is distributed across all bodies but is also one body.
She said, What I’ve brought to the new art is my name, known only by its syllables.
Day. Nuh. Day. Nuh. Or any syllables. Yours, for instance, dear reader. There’s no difference, not since that first name was recorded: Ku Shim. Ku Shim. Kushim. 𒆪𒋆
I woke up and called out to my husband. It was time to stop dreaming, though I could have gone on in that state all day. Such dreams are alluring, but they also call us back to the Earth and to all living beings.
My sleep score was a 90. I won’t lie. With that dream sequence, I was hoping for 100.
In a place that’s lacking in diversity, one that doesn’t cultivate an inclusive mindset at the individual and collective levels, broad-based cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy will falter. That’s what it comes down to for me as I look at Southern Utah through the lens of systems theory.
The cultural literacy here is concentrated in teachings and the culture of the LDS church and influences everything and everyone, even those outside the church. That focus leaves those who aren’t members out of social events and social support systems while tending to reinforce small-minded and small-hearted views, at least in this part of the state, about those whose identities aren’t accepted, aren’t represented, or have been historically misrepresented in and by the church. If you don’t believe that, ask me when slave day stopped being celebrated at the local schools. Ask my why it ever existed here in an area folks still insist on calling Dixie. Ask me about the Confederate flags folks fly and display on their trucks.
The selective cultural literacy here is why I experienced no fewer than twenty-seven frictions when attempting to participate in a local literary event, from five different folks centrally and peripherally involved in that event, on seventeen different occasions. Those frictions rose to the level of discrimination in eight cases. The others involved invasive questions about my gender and sexuality, othering, negating, trans erasure, and trauma erasure. The forms of discrimination included ableism, sanism, and gender- and sexuality-based discrimination.
Nobody here can see what happened. They literally can’t see it. The lack of cultural sensitivity and cultural literacy is what allows folks to feel entitled to probing about my gender and sexuality as if I owe them an explanation, to treat me like I’m scary because I have bipolar, to tell me talking about my trauma isn’t appropriate, and more. These attitudes and behaviors also have the effect of expunging me and folks like me from local events, from the local university, and from the area as a whole.
But they really don’t see it. They have no idea. To them, I’m a troublemaker, a problem, someone who’s just hastily making assumptions, not responding to a suite of valid experiences and real erasures that have been occurring for eight months and, outside this event, for five years, which is when my husband and I moved to Southern Utah.
It won’t change. This place won’t change. But what’s happening here underscores why we need more understanding, not less. More inclusivity, not less. More cultural literacy outside of one specific culture, not more of the same. We need these things across the country, but Southern Utah is where their effects are felt earlier than in other places and more painfully and more deeply and more consistently, all outside of a larger supportive community. There is no larger supportive community here unless you believe those intent on gaslighting you into thinking there is or that there is no issue here that isn’t all in your head.
I’m thinking about the kinds of frictions marginalized folks experience in the literary community, namely when participating or attempting to participate in things like events, readings, residencies, and literary programs. It occurs to me that things other folks might miss or not understand or not be able to “see” can be experienced very differently by those in marginalized groups and can make spaces unwelcoming, othering, invalidating, and even hostile.
One example from my recent personal experience is the trans erasure associated with someone dropping the letter “T” from the acronym LGBTQ+ and instead saying “LGBQ.” That act changed the way I see the university where I planned to study writing and creative writing at the graduate level because the person who dropped the “T” is affiliated with the institution. Along with other frictions I’ve experienced, I no longer feel welcome at that school. Someone else might not notice an omission like that, or they may think it’s no big deal, but as someone who’s queer, that erasure is both obvious and painful.
I’m interested in the kinds of frictions others have experienced and the disproportionate ways frictions tend to aggregate, not only within one type of marginalization but across various forms of marginalization.
Now, Hope Hall is an empty and quiet place, one where footsteps echo down tunneling hallways. Bob McDonald, who once stayed in an open barrack on the campus, said “the noise level was huge” when patients were “warehoused” in the mental health ward, back in the 1980s and before. Their cries reverberated throughout the building, he said, and patients pounded on their doors. Some had only an eyeball-sized peephole to the outside world.
And more important, perhaps—the patients had little or no treatment for their illnesses. They were the castaways from generations that didn’t understand them. They were locked up and kept out of sight.
—
From a story about Central State Hospital / Griffin Memorial Hospital, where my mother worked for thirty-five years. We need to seriously evaluate where mental-health care is headed under the July 24 executive order. It’s headed back, not forward. Back to the days of warehousing human beings like sacks of grain. Story link in comments.
Dana Henry Martin 