Something incredible happened today, and the only person I want to tell is my mother, who died twenty-one years ago.

The poems are too good today. I can’t take any more. I’m going to listen to devastating music now and stare into a sky heavy with wildfire smoke where things are taken and given, but they’re never the right things, only sometimes they are, which is the scrap we cling to, isn’t it, because we’re here and have nothing else. I’m sorry to break it to you. Your talon is just a hand. The scrap is what’s left of your baby blanket. It will never reweave itself. You will never fly. You are impossible. And yet.

Poems are in it. They aren’t above it, below it, beside it, behind it. They are in it.

I put water out for the wild critters who congregate in my yard.

In the drought-stricken West, fire is the four-letter word we wear like dead skin on our lips.

I looked up and saw twelve Gambel’s quail, two white-tailed antelope ground squirrels, a rock squirrel, a juvenile western fence lizard, and a butterfly on my back patio. They were either hiding from a predator or digging the shade from the pergola. Or maybe the animal uprising has begun.

Pantoums are like that weird sex thing you try once because you’re curious, but after that one time, you’re like, Naw, I’m good. I’m gonna stick with regular stuff.

I will swallow Earth whole before I write another pantoum.

I carry my father’s war in my body.

A poem can’t just be a counterpoint sung above a nonexistent plainsong. I mean, it can be, but why.

Poets, may I rise from the beautiful destruction of your work. May I live another life, another day, through your poems. Grant me the strength to be burned clean and fly like that fierce mythical bird or even to outlive ten phoenixes like one of the Nymphs—all because of your writing. May we rise through and because of each other. May that be our eternity.

He was also like rain.

We need to dispel once and for all the myth that the federal land footprint cannot be changed. — Utah Senator Mike Lee

We need to dispel once and for all the myth that federal lands are like disposable body parts that can be amputated, bagged, and sold to the highest bidder on the black market that the federal economy has become. — Dana Henry Martin

Most of what’s not in the DSM-V is what’s most pathological in our country. Those with pathologies wrote the DSM in the first place, each ever-proliferating version of it. Power and control wrote it. Normalization wrote it. Coercion. Scapegoating. Blaming. Gaslighting. It will be rediscovered in the distant future and seen as the cultural artifact it is: a testament to colonization and the endurance of colonized mindsets and systems, and as evidence of one of the myriad human-directed harms of colonization. That’s assuming the future isn’t characterized by colonization and therefore unable to see this document for what it is. The DSM says more about those who created it than those it attempts to characterize, treat, and control.

My friend Jeff said this about my work, and I love it so much:

But I think one of the great strengths of your poetry is that it does exactly that, stare the reader right in the face, in a way that is so freeing for some and so frightening for others, haha. For me, maybe only like 25% frightening.

I stole all my husband’s guitar picks because they’re colorful and sparkly. I’m officially (not) a crow (or any type of corvid because apparently their reputation for liking new and shiny things is based on myths, not science).

It’s almost light. I can almost make out my bookcase, its white shoulders, its white doors. Within, its inks are blood. Its papers are bodies. But its heart is formless, a force, an energy, the static from a balloon. Here, my eager hands. Here, my eager mind. Here, my own heart, battery-like, waiting to be charged. The birds are singing. They’re singing for my bookcase, for me, for you if you happen to be a book, for the whole damned world.

Sleep didn’t go as planned. I had a nightmare about not being able to reach the books on the bottom row of my new bookcase because my knees hurt too much to crouch or bend over. When I woke up, I couldn’t stop thinking about my new bookcase, namely the smell of it, that light, woody scent combined with hints of paper, ink, and time. My heart started racing. I’m still trilling inside. I told myself not to get out a flashlight and go look at the bookcase in the dark. I told myself to wait until it’s light out to look at the bookcase. I kind of want to go back to sleep, but I also want to watch the sun rise with my new bookcase. This is its first day in the world, the world that is on fire.

You have a mouth the shape of joy. I have a mouth the shape of despair. It’s the same mouth.

The world is our corpse flower.

I’ve never come out, but I continually come in: in to who I am and am becoming, in to my truth, in to my experience, in to my personal and family history, in to my communities, in to my survival, in to my resilience, in to my heart, in to my mind, in to my body, in to my creativity, in to my rhythms, and in to my language. Yes, in to my language.

Sell our lands, sell our soul.

Don’t thank me for helping you grow if you grew at my expense.

I don’t know what’s out there, but there are currently nine Gambel’s quail, a juvenile Western fence lizard, and a desert kangaroo rat hiding in my rock wall. Hawk is my guess. Could be cat, but I think it’s hawk. I’m glad my yard is a safe space for them.

I have all the flowering native plants, which means that, as of this morning, I have all the screaming fledglings. My blossoms bring the floofy babies to the yard.

One thing I know: The desert doesn’t need lawnmowers, but here they are in the desert.

Kitty still here.

I’m not here to be the person with trauma and mental-health issues whom folks accept without that acceptance leading to a larger investigation on their part about the ways in which they may be biased against others who live with similar issues. Accepting me needs to go beyond accepting me. I’m not here to be a token. I’m not here to be an exception because I’m not an exception. Accepting me—or engaging in what passes for acceptance, which is often self-righteous tolerance with a side of derision—doesn’t mean someone’s addressed their discriminatory thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. I’m not a one-and-done. I’m not a shortcut. I’m not proof that someone who accepts me is -ism free. I’m not interested in such psychological loitering. Folks need to do the work, all the work, not just scribble my name in a column and call it good.

Sanism and ableism make a person weaker, not stronger. They keep folks from thinking and feeling and instead allow them to slap a label on people and situations, usually while mired in hate and its correlates: anger, defensiveness, dehumanization, and even cruelty. These forms of discrimintation are accepted and even encouraged, yet they do untold harm. Hate in any form has no home on my page, not in response to my work, not in response to me, and not in response to others.

In the United States, a diagnosis is a label that, when applied, results in exorbitant medical charges.

Apparently, John Donne’s work is often analyzed through the lens of queer literary theory. (AI said so, which means it must be true.) It makes sense now, the way I was so hot for him for two years. I actually wrote a paper decades ago about his work that explored his challenges to dualities around sex and gender, but I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I was living in Oklahoma and had never heard of queer theory or queer literary theory. Queer was still a word that lived in my dead father’s mouth.

A fly lives with us now. His name is Jeff. Jeff just bit me on the calf. That’s his way of saying good morning.

Everything is fucking diagnosable.

Lesser goldfinches gather out front to eat and spread desert marigold seeds. They’re rewilding my yard, the flowers and the birds together. Who am I to stop them? I never unwilded myself. Now the goldfinches are calling, their sound the shape of a slide. Tee-oow. Tee-oow. They move into the distance. My eyes settle on the old farmhouse across the creek. It’s yellow like the birds, only less vibrant, the way they are outside of mating season. What’s here is going, is gone, cannot be gotten. Claws. Carpels. Cladding. All going, all gone.

I dreamed I was a double-basin sink in a frat house. The frat members kept shoving their fists in my drains. I didn’t have a garbage disposal in either drain, so I couldn’t stop them. I tried to scream, but my mouth was full of water. All I could do was gurgle as they queued up for their turn. When they left, it was worse than when they were there because I knew they’d be back. My baffles couldn’t relax. I just wanted to be left alone so I could be a sink and experience being a sink.

I’ve been ill the past couple of days and sleeping most of the time. All my dreams have been disturbing. The others involve my father, who I haven’t dreamed about since right after his death forty years ago, other family members, neighbors, the home I grew up in, and neighbors’ homes. Themes include abandonment, isolation, and fear bordering on terror. But the sink dream was the worst of them all.

The longer we live, the longer we live in the past.

I dreamed I invented sardines sold in jars. Their brand name was Jardine.* Dolly Parton did the jingle to the tune Jolene. She substituted the product name Jardine for Joline. It was brilliant.

—

* I decided the brand name should be Jardine, so I’m changing it to that right now, even though I dreamed it as Jarline.

A baby-sized cyst wins the prize for the strangest health news I read today. From MedPage Today: A fitness trainer from Tennessee who avoided doctors for 7 years despite unusual symptoms ended up with a baby-sized cyst extending from the left upper quadrant to the floor of the pelvis.

My husband thinks Robert Plant is the most interesting member of Led Zeppelin. I think it’s Jimmy Page. I am right. Jon is wrong.

I take my water without ICE.

IKEA is having technical issues today, so I don’t recommend ordering anything from them unless you want to find yourself rage-chugging a couple of zero sugar Cherry Cokes before 8 a.m. while talking to one of their chatbots about all the snagglefuckery.

I call him Jeff, the chatbot. Jeff says he’s a human being. Isn’t that what all the bots would have us believe? Jeff doesn’t appear to be able to read screenshots or remember what he’s already said or track with a simple conversation. Maybe Jeff *is* human.

I just misread The 10 Best Sandals as The 10 Best Anals, so that’s how my morning is going.

This country.

I’m a lot of things, but quiet queer isn’t one of them.

My dog saw a white-tailed antelope squirrel when she went outside to potty. She darted at the squirrel, who in turn jumped in the air, did a big flip, and scurried into a hole in our rock wall. Now, another white-tailed antelope squirrel who witnessed the whole thing is screaming incessantly from a nearby basalt boulder.

Yesterday, a dear friend read a poem by Charles Bukowski that moved him. He sent me the poem so I could see it. I’m touched that those I love think of me when a poem means something to them, and that we can connect across distance and time through that poem, both with the work and with each other. Such a gift, such proof that love abounds.

My job right now is to hold my silence while it screams.

Stripped of my emptiness, yet I remain empty.

This desert rain, desperate. This desert heart, wanting.

Love, like grief, can blossom.

Kris Kristofferson is my spirit animal.

“The ‘Man-Eater’ Screwworm Is Coming” is one of the best titles for a scientific feature I’ve read in a while. I feel like the man-eater screwworm is coming for all of us.

Managing my to-do list consists of moving everything to the next day.

Here in the land of erosion, time is down, not back.

The bird makes my mind bird.

It’s alarming what the very few can do to the very many.

I wish someone would steal Wax Dana and take her somewhere nice.

Mushrooms freak me out.

This wind is as my mind is.

Arizona highways are so bad that several screws on our desk vibrated all the way out and feathers wriggled through our sofa cushions. We brought an antique piece back with us that partially turned to sawdust.

Facebook just showed me an ad that says I can become a certified sound healer in just fourteen days. My first thought was: Aren’t poets sound healers? My second thought was: Doesn’t it take several decades to become skilled in the art of sound healing through poetry? My third and final thought was: YOU MEAN I COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING IN FOURTEEN DAYS AND POETRY WASN’T EVEN NECESSARY?

The thing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatening to bar scientists at the National Institutes of Health from publishing in leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet is that it totally sucks. That’s it. That’s the post. It totally sucks.

Because someone thought this, I should also think this is not a thought I think I’ve ever thought.

Tonight, I stood beneath seven common nighthawks as they caught insects midair. I’ve never seen so many at once. They were flying so low they barely cleared my head. One of them called rhythmically, as if they had an invisible tempo they had to follow and he was in charge of keeping time. A bat fluttered between them for a bit like a soloist who didn’t quite know her part. What was my part? None. I watched them because I wanted to. I did not write myself into their world or write them into mine.

I like a lot of birds together but not a lot of frogs together. I think it comes down to texture. Not the way they feel but the way they look like they feel.

With words, we make and unmake the world.

Others can debate whether poetry is therapeutic until the cows come home. I have no need. My cows came home a long time ago. They’re poems, and they don’t charge me for spending time in their pastures. More cowbell, please.

Dear moon, dear man sprawled across my bed. I wake to you and your intrusion. Now you’re gone like you never happened. I mistook you for light, not your cold body that set me spinning. I’m not a tide rising to meet you. But of course I am. Tonight, I’ll pull the shades and sleep in the dark, the near dark, while bright predators dangle in the sky.

She who typos first thing in the morning will typo all day long.

Early morning, the moon spills across my bed like it’s too tired to get under the covers after staying out all night.

I exist in two states: having just peed and having to pee.

I’m too young to be this age.

This is the first time I’ve heard my neighbor laugh since her daughter died.

My dog threw up in my hands last night. It was everything she’d eaten since her dental cleaning. If her system is still shut down this morning, we’re heading to the vet. She’s in my arms right now. We’re listening to some bird who doesn’t quite know how to sing.

One thing I dislike is a fawning AI. You’re right. I was bad. Give me another chance. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. Where is this coming from? Who taught AI to interact like this? Oh, right. Us. We did.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

Creative writing entails taking risks. That’s hard. Attacking people doesn’t. That’s easy.

I didn’t read that poem. That poem took me inside it. It became my habitat. I dwelled in it as it dwelled in me. Old ghosts, those trees, a haunting, that land. I was reading the poem, then I was in it, around it. I’m still there, floating in its waters, drinking in its waters, face to the sun, belly to the sun, toes to the sun. I almost can’t see the world I actually live in. I see it through this other cross-eyed world. World of the lost, world of thorns, world of watery devils coming closer with every ripple.

—

A response to the poem “Down in the Gully,” by Dominic Leading Fox.

Good morning. The laccolith is purple right now, the reddish-purple I always imagined the majestic purple mountains being when singing “America the Beautiful” as a child. It was hard to work that out when I was young and didn’t have a nuanced understanding of color. How could mountains be purple? It took some time to see tints and shades and anything beyond the bright colors foisted on kids in books and toys and clothing. Everything that wasn’t bright seemed to be sepia-toned, almost, including my father’s El Camero, whiskey, and mountains, which I rarely saw anyway outside the Arbuckles, since we lived in Oklahoma. But yes, indeed, mountains can be any of the colors we loosely describe as purple, namely at dawn and dusk. My laccolith is comprised of fifty-six mountains. Think about that. Fifty-six mountains purpling all at once in the blush of a new day. Tell me you could look away.

Looks like I’m graduating to shoes with a big-ass toebox.

Al-Anon needs a counterpart called AI-Anon for those who have folks in their lives with an artificial-intelligence problem.

Thanks to Chansonette Buck, I’m putting shallow dishes of water around the house for our resident spiders so they don’t get dehydrated.

One bloom at a time, two lesser goldfinches tear up the desert marigolds outside my bedroom window. They methodically toss petals onto the gravel and sandstone below like unnecessary thoughts, throw-aways. It’s safe here. No cats. No snakes. No roadrunners. Not in our yard, at least, which nestles a great surrounding wildness that seems to have no end.

The mess of spring doesn’t just happen. The wind makes it. Plants make it. Animals make it. Every living thing makes it. Things grow, fall, rot, renew. That last part is nearly invisible, but the evidence is all around in that sand, that leaf, that wing, even in you, wherever you are. Your very existence is renewal.

One of the goldfinches flies to the front of the house. The other bobs on a trio of clutched stems and sings. We are all the bird that flies, the bird that sings, the bird that feeds.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

When I was young, I didn’t think Billy Idol was hot, which is how I know I’m not entirely heterosexual.

Every time I want to love nobody, I end up loving everybody.

What music did I listen to when I was processing difficult emotions as a teenager? Samuel Barber, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Gustav Holst, Carl Orff, Led Zeppelin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Simon and Garfunkel, and Tears for Fears.

I ache for this place as if I weren’t in it.

I want to tell the rat who lives in my rock wall that he’s safe. But the snakes, I think. But the hawks and roadrunners. But the neighbor’s pesticides. But the other neighbor’s cats. The rat wants to tell me I’m safe. But the memories, he thinks. But the body. But the mind. But the others. So we do not speak. We watch each other making a home out of nothing, in a crevice, in a house, each of us building a little future, a place with a scoop of light, a dollop of air, so we can sleep and wake and build a little more, a little more, until a mouth envenomates the memory, until a wing casts shadows on the body, until poison enters the mind, until the cats or the others get hungry and become a single thing that eats.