Free Poem Fodder

Before the churn of factories and the tang of coal smoke came to dominate modern life during and after the Industrial Revolution, the smells of daily life were intensely organic, shaped by proximity to animals, bodies, plants, and decay. Urban and rural environments offered distinct olfactory experiences, but both were pungent, earthy, and changed with the seasons.

Once industrialization and modern sanitation systems had taken hold in the industrialized world by the mid-1800s (following a transformation that lasted about a century), the smells of waste, sewage, manure, and other organic materials were significantly less common, even in rural areas. Changes in agriculture, the decline of small cottage industries, and advances in chemistry also pushed scents away from earthy and toward synthetic. But understanding these historical odors offers a visceral glimpse into how people once experienced the world — as they say, “the nose knows.”

A Birdless Island

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

A Birdless Island

My husband says the use of AI is inevitable. He tells me he uses it all day at work. It’s built into coding platforms now. It’s getting really smart really fast, he says. It can figure out context even when no context is provided.

It’s a requirement for software developers to use it. They’re all using it. Prompt engineering, he calls it.

But he’s using it as someone who knows how to think, not as someone who’s never learned to think, I say. What about those who never learn to form an argument, do their own research, make their own discoveries and assertions?

He doesn’t seem concerned. I worry that I’m losing him, that we’re shifting like tectonic plates only faster: me into the organic and him into the artificial.

He tells me to use AI, to give it a try. Have it write a poem for you, he says. You’d be surprised what it can come up with.

He doesn’t understand. I don’t care what AI can come up with where creativity and expression are concerned. I care what I come up with, what moves through me and what I’m moving through.

We grind past one another as we continue in our respective directions. I spend the rest of the day in bed alone, like a birdless island in a forgotten past.

T4 Centers

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s language about people with autism in some ways parallels what Nazis said about Germans with physical disabilities and mental-health issues in 1939. Useless eaters was how the Nazis referred to this group. More than 70,000 asylum patients were killed in gas chambers called T4 centers before the death camps were in operation. These centers served as a model for the camps that were built later. Though the T4 program, as it was known, formally ended in 1941, the murders directed at this group didn’t stop. By the end of the war, 230,000 people with physical disabilities and mental-health issues had been killed between the T4 centers and the death camps.

Their gold teeth were extracted. Their brains were removed and sent to German physicians to study their “congenital idiocy.” Their ashes were sent to family members without regard for whose ashes were whose, along with notes that covered up what had happened. Murder was never the cause of death. Being gassed, often by one’s own doctor, was never the cause of death. Families were told the cause of death was something physical, unavoidable, like pneumonia or pulmonary tuberculosis. Some families weren’t notified at all and continued sending money to pay for their loved one’s expenses.

One of the main factors in deciding who lived and who died was how many hours a patient was capable of working each week. Think about that as you consider Kennedy’s comments about those with autism never holding a job or paying taxes. Think about that when you consider the implications of a database that’s tracking those with autism and potentially using information those patients and their families haven’t provided consent to use. Think about that when you decide if he’s really trying to help those who have autism or if he has darker motives, not just misguided ones.

The Nazis kept a record called The Hartheim Statistics as part of their T4 program. It was an account of the money saved by killing those 70,000 patients as opposed to maintaining their lives for one decade.

Think about that. Think about how much money this country would save if people like me didn’t exist and how little concern some people would have about our no longer existing.

Am I saying that’s where we’re headed today in America? Extermination? No. But I am saying we’re seeing the same dangerous collective mindset now, here in the United States, that we saw in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany.

People are not worthless if they don’t work or work enough or do the right work in this world. (I would argue that much of the right work to be done in this world is unpaid, and that those with physical disabilities and mental-health issues do that work in spades every day. The healing work. The loving work. The accepting work. The teaching work. The work of helping people see what it means to be human, which allows everyone to be more humane.)

People are not entries on a balance sheet or a way of saving money. We should not have treatment forced on us or be refused treatments we need. We are not things to be catalogued and monitored and followed and corralled into health camps (i.e., institutions we may never emerge from) or whatever else Kennedy conceives of. We are not participants in one big experiment that we didn’t even ask to be part of.

Kenney’s language is dangerous. His ideas are dangerous. His actions are dangerous. His power is dangerous.

The first people killed in the T4 centers were children. A father wrote to Hitler asking him to kill his deformed infant. That’s what inspired Hitler to start T4. I’ll repeat: He started with children.

We must protect our children. We must protect our adolescents. We must protect our adults. We must protect our seniors.

We must all protect each other. We must not look away.

Intergenerational

Family trauma is passed down genetically and epigenetically, through family stories and family preoccupations, through family experiences, through details like tones and inflections and mannerisms, through what’s focused on and what’s omitted, through place and what place means and has meant to the family, through hand-me-down memories, through objects and their cultural contexts—what they are and what they represent. And more.

Trauma isn’t the only thing passed down in these ways. Beliefs, values, biases, violences, and more move from one generation to another in this manner. We are haunted. The ghosts are inside us. The shadows, as Jung would say. Long shadows. Dark shadows. Shadows inside of shadows. But also light. Light, too.

We are intergenerational beings. Our becoming grows out of pasts we never lived but that we know, ones that lie beyond language and personal memory. We feel this. We struggle to understand it. We can lose ourselves to and in it. This is eternity, the feeling of eternity, of ongoingness, of neverendingness. Our neverending family and what it’s experienced, what it’s done. The hand we raise that is the father’s hand, the grandfather’s hand, the great grandfather’s hand. What we do. How we move. The who what where when why of us. What we’re from. What we’re for.

And what we’re against, up against, not only now but in those layered pasts. What we want and need to break free from. Those histories that riddle us like lead ammunition that can kill us quickly and also kill us slowly. Those wounds. Those poisons.

Dana for Mayor

My day hasn’t gone as planned. I went to get lab work done early this morning only to find out the orders were never placed, which means I won’t have results in time for my appointment with the specialist who (should have) ordered them. This is the doctor who, in part, is following my cancer status, so the labs are important.

I came home to an attempted identity-theft scam that Jon and I both had to deal with immediately. Things like this are happening more frequently, and they’re harder to identify. Someone tried to hack one of my online shopping accounts just three days ago.

I commented on a story in The Salt Lake Tribune in support of a gay mayor in one of Utah’s cities. Someone else in the queer community, another Utahn, saw my comment and thought I was saying the opposite of what I was saying. Their response was to tell me that I’m attacking the mayor based on his sexuality, that I’m not being Christlike, and that I’m so ugly-looking that they’d never live in a city where I was the mayor. Humph. I have many grumpies around that set of assertions.

My Fitbit died. I have no data whatsoever, and I rely on that data for my health and mental health.

I drove half an hour each way to see my therapist, where I hoped to talk about the parts involved in my strong feelings about the SLT commenter calling me an unattractive, unkind homophobe, but the therapist forgot my appointment, which means I drove for an hour for no reason and have three exiles I need to deal with on my own now rather than in therapy. (Exiles are a type of part in the Internal Family Systems framework. It’s not ideal to be exploring them alone.)

These are all small problems in the larger scheme of things, and they’re counterbalanced by an incredible conversation and connection I had with a fellow poet today. We talked about organization, one of my favorite topics, and poetry and community and dogs and mountains. I mean, it was good stuff.

Also on the plus side, there’s my sweet dog. And my relative ability to handle all these relatively small problems. And my view of the laccolith, which I can see now that the clouds have started to dissipate or move on or whatever clouds do.

Oh, and someone ran over a raccoon in our neighborhood, so there’s also that sad occurrence. That’s another item for the negative side of today’s +/- list. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been making that fruitless round-trip drive to see the therapist.

You can file this under grumpy with a lower-case g or grumpy with a capital g or dumpy if you also think I’m so unattractive you would never live in a city where I’m the mayor. The last part of that sentence was written by one of the exiles. She was called ugly by her classmates almost every day of her life from preschool until she was well into puberty. We’re working through it.

Fundamentally Defective

I got a notification from Ancestry that information about my brother had been added to the site. Of course, I followed the trail to the information because that’s what I’ve always done where my brother is concerned, even now that we’re not in contact (see Marie Howe’s poem “The Boy” for an explanation of what I’m talking about).

What I found about my brother wasn’t interesting, but there were dozens of new pieces of information linking numerous relatives on my father’s side of the family to the Civil War, where they fought for the Confederate States of America. One of them was a prisoner of war and died inside the camp where he was held.

My lips are numb. I don’t know how to process all of this. This awful history is in my family, in my epigenetics. It’s been handed down and down and down to me. This is only four generations from me.

It didn’t stop with the war. My grandparents on my father’s side were racist, as was my father. One of my most traumatizing and painful moments occurred when I was very young and witnessed my grandmother and my great aunt treating a Black woman with extreme disrespect before turning away from her and calling her a racial slur. They didn’t know I was in the room where it happened and that I saw everything they said and did to the woman.

I think that experience was more painful than the sexual abuse that occurred later. There’s an exiled part of me who’s still in that room feeling shock and terror and sadness all at once. That’s when the feeling of being part of an evil family started, of being from a family that was more monster than human. It started that day, not the day my father began abusing me. What he did only reified those feelings, setting them like grout in tile that’s already been laid.

Those are the feelings I would eventually turn inward on myself, believing that I was a monster, that I was evil. Or, put a more sanitized way, that I was fundamentally defective. Fundamentally meaning essentially, systemically, absolutely, irreparably flawed.

It wasn’t just my father who made me feel that way. It was his whole side of the family. I was of them. I was of all of them. Who they were and what they did ripped through me like lead bullets, like death, like the only thing worse than death, which is pure hatred.

Family can bite me. That half of my family can bite me.

Deep Clean

It’s been rainy and dark here for days, and I love it, but I always find myself feeling low in this kind of weather, which is pretty much how I felt one-hundred percent of the time when I lived in Seattle. To get motivated today, I had to come up with a project that would raise my dopamine levels enough to make getting out of bed worth it.

The first thing I tried was organizing all the nuts we just bought from Costco in large mason jars. That was exciting and all, but I needed something bigger, something more substantial. So I removed everything—including the furniture—from my writing and weaving room, did a deep clean of the carpet and walls, and placed the furniture back in the room in a different configuration, one I’m really excited about.

And because that still wasn’t quite enough, I organized all my books by subject, then arranged them by the author’s last name. This was thrilling. THRILLING. I’ve always arranged my books by height, which is only a little less ridiculous than sorting them by color. The particular part of me, let’s call her Particular Dana, likes the orderliness of books arranged from tallest to shortest or, in special situations, from shortest to tallest, but it was getting really hard to find what I was looking for. Turns out, I have duplicate copies of several poetry collections for this very reason. I’ve known my system was a failure for a long time, but I’m a creature of habit, and this undertaking seemed like too much work and too much change all at once—a combination that could lead to overwhelm, as the pop-psychology folks say.

I’m digging my books this way. Each row looks a bit like a cityscape, which is as close to a city as I’ll get these days. Plus, my two desks are now back to back and floating in the middle of the room. One side is for writing, and the other side is for weaving. Both desks can be raised or lowered, which is also thrilling.

I am winning this dreary day. Winning against whom? Myself. Against myself, namely the part of me that wanted to stay in bed and not even look across the creek to marvel at all the puffafuff clouds that have pulled off the biggest magic trick ever, which is making the world’s largest laccolith disappear entirely.

Selves and Others

Richard Schwartz, creator of the Internal Family Systems model, says some people are more easily activated in their relationships because they’re more dependent on those relationships to heal the most wounded parts of themselves. One of the goals of IFS is for folks to focus more on themselves for healing and less on others—that is, cultivating secure attachment with our internal parts.

I would add that this goes back to attachment traumas early in life. In my case, I have insecure attachment, which means I had my needs met some of the time but not consistently. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this brief explanation suffices for the purpose of this post. Having folks around me who have secure attachment is helpful. Having folks around me with insecure, avoidant, or disorganized attachment isn’t helpful. That’s because I haven’t developed secure attachment yet. IFS is one way to address that internally so I can bring my own secure attachment to my relationships with others.

Outside of IFS, being around those with secure attachment is the best way to learn secure attachment. This can happen over the course of about five years, for example, if someone with insecure attachment is in a relationship with someone who has secure attachment. The problem is only a subset of adults have secure attachment, and those with attachment trauma are often in relationships with partners who have attachment trauma. Pairings between those with insecure attachment and those with avoidant attachment are common, as is the case in my marriage. (My husband has avoidant attachment.)

The pandemic and moving to a rural area have made it even more difficult to interact with those who have secure attachment. I no longer work in a workplace, and I’m not around people on a regular basis. I spend more time with horses, cows, and birds than with human beings.

I need to work out how all of this maps onto the way I navigate and experience poetry spaces both real and virtual. Coupled with traumas I’ve experienced in poetry, the prevalence of insecure attachment styles among poets concerns me, especially when it’s not examined and when certain behaviors occur as a result, including those I witness that are directed at others and those that are specifically directed at me.

Questions I’m going to be asking myself as I work on IFS with a therapist and attempt to be less activated in my relationships with poetry and poets include: how can the behavior of a poet or group of poets have less of an emotional effect on me, how can I more effectively address issues I see in the poetry community in ways that feel less emotional, how do I cultivate relationships with poets who are aware of their own attachment styles and are also working toward or already have secure attachment, how do I measure progress to assess whether my efforts are working, and what decisions do I make if I don’t make progress (e.g., where else can I practice relating to others in ways that are less activating, how can I limit my exposure to interactions that aren’t helping me heal)?

I’m also not a fan of endogenous social networks, which I’m certain stems from my early traumas. I’ve always felt safer in exogenous networks where most of my friends and connections don’t know one another. You can’t get much more endogenous than the poetry community, where everyone seems to know everyone else and gossip runs rampant, especially in the social-media age. That’s a different issue in some ways, but developing greater security in my attachment style should help me navigate tighter social networks.

If things work out with this therapist, we’ll also be doing IFS-informed EMDR work. Or maybe it’s EMDR-informed IFS work. Either way, the work will address complex trauma as well as parts and attachment style. All of this matters: these intersections of self and self, of self and other, of self and community.

Always the Water

I dreamed about all the ways children experience pressure and coercion around sexuality and gender, as well as the sexual abuse and violence many children also experience. The dream went on and on. It was personal and universal. It was in the past and present. Everyone I know was there. We were a traveling circus going from place to place and weaving through time with our pain and our healing in tow. We were helping. We were trying to help. Children grow up but don’t stop carrying what harmed them when they were young. At one point, the dream was so profound it exploded like the big bang then sucked back in on itself until it was the size of a marble. That marble contained the experiences, the suffering, the worlds of the collective. I held it in my cupped hands. I carried it into the night.

Let my life be a study in benevolence and compassion, for the environment, for the land, for all living creatures. Let me life not be any other story.

Some things are cute, but they’re not real. Other things are real, but they’re not cute. When things are cute and real, they’re puppies.

I picked up some collagen today in the hope that it will make me look a little less like a piece of corrugated cardboard.

Quit trying to outrun your life. Outgrow. Outgroan. Outruin. Outmode. Outmine. Quit it all. Put out of mind this notion of escape, of lamentation, of destruction, of obsolescence. Run it down, your life. Don’t run ahead.

I want Dark Woke to be like Dark Green environmentalism: systems-oriented, comprehensive, and thoughtful. I don’t want it to be snapbacks designed to get media attention and that, often, resort to hateful language that’s sexist, ableist, sanist, or some combination of the three.

I’m reading Allisa Cherry’s An Exodus of Sparks and Derek Thomas Dew’s Riddle Field today. I’ve pulled other books close: ones I’ve read or need to read again or need to read more deeply. My only distractions are wind and cloud, horse and horse, laccolith and barn.

My husband and I were into some really kinky stuff when we were young, like sleeping in on the weekend.

Since I’m apparently busy naming all the things this morning, I think there should be a graphic-novel character named Dark Woke and a punk-rock band called Keto Crotch.

Is there a poetry collection or anthology titled Gripe? Because there should be.

Why does Facebook think I want to buy spare tires for a Tesla?

When a door closes, you have to open a window. That’s how God works—through you and the choices you make.

Three nights ago, I dreamed about letting my kuhli loach down, the one I had twenty years ago. In the dream, I gave him to a man who killed him because I was careless, because I didn’t know any better, because I didn’t see how dangerous that man was.

The turkey vulture forgives the living for being inedible and praises the dead for being life.

I’m trying. Those are my two words for today.

I’m devastated. I sat here for an hour and could only come up with those two words.

Writing poetry has little to do with my brain, much to do with my body, and everything to do with my mind.

People are kind to me in the way that they feed a dog scraps while leaving her outside chained to a fence without any shelter.

Hell is that I woke up. I woke up to hell.

Where you saw someone who needed hating, I saw someone who needed help.

People leave when you have cancer, too, not just when you have trauma. I’ve had both. I know the taste of emptiness, the shape of it. Praise be this silence, this bell with no to tongue, this bird with no song.

Belonging and understanding are two things I will never have.

I just unfriended and reported a Facebook friend for swearing at and bullying the poet who’s having a mental health crisis. He did this even after reading my posts about why that type of behavior is harmful and could contribute to a disastrous outcome. Shame on him and everyone who insists on behaving in this manner.

Every time I accomplish something, it feels like a funeral for a part of me that feels like it’s died. A funeral in which I speak for that part, I honor that part, I remember that part. I did what that part wasn’t able to do.

The innocence of a cat living in the mouth of a god.



I have as many questions and concerns about poets and the poetry community as there are bees in my blooming purple robe locust.

I like the town I live in because it almost has queer right in its name. Toquerville. See?

The bees and the flowers are one thing. The bees and the flowers and the trees and the air and the soil and the water. Always the water. Nothing about water without water.

The war was and is and remains a long poem. — My misreading of something Matt Jasper wrote

Today, I feel grief, which doesn’t surprise me.

Carry poems in your mouth like fertilized eggs until they hatch. Then set them free or eat them. It’s your call.

Butter Recall Over Feces Concerns is not the headline I wanted to wake up to today.

I’m tired of standing up and saying folks like me are human only to see others continue to dehumanize folks like me.

It’s amazing how long a bell can ring—longer than some lifetimes.

It’s hard to erase history when folks keep making history.

We will not yield.

There’s so much we can learn from each other, much of it wrong.