Why do I keep finding my words on your tongue?
Don’t quiet quit your life.
My mini-writing retreat ended up being a retreat from writing, one I needed.
Life: Losing a shoe and finding a sock.
Your studio is the middle of three, with a purple flagstone walkway and an image of a tree on the courtyard gate. Perfect. I’m on my way.
I keep listening to the Contagion soundtrack. Music for our times.
Brevity is the hallmark of someone who only writes on a smartphone.
All the ways things could have ended but haven’t.
I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.
I eat dark cake in the dark.
These days, writing retreats are just me in a room I don’t have to clean myself.
I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.
Woke from a nap looking like a combination of my mother, my sister, and The Elf on a Shelf.
I love every bird who is singing and every bird who is silent.
I feel like I swallowed a guillotine blade.
I’m not sure why, but I keep looking around stiffly as if I have a cast on my neck.
I suppose one can be at motion, as in standing on the cusp of it, as in looking onto or into.
In motion, not at motion.
My inconclusive heart. My errant clavicles. My wandering womb. My basted spleen. These parts of me at rest, at motion, steeped and parched. I thank them. I give thanks for them. I’m honored they’re here with me now.
I’ve just misread the phrase basted spleen as bastard spleen and bastion spleen. I’ve just typed spleen as sleep and peels. Dyslexia is my collaborator.
If the man who sexually assaulted me could see me now. He’d be so proud.
For those in Utah: Activism does not equal satanism.
The day I led you to a wooden cathedral in the field and, mid-air, hummingbirds flashed their jeweled feathers.
I was all typos this morning. Being wildly ill is affecting what my thumbsies do.
The wind’s blowing.
I found a little pie and ate it.
You don’t need someone to tell you the wind’s blowing.
I thought I could only raise my voice if others did the same. But they were silent. I had to raise my voice first, then they raised theirs.
My master of fine arts program offered free bonus coursework in trauma dissociation.
Imagine screaming for your life when trauma has its palm on your omohyoid muscle. And that trauma is other people. And they’re telling you to shut up. And they’re crushing your neck. And they’re calling it massage.
I’m at the weight-loss stage of my illness where people want me to eat anything: an exoskeleton, a hoof, teeth.
Ruin is my safe word.
Living in southern Utah means having a second chance at everything I did thirty years ago.
Let’s get some better language, folks.
But her emails, I say every time I send an email.
I never stopped writing when I left poetry. I just started composing elaborate Tweets and Instagram photo captions.
I don’t like it when the wind wheezes like a child with untreated asthma who’s just tried to run a fifty-yard dash.
The kind of wind that uproots thoughts.
Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.
Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.
If you don’t love me once you learn I’m nonbinary and sexually fluid, then you never loved me.
One large organism. That’s what we all are. When part of us dies, part of a whole dies.
All the earth ever wanted to be was the earth.
I hate the poem “The Mower,” by Philip Larkin. The hedgehog wouldn’t have died if the speaker had checked the lawn before mowing it.
You didn’t bring me back to life. You brought me back to a trauma state that I used to associate with living.
I’m listening to sad songs. They’re all sad songs.
I’m getting tired. This question just popped into my head: “If you were my sandwich, what kind of sandwich would you be?”
Note to selves.
I used to think the internet was an oracle. Now, I think it’s a monster.
And yet I think it’s beautiful.
I can totally write a single sentence and stop there. But why?
The trinity I knew was guilt, shame and fear.
Finding joy. It’s like holding an extinct bird in my hands.
And if the sun doesn’t come up, I will never die. Nothing will die. Not one person, not one idea, not a single living being. Even the earth will be safe from death.
Until the sun comes up, I’m rejecting death on every level. Death of the mind. Death of the spirit. Death of the body. Individual deaths. Collective deaths. The death of democracy. The death of polyvocality. All deaths fitted neatly inside another death like death nesting dolls.
Imp, quit saying “The End” to shut down conversations. You’re neither a child nor a god. Children think they control beginnings and endings. Gods, as we imagine them, may have that ability. You don’t. You’re just someone acting at once childlike and godlike, a putrid admixture.
A living being is a living being is a living being.
I’m trying to stay alive until the truth comes out, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.
Brands are people now. They act like people, interact like people, react like people, and are informed by people.
Brands are people now. They have an insecure attachment to us, and we have an insecure attachment to them.
Brands are people now. They talk to us as if they are our teachers, philosophers, sociologists, leaders, gurus.
Brands are people now. They self-consciously expose their psyches, including the marketing tricks they use to lure us in, to keep us in conversation with them, and to make us experience ourselves with and through them.
Brands like Steak-umm are people now. They assume a teacherly, philosophical role. They tell us exactly how they’re manipulating us and how we’re being manipulated by other brands. And we do what they predict. They can’t shake us.
But they can Steak-umm and bake us. Or maybe we’re just there for the baking (and the taking).
I love Steak-umm, by the way, it’s one of my dearest friends. Because brands are people now.
Brands are people now. They act unkind toward us. They act indifferent toward us. Spokespeople like Sarah Silverman explicitly tell us they don’t even care if we buy what they’re promoting.
Brands are so people now that I want to avoid them the way I avoid all people.
What are brands if not a conglomerate person that arises from the human tendencies, limitations and impulses of all the people creating any given brand? And where does our consciousness and brand consciousness begin and end? Do we know? Do you know?
Who are you wearing? I mean that blouse. Who designed your ottoman? Did you get it at Target? Studio McGee? Oh, I love that perfume. What a great car.
Brands have been people since people have been in the business of creating brands. But brands are meaner now. They’re just as cruel and indifferent and loathsome as we are, which means we’re getting meaner. I mean, that’s obvious, right? That we’re getting meaner.
And more cynical. Look at how cynical brands are. That’s a clue about how cynical we are. Because we’re all brands, and we’re all people. And brands are cynical people now.We’re not buying the world a Coke these days. And perfect harmony? Try cacophony. The brands are people, and they know it. They know how much trouble the world is in.
Brands! You used to make me feel safe. You gave me hope. You were like the lyrics to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” As a child, when I’d see you on television, you made me feel like I could live, like it would all get better.
You don’t know anymore, do you, brands? You don’t know if we can live, if things will all get better.
Brands, I believe every word you uttered when I was young. I got through being abused, being molested, being raped because of you. I got through all of it because of you. Now where are you? What kind of person have you become?
I know you don’t have any easy answers, brands. I know you’re scared, too. I know, I know. You’ve done your best. You were always a stand-in for religion and spirituality, for relics and icons and talismen. I know it was too much to ask of you. To play that role. To be all that.
Ace Hardware feels my feels. It just sent me an email that reads: “Let us help you.” Of all the brands, I believe Ace Hardware is the one that actually could help me. Ace isn’t cynical. It’s doesn’t antagonize. It doesn’t tell me my future is iffy at best. It doesn’t scare me.
In short, Ace Hardware is a good brand friend to have. But it’s not my best brand friend. Honestly, I think Ace is a little naive, especially these days. It has some things to learn about being a person-brand. I might need to seek out some new person-brands to befriend.
I would love to be a hippopotamus named Fritz.
I wish I could show off my feet and make someone love me.
No expression without digression.
Be inconvenient and all else will follow.
A picture of the hamster I had seventeen years ago came up today in my photo memories. I loved that hamster. Her name was Tater McGee. I’m a wreck now.
I need a better elevator pitch for telling people I’m not straight. Apparently, saying “I’m not straight” isn’t clear enough.
Imagine being dead for one hundred years and people still leaving books at your grave.
I feel the dead close. Closer than the living.
Water, water while away your sighs, spiral through my ridges. If today is a window, it’s a way out.
When I darken like wild rain in a quixotic moment, the shores of my life reluctant to wake.
When I see the sunset tethered, tamed. When I hear wood moving on a smooth creek.
The dock remembers water. I remember the feel of escape—dry as land, quiet as mercury stretched and spread and hardly here.
Across an afternoon, the boats away and away. I linger like a canyon, like someone’s love or lies.
Ruin.
Basalt: even darker after rain.
Listening to what screams outside in the deep dark.
Beauty, I can’t leave you.
Dana Henry Martin 