My friend Jose Faus in the distance at Baker Wetlands in Kansas, 2017. It was evening. We were alone. I saw a Wilson’s Snipe. I’d recently stopped writing poetry. Jose, a poet, ventured into birding with me so we could spend time together that way. It wasn’t half bad, being a birder and not a poet.
Guy Davenport on Ronald Johnson’s Transcendentalist Poetry. This headline makes so much more sense today. I initially read it as Guy Davenport on Ronald Reagan’s Transcendentalist Poetry.
When I was in middle school, my friend and three generations of a family died in a house fire. Her name was Katy. She was so kind to me. When I had her over to show her the doll house I made from a shoebox, she said it was great. Her living room was full of plants and animals. They were everywhere: snakes, lizards, spiders, and, below, cats and dogs. The wood floors were water-stained from all the plants. At least that’s how I remember it. I was ashamed then. Full of shame. Didn’t have kids over much. Didn’t know what to do with the kind ones. Katy. Katy Shay. The kids made jokes about her, about the fire, the very next day.
In chemistry, the prefix cis is added to the name of a molecule when two atoms or groups are situated on the same side of a plane of symmetry passing through the molecule, like a double bond between two carbon atoms.
In molecular biology, a cis-acting element regulates a neighboring gene when it binds to a trans-acting element.
The prefix cis comes from the Latin meaning on this side.
Some folks: You chose this [painful or tragic thing]. Me: You didn’t choose this [painful or tragic thing], but you can choose how to respond to this [painful or tragic thing].
Cancer cells can hide inside other types of cells within the body, which is how cancer can evade detection and continue taking up residence inside us even after cancer treatment.
Viruses can mask themselves inside us and avoid being found for years. Hepatitis C does so using FAD, a molecule composed of Vitamin B2 and the energy carrying molecule ATP.
It only takes one B cell turning on our bodies to get all the B cells around them whipped up and make them act the same way, at least for a time. That’s how autoimmune diseases like alopecia areata happen, where an itch or some other benign thing affecting the skin turns into a bald patch that lasts for months or forever because first one, then many, B cells misinterpret the itch as a threat.
My immune system is dysregulated. In addition to having immune deficiency, I have several forms of autoimmunity. My humoral immune system doesn’t always attack invaders such as viruses and bacteria, but it does attack me, my body, routinely. Dysautonomia looks like it’s an autoimmune disease. That tracks with my immune system dysregulation and the way I’ve been developing more and more autoimmune diseases over the course of my adult life.
Many of the health issues I’ve been having over the past two years seem to be my body saying no, the way Gabor Maté discusses such phenomena in his book titled When the Body Says No. My body has been saying no since I was a child, since my trauma started, my familial sex abuse and trafficking. My body keeps saying no and is now in a rhythm of saying no, sometimes quietly and—in a pattern that starts every seven years and resolves in about a year’s time—sometimes piercingly.
I’m at the end of one of those cycles now, but my body isn’t coming back. I’m a rubber band whose elastic has failed, the kind that ultimately break after years of use. I still can’t gain the weight I lost. I’m in pain every day, sometimes extreme pain. My heart gallops and loses its pacing. It would be put down at the track. I’m struck by bouts of exhaustion that come when they please and leave when they please. My TSH absorption continues to be significantly dysregulated despite not even having a thyroid anymore.
I’m fighting, but I’m not coming back. I don’t know if I’ll return this time. The trauma I’ve experienced is severe. My health issues are alarming and serious. Complicated, my doctors say. Your health is complicated. They are somber when they speak to me. They don’t have as much hope as I do, or at least as much as I once had.
The first person Maté writes about in his book dies. She can’t come back from her health issues and ultimately succumbs to them. Cancer, I think. I’d have to look again, and I can’t bear looking. That book is hard for me to read. This life is hard for me to live.
But I want to live. I will live fully as long as I can, whatever that looks like for me and whatever that continues to look like over time.
Haters, especially local haters who think the problem in this community is me because of my gender and sexuality and because of the ways in which I talk about my trauma, especially in and through my poetry: You don’t need to keep me down or hold me back or marginalize me. Stop doing that to me and to others like me. You’re poison. We need the antidote, not more of you. You will be ashamed of yourself someday. You will wish you’d led with love, been flooded with love, exuded love. Trust me. (Dont’ truss me.)
Guess what? You’re the recyclable.
Shut your eyes. Focus. See the world as you’re made to see it, the way that allows you to survive.
There’s an equation for doubling. A graph that goes up and up. Is math the path to infinity?
Four words where there was one. How can we call them one again after seeing them doubled, quadrupled?
It’s strange that we can loosen our vision and watch one thing turn to two things turn to four things.
A juvenile Rock Wren is learning how to catch moths in my front yard.
Half the time, these doves fly wherever they want. The other half, they fly away from danger.
Fun with words: I may or may not have offered to give my husband a _____ in exchange for _____ last night.
It’s OK to buy blueberries and not eat them all. We all love imperfectly.
If your will isn’t simple and strange, how can your life be simple and strange?
To sleep, perchance to dream in my matching boyshorts and compression socks.
Knee-brace days. Compression-sock nights.
Sometimes ramming two shitty poems together can result in one slightly less shitty poem.
I wake to dozens of fruit flies dead in my bathtub.
May you be a large, Quaternary-age landslide of reddish-brown, Triassic-age Moenkopi Formation that flowed out of a canyon and came to rest here in this hellspace called Twitter.
A new scent called Thrift Store.
Poets are getting away with it because nobody understands what they’re doing. What is it? Healing. We’re healing. Ourselves, maybe others, too.
What did I forget today? A password. And something else.
An irrigation pipe bursts in the field. Horses stand up to their ergots in water. I think of Ukraine, all the flooding, all the flooding.
Ecologies
Eats: cockroaches
Eaten by: cats
Eats: flatworms
Eaten by: fish
Eats: seeds
Eaten by: snakes
Eats: nothing
Eaten by: men
Headline: Deadliest Creature on Earth Is Now Active in Upstate New York. You mean humans?
The body and mind can’t take eighteen years of constant abuse from within the family, from within the school, from within the community, without repercussions. We aren’t designed to withstand that kind of abuse. But we are designed to heal.
This will soon be a memory-loss journal. It’s probably been one for some time. Why can’t I choose which memories go and which stay? The love is going but not the fear.
I forgot how to fasten my bra today. I forgot my address. I forgot a third thing that I’ve forgotten.
What I am is increasingly what I was.
Every longing a cricket outside my window.
You need something to drive your feet into, something to drive a flag into, something to dream from, fall from, come back from: alive then dead or dead then alive.
Tell the mountain not to mountain and who will scale the mountain? Who will look down on ruin from such a distance that every mistake and mangling glimmers?
These lips, this hair, this tongue. The way I stare you down and won’t stop. Who’s going to blink first, wild girl?
It’s you I reach for in my dreams as you slide into shadow.
Then one bright day it’s back, that damn thought—or is it a feeling—pumping its arms up and down looking for a mate, a twin thought or feeling to attach itself to.
A roll, a topple, a slide—we all come back to the lowest point, our lives a downward slope, a wanting even as we break, even as we absorb heat from an unrelenting sun.
Grief, like love, can flower.
Let me be the rock where birds eat their prey, little legs dangling, broken, soft bodies split, organs tangled and glimmering.
Something died on the sidewalk. Everyone is bent over, looking.
From grade school forward, I was bullied, harassed, sexually assaulted, and raped by my classmates. The lesser infractions started when I was younger, with the exception of the CCSA I experienced at an older boy’s home where my mother had me go every day after school until she got off work. The more serious incidents occurred when I was an older student.
Things got much worse after my father died when I was thirteen. Most of my peers didn’t even know he was dead. His fatal heart attack occurred the Friday before spring break. My mother made me go to school the week after spring break ended. She didn’t like the way it would have looked for me to have taken any time off.
It was around that time that the orchestrated bullying began rather than the sporadic outbursts that had occurred earlier. It was a sport—I was a sport—for a growing group of students, even other students who were LGBTQ+, who were neuroatypical, who had serious health issues that made them the target of kids who didn’t like weakness, paleness, physical differences and the like, or who were scared, marginalized, and unpopular for other reasons. I was the most unpopular. I was everyone’s target and, for some, a ticket to greater inclusion and popularity if they could demonstrate a shared hatred of and derision for me.
In groups, my classmates would call me names, ridicule me, and more: in the school’s hallways, inside classrooms, on the bus. My neighbor across the street, a student I’d been friends with up until my father died, would even open her door and, alone or with her friends who were over, call me bitch or slut anytime she saw me in the yard or driveway.
What was I to them? Prude. A slut. Stupid. Ugly. A bitch. Slow. Retarded. Flat-chested. Boyish. Easy. Gay. (Only they didn’t use the word gay. They used words that were darker, words that catch in my throat to this day. I lived in terror of them finding evidence to back up that last claim. What would they say—what would they do—to me then?)
They were like plaque, those students, the way they gathered, the way they clumped up like something clogging an artery that would otherwise function properly. After my biology class, I’d go to my locker, which was just outside the classroom. It was a lower locker. JL, a tall, funny, wildly adored boy had the locker above mine. One day, he started ramming my face into his crotch and simulating oral sex, holding the back of my head, forcing it into his genital area over and over as he pretended to orgasm. I thought it was only going to happen once, that someone would stop it. A teacher. Other students. School officials. They didn’t. JL repeated the abuse anytime he caught me at my locker. It became a joke most of the students in that building participated in. They’d linger after class, stand in groups gawking, laughing, as he simulated rape.
Though this wasn’t my first experience with CCSA, it was my most public, on display right there in the bustling, glimmering hallway where the floor tile and walls were all paste white, chalk white, as white as the flour babies the girls in some kind of love and marriage class had to carry around to prove they’d one day be able to take care of a child.
I began leaving class early to go to my locker or lingering after the bell rang so I could switch my heavy books out after class had started. It worked for a while until JL caught on.
I went to the school counselor. She told me boys will be boys. The more I resisted what JL was doing, she said, the more he would do it. It was, in essence, my fault. What happened to me was *my* fault, not JL’s. The counselor didn’t do anything. I asked her if I could be assigned a different locker. She refused. I asked her if she could talk to him. She saw no need. JL continued to force my head into his crotch whenever he could.
I got a large backpack. I put all my books in it. The backpack was tremendously heavy, weighed down by my literature, chemistry, physics, biology, Latin, music, and other books. I’d managed to overcome my learning disabilities, which I’d been bullied for in grade school. I fought my way into language, into mathematics, into all the letters and numbers that confused and frustrated and bewildered me all through grade school and early middle school. I knew being smart was my only way out. Education was my way out. College was my way out.
I knew my classes were more important than anything. I didn’t want to end up like JW, who got pregnant and was never seen again. Or like MW, whose entire family disappeared overnight. Or like RY and KA and LL and LB, all of whom ended up addicted to drugs, some of whom were raped, and one of whom was gang raped. (I failed to avoid being raped, twice, but that’s another story.) I forced myself to learn how to read and do math with no help from anyone and without my learning disabilities being recognized. By junior high, I was in advanced classes. I wasn’t going to let JL or anyone hold me back. My backpack gave me the freedom to avoid my locker. My shoulders and back hurt from lugging it around, but at least I could be mobile and move away from any tangles of students forming in or between the school’s buildings, ready to attack me verbally, physically, sexually, or in some combination of the three.
Years later, I spoke with one of those classmates, a brilliant student named PD. She explained why she and the other students did what they did. You were unflappable, she said. No matter what we did, we could never get a response out of you. So they did more. And more. And more. It was a challenge.
They were trying to break me. They never broke me. I’m still not broken.
They didn’t know what kind of family I’d been born into, what I’d already survived in my own home. What I survived every day.
Unflappable. A challenge. The word is strong. The word is a survivor. The word is fierce. I was fierce, but the body and mind can’t take eighteen years of constant abuse from within the family, from within the school, from within the community, without repercussions. We aren’t designed to withstand that kind of treatment. But we are designed to heal. This is what healing looks like, believe it or not. Right now, it’s me at age fifty-one waking from a nightmare in which I’m a teenager being sexually assaulted poolside, writing this down, and processing these emotions and memories on my own terms all these years later, as I have for many years up until this point. It’s a Mobius strip, healing. It’s a process. There’s no clear beginning and no clear end.
It’s life. It’s the life I’ve had up to this point and the one I fight for every day. It’s the me I fight for, and the others I fight for, and the fight I continue for those I’ve known and loved who have fallen because they could no longer fight. My comrades. My kindreds. The ones who didn’t make it. It’s JW and RY and KA and LB and, most recently, KB. And it’s DG. Dana Guthrie. Dana Lynn Guthrie, the name I was born with, the name I got from my father and the parts of him that I still carry with me. He was a boy, too. Boys who’ll be boys. Men who’ll be men. Fathers who aren’t always fathers.
The birds are singing. Wake up. It’s time to wake up.
Yesterday, The Human Rights Campaign declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States and released a guidebook that includes laws it deems discriminatory in each state, information about LGBTQ+ rights, and resources to help people relocate to states with stronger LGBTQ+ protections. Those who are LGBTQ+ are more likely to experience child sexual abuse, sexual assault, and rape. We can live with ongoing bullying, harassment, and discrimination all our lives, including during critical developmental years. We’re more likely to be stigmatized and marginalized, to receive less and poorer healthcare (including care that is neither trauma-informed nor LGBTQ-literate), and to receive inaccurate diagnostic labels when we seek mental health care—labels that are biased and don’t account for the relentless, systematic abuse we’ve faced and survived or that shift the blame for those experiences to us. Conversion therapy, which is legal in numerous states, may even be employed.
I’m not putting a collar on my mind. If I lose it, I don’t want anyone bringing it back.
Near the border, owls hunt bats. Here, we hunt each other.
Water thick as cotton, the lake a drowning mouth. Swallow. Spit. Swallow.
I notice this pain. I feel this pain. I acknowledge this pain. I give myself permission to release this pain, even for a moment. I give myself permission to let this pain go.
Vial my longing. Flush my joy. Pump despair from my lungs. Displace the air that holds me up, even in water, that lets me float like a buoy in the cottonmouth-thick lake. Sterilize me. Ethereize me. On Prufrock’s table, label me. Tag me. Take whatever makes me.
Mamallian nightmares. Chelonian dreams.
Always write before you can think.
You were one leaf once, whole. You are still whole, even with that hole. The hole is part of your whole now. And now. And now. And ever. Good morning.
In three of the locust’s leaves: perfect circles chewed away; perfect holes; perfect absences. What remains, what surrounds, what the altered leaves tell us about presence and absence. Here and gone. Now and then. An encircling. A staying. A leafing anyway, with and without. You were one leaf once, whole. You are still whole, even with that hole. The hole is part of your whole now. And now. And now. And ever. Good morning.
Things I’d rather be right now: a cushion, a brick, anything that doesn’t ache.
The wind is styling my hair.
The leaves tell us to be alarmed by the wind.
Darting: critters, thoughts, molecules. How can we not be here for all of them?
I went outside. And that has made all the difference.
Just a few more minutes, and I can start dipping into tomorrow’s calories.
All night, my knee remembers the tear in my jeans: freedom of air, comfort of warm light reaching skin.
Crown me. Drown me.
Crown me dead. Crown me listless. Crown me longing. Crown me timbered. Crown me felled. Crown me lonely. Crown me. Own me. Owe me.
I’m a thing. A thing made of mud that speaks and eats and sleeps.
I don’t know when trauma took my life. Was I five, seven, thirteen? I’ve been dead for at least four decades.
I hear the rain but only see one drop.
Living with. Healing with. Loving with.
With others. With(in) ourselves.
It’s all the land I love.
I’m at risk of being overly involved in the lives of animals, the life of the Earth, and the lives of humans—especially my chosen and biological families and every child who enters or has entered or will enter this hairy, hoofed world.
Dear girl-child: Where do you go when you’re nowhere? Everywhere?
Those who other conditionally still other. Under what conditions are you willing to be othered by those who conditionally other?
Failbrella: When your umbrella flips inside out in the wind then slips from your hands in the wind then manages to open inside your passenger seat as you’re driving then gets stuck in your coat some goshdarn way when you try to open it after emerging from your vehicle to brave even more rain and wind.
Jungbrella: When all these things happen right after you’ve seen your Jungian therapist, so you can get all deep-myth about every single mishap.
Love is a non-count noun.
Our bodies are rentals. Our home is the universe.
Chronically Ill? Read poems.
(Chronically, I’ll read poems.)
There are two kinds of people: those who love you and everyone else.
PrairyErth. We are one.
As astra per aspera.
Just abandoned a poem because it’s past my bedtime and I don’t have time to wrestle with it. Come easy or go home, poems.
An attention difference thing I did: Googled “on-ramp” to see if it’s hyphenated, accidentally typed “on rap” instead, then spent hours learning all about the history of rap.
This cricket is going to keep me up all night.
It’s bedtime, and I can’t get this fly to go to sleep.
Flies primarily sleep at night, even when kept in constant darkness.
You and the cheatgrass sway in the same winds.
On the patio listening to one bee, then another.
Sit, child. The night is hurling itself at the stars. Look up.
Not unpleasant: the gnat running around on my arm.
When I get to the Larry Gross section of my Twitter feed, it feels like finding a rich vein of silver in Southern Utah’s white sandstone.
Hey, terror. Short time no see.
People scare me.
This dreadful month turns every shoe into a sandal.
Every time I put on my sarong, I think “but it feels so right.”
Last fall, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Salt Lake Tribune in response to several Southern Utah politicians speaking at a meeting in which LGBTQ+ folks were repeatedly called evil and satanic. Members of the community left numerous disturbing comments in response to that letter. Seventy percent of the comments were deleted by The Tribune‘s staff because they were threatening or otherwise violated the publication’s comment guidelines. I saw some of those comments before they were deleted. I’ve been terrified ever since.
Similar comments were left on stories in other publications that discussed LGBTQ+ rights, including stories I was quoted in or otherwise participated in. Those comments were also deleted, but that doesn’t change the mindset of those in our community who have the feelings they have and who threaten, defame, harass, dehumanize, and discriminate against those in the LGBTQ+ community for no reason other than the fact that we are LGBTQ+.
These community members are taking their cues from the politicians who have turned their attention to the trans community because being anti-trans is a good political strategy. It gets people whipped up in ways that catalyze people to act, often without thinking, from shadowy places that all humans possess but that don’t need to govern our lives, determine our values, inform our beliefs, or control our behaviors.
What I mean is, fear, disgust, and loathing are all being conjured but not so we can explore those feelings and work through them to gain a better understanding of their origins. Instead, they’re being exploited, and words and actions that stem from these feelings are spreading like wildfire across parched land.
Who’s being destroyed? Not just trans folks. Not just the entire LGBTQ+ community. It’s everyone. Everyone who’s been discriminated against. Everyone who doesn’t have equality. Everyone who’s made gains and is now losing ground.
And everyone who’s harming others.
When our common ground is burned, our shared humanity singed beyond recognition, we all end up having nothing.
Anti-trans legislation will most likely be one of the top agenda items for conservative politicians in 2024. We’re already seeing a wave of anti-trans legislation and anti-trans language and attitudes across the United States, as well as here in Utah. Bills and emergency rules are getting more expansive, more disturbing, and more life-threatening.
At the same time, people are making statements that are more violent, caustic, and harmful than ever.
Earlier this month, a community member in St. George, Utah, stood up and told city officials that it’s not harassment and discrimination against LGBTQ+ folks which is causing us to die by suicide because we’re all mentally ill anyway. The implication is that we can be treated however by whomever because we’re broken, defective, and disposable.
Last month, a local politician who spoke at the meeting I mentioned above shared a cartoon on social media depicting the LGBTQ+ community as being a Trojan Horse full of pedophiles. That’s not about “protecting” children, which is the line these politicians use when they propose anti-trans legislation. It’s literally an elected official characterizing every person who’s LGBTQ+ as a pedophile.
At an event last week, a fellow volunteer approached me and said that “we” are supposed to be boycotting Bud Light because the company has a transgender spokesperson. We? We who? What we? That’s not a we that includes me. That’s not a we that will ever include me. And that’s not a space where I’m welcome or safe.
Where am I welcome or safe these days? Where are any LGBTQ+ folks welcome and safe? We’re running out of spaces that are inclusive.
I was recently told that the solution is for me to conform, adapt, tolerate, or otherwise learn to live compatibly with the very same people in this community who are attacking the LGBTQ+ community, who have attacked me, and who are making it impossible for LGBTQ+ folks to feel and be safe here. I don’t know what the solution is, but that’s not it.
I’m wearing my Victorian chemise. I’ve been cleaning and crying and organizing my closets all day. While gently spreading a newly washed flat sheet across my bed, I thought about my dog Hayden, who died almost two years ago.
Pain, pain, pain. It came sharp and quick like needles marching up and down my body—not just losing Hayden but all the pain before and after. I think we so suddenly remember the animals we’ve lost because they allow us to enter into other painful experiences. Animals are guides, I believe, even when they’re no longer with us.
There’s been so much pain in my life, in my husband’s life, in our friends’ lives, in our families’ lives, in the neighborhoods where we’ve lived, in the cities and states we’ve called home, in public spaces, in private spaces, in our country, in the world.
Leonard Cohen spent six years meditating in silence on Mount Baldy. He finally came back because he knew he was a writer and had to write. He was writing all the time while meditating, he said.
I used to say I was a text generator, not a writer. I was rejecting agency and narrative. A fellow poet and dear friend influenced me in this regard or maybe we influenced each other. The stance was entertaining but preposterous. I’m actually a writer, not a text generator. But I had folks fooled: On Twitter, some of my followers actually thought I was a bot.
It would be easier to be a bot. It would. This world makes me bleed, and I bleed into it in turn.
When I was arranging a stack of poetry books on a high shelf this afternoon, one of them fell on my head and left a welt between my eyebrows. It’s kind of a third-eye type of thing. The offending collection was by John Donne, my favorite poet, a man whose work sets my heart beating in time with his lines. What’s that saying? Something about being hit over the head … Donne’s aim was a bit off, but close enough. Point made.
Earl Smith, a man I met once who’s dear to me said we just have to do three things: try, love, and use our gifts to help others. Phil Stutz, a Jungian analyst whose work I admire, says we will never escape the following three things: pain, hard work, and uncertainty.
That’s what I’m meditating on now, after three days of sitting with an especially painful situation. I need to try. I need to love. I need to use my gifts to help others. And I need to do those things despite pain being unavoidable, hard work being necessary and constant, and uncertainty being ever-present.
And I’m going to have to write at least some of it down. I think that’s unavoidable, too.
Look at enough corsets, and everything starts to look like corsets.
The gray sky makes the white locust branches whiter.
It’s strange that people sing in front of other people. All my singing is done alone.
My mother was named after a “silent film star.” That’s a fancy way of saying she was a vaudeville dancer.
It’s early spring. Puffy things gonna puff.
Don’t conflate conspiracy theories and conspiracy hypotheses.
My mother got stuck in quicksand once when she was a child.
It’s hard to stop shopping for gongs once you start shopping for gongs.
Utah News is at it again. Rise and shine, Dana. Time to make the donuts. Every day. Every dang day with these donuts and the making of them.
The book I’ll never write about my adulthood will be titled Unsolicited. The book I’m really writing about my childhood in Oklahoma is titled Crude.
That’s Miss Pronunciation to you.
My kinda Utah: I saw a statuesque trans woman tear open a little creamer cup at Barnes and Noble in St. George and knock it back like a shot over at the condiments station.
Pastiche on the streets, passed out in the sheets.
I think I finally understand what Nate sees in Jeremiah.
That was supposed to read took a sharp turn. I give up, language, little keyboards, mindless thumbs, predictive text, bad spell check. You win! Have your wrong words in the wrong order, the near opposite of Satie’s approach to composition: removing the wrong dang notes.
The adjective “everloving” has an interesting set of meanings: 1. Complete and total devotion 2. Sexual virility 3. Of or pertaining to an everlasting gobstopper 4. Violence on another person resulting in death or serious bodily harm Sharp took a turn at 3 and again at 4.
To Do: Clean up my act.
I feel like there’s a gumwall in hell.
Nothing my pink Himalayan salt lamp can’t fix.
I’ve literally been a Wandering Tattler of late, which is the bird I’ve always aspired to be.
I Julia Cameron Artist Way avoided the news for seven weeks AND THEN I SAW THE NEWS!!!
This is the winter of our dissing content.
Dis/content.
The rain is loud. My heart is louder, wetter, than the rain.
Still. No words.
True story: I went into a pawn shop that’s mostly a gun store looking for a bow and arrow and left with a solid silver Pearl flute with pointed tip keys, two woven mojo bags full of worry dolls, a beaded keychain, and a referral to a local archery store. That’s my kinda Utah.
Bedazzle animal skulls if you must. Anything to survive.
Grammarly to me: Are you tired of struggling with grammar, spelling, and punctuation when writing? Me to Grammarly: Heckin’ heck no. The struggle is where the life is, the juice is, the glimmering — in words and in everything. How do you not know that? Watch Stutz. You’ll see.
What’s better than a guide who’s still razzle-dazzled by all of this herself? I mean themselves? I mean time to drop the darn mic or bang the darn gong or pan away from these words while theremin music or Dolly Parton wafts in the nearish distance.
I mean, people who are fifty or older are, by definition, time travelers. No machine needed. Just minds that recall and mouths that speak. And hearts that throb or bleat or sort of keep the blood moving.
Dear bot: We’re already in love. Admit it.
I bought fourteen oranges from some guys selling oranges. Now, I have thirteen oranges to give away.
Look, if something just isn’t adding up, maybe you’re a victim of fuzzy math.
The word of the day is humuhumunukunukuapuaa. Tell me that doesn’t make you smile.
Keep us freaked out and divided, Salt Lake Tribune. Good job.
There goes AI again, mistaking feathers for coral.
I’m terrified of water. I’m made of water. I’m terrified of myself.
No family reunions in sight. There was never union to begin with.
I’m not a trading card.
Sometimes, trying to talk to siblings is like trying to talk to strangers who know you just enough to hate you.
Kin = kind = kindness.
Sometimes, your family isn’t your kin. Sometimes, your kin isn’t your family.
I just realized I can carry a men’s wallet, and the wallet police won’t arrest me.
A men’s wallet? A man’s wallet? I don’t know. I just know I want one.
I literally just saw a purse that made me drool.
Nothing is more terrifying than a purse made out of jeans.
OK. I can survive my family, but only if we survive with each other, not in spite of each other.
When a word seems like it’s going to have a really great meaning but doesn’t. Actually, is there a word for that? That unfettered disappointment?
A doctor told me my intelligence is a coping mechanism. Is there any sense in that nonsensical statement?
My honesty is never delayed.
Some forms of love belong in the DSM.
My trauma is survivable. My family isn’t.
There’s no such thing as delayed honesty.
Mudras are an embodied language, flesh as symbol, sign, signified.
The hand is a sign if you use it to speak.
Between my words: gasps.
Dana Henry Martin 