Childhood

Gaslit

I was just on the receiving end of the most surprising gaslighting I’ve experienced in my life. In part because of what I wrote yesterday, I was accused of turning everyone into demons, and the concerns I’ve articulated about various experiences I’ve had in poetry were described as my finding new demons every month.

That’s a particularly painful accusation because it not only discounts my experiences in poetry, up to and including sexual assault, it’s also sanist in that the implication is that I don’t have clear seeing or clear perceiving. That I am not sane.

When I was delusional in 2023, I literally thought I was evil or even the devil, something I’ve written about here and in numerous poems. The poet making his accusation today knows about that delusion and how terrifying it was. To call up the word demon the way he did, to resort to making me afraid I can’t trust my own perceptions—well, it doesn’t surprise me. I thought someone would have that reaction to my writing. I just didn’t think it would be this person, this poet, who I considered a dear friend.

I am as unsettled as I’ve been in a long time. I am so tired of folks doing the greatest amount of harm possible when they disagree with someone else. It happens all the time on social media, but this is different because it’s not an interaction with a stranger on a comment thread. The call came from inside the house. And it wasn’t a calling in or a clarifying. It was needless, pinpointed weaponization of communication to do the most harm possible.

This is a story I’ve known since childhood. Long before I had lived experience with mental health, I was called crazy anytime I talked about what I saw and what I experienced. Abuse. Assault. Bullying. CSA. Trafficking. The R word.

I don’t see demons. I don’t have to. I see humans under their gloss, their resumes, their titles, their connections, their reputations. I’m going to keep talking about what matters because it matters and because I learned decades ago that silence never helps me or anyone else. Not ever.

Split

I dreamed I told my brother what our father did to me. He threw me out of the house. The moment the words left my mouth, our father died. My brother blamed me.

Later, my brother split in two: one who believed me and one who didn’t. The one who believed was locked in a room crying and wailing, not just about what happened to me but about what happened to him. The one who didn’t believe was standing over the one who did. He was pointing and screaming. He started to beat up the one who believed but instead fell to his knees, bawling.

I was all alone in another room. I thought they’d come for me once they realized what had happened to them and to me. They never came. They were lost in a world in which they could only console each other. It was like I’d never existed. But I did, and I do. I believe they exist, too, in one body: half believing, half trapped in disbelief. One brother cordoned off behind a velvet rope in a bewildering cage our father made for him that’s now his own.

Loosening Our Ties

My father had a tiger’s eye bolo that I loved. I wore it in grade school when we reenacted the Oklahoma Land Run. (Yeah, we did that. Also, there was more than one land run, but we only learned about and celebrated—for lack of a better word—the main one for simplicity’s sake.) I wanted to be a cowboy. My teachers protested. They wanted me to do whatever the girls were doing.

I’ve been looking for a bolo that’s like my father’s for a long time, but most of them are turquoise, and my father’s was shades of brown. I found one today tucked into the back corner of a gift shop. It was made of tiger’s eye. As soon as I saw it, I remembered that’s what my father’s was made of, and it’s also why tiger’s eye was my favorite gemstone as a child.

As I held the tie, I thought, “My father was more than the sum of everything terrible that happened to him and everything terrible he did, including what he did to my mother and me.” It was a surprising thought. I want to believe that—that there was an untarnished part of him tied to the traintracks inside his heart. He may have tied that part up. He may have wanted it tied up. But it still existed, whether or not he longed to free it.

I bought the tie to commemorate continuing to be in mental-health recovery after my trauma-induced mania two years ago. As I drove home, 104.1 played “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. The sky was lapis lazuli polished and held to the light. The cliffs in and around Zion looked at once eternal and ephemeral. As much as their presence hints at forever, they are also literally dust in the wind.

I started crying. How could I not? How could anyone spend time with this land, this sky, and not untie the parts of themselves that are immobilized in their hearts?

Let the heart run. Let it rewild. Let it forget suffering. Let there be nothing to suffer from or for. Let us all loosen our ties and help others loosen theirs.

The Closet

My teacher says the penis just finds its way into the vagina, knows where to go, doesn’t need any help getting up in there. She says it goes right in the way her husband’s does. She’s pregnant, so we’re pretty sure she’s telling us girls the truth. We’re fifth graders. This is our sex-education class in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1981 at McKinley Elementary School.

We are fifth-grade girls being told the penis just finds its way into the vagina while the boys are in the other classroom with the nice teacher being told who knows what. They will squirm a lot when they come back, the boys, which will be unsettling given what we are just now learning about their penises.

Most of us barely know what a vagina is or how it’s different from the part we pee out of or the vulva as a whole or that there’s a magical subcomponent to the vulva called the clitoris. She doesn’t tell us about the clitoris. She leans back onto one of the little desks at the front of the room, probably one of the reject left-handed ones like the one I beg to use since I’m left-handed but that’s always denied to me because our teacher, Ms. Malecki, is not the nice teacher. She’s no Mrs. Brown, that’s for sure.

Ms. Malecki once left me in the coat closet as a punishment for the entire day. I wasn’t allowed to come out to use the restroom or eat lunch or play on the Big Toy outside. She turned off the lights and left at the end of the school day with me still in the coat closet. I waited at least an hour before coming out. She’d threatened me several times in front of the whole class for occasionally whimpering from the closet. The paddle. I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell the principal, all of that. The principal was related to James Garner, so of course I didn’t want him involved. It would make me uncool forever, and I was already well on my way to being uncool forever without celebrity-adjacent involvement.

I was understandably terrified of Ms. Malecki. Now, I was terrified of her husband’s penis and penises in general, things that seemed like they acted on their own and without authorization and without thought and without consequences the way DOGE will in a future I can’t imagine, one that’s completely out of alignment with the pledge of allegiance we all take every morning unless we’re one of the kids who have to wait out in the hall because their parents don’t want them saying the pledge or singing the national anthem. The scariest thing in my world thanks to Ms. Malecki was the fear that one or more penises would be up inside me all of a sudden while I was hyperventilating on the monkey bars or trying to grab an extra cookie in the lunch line.

Ms. Malecki’s still perched on the little reject desk, which makes her stomach tilt upward. Her exposed belly button gazes at the fluorescent lighting as we ask questions. How do you know if you’ve had an orgasm? You just know. What does the penis look like? You don’t want to know. Are penises going to get inside us as we walk around on the playground or sit in class next to boys? I hope not.

This is a story in which I don’t talk about the sexual abuse I was already experiencing without understanding what was happening. Because the penises stayed tethered for the most part. Because one of the men was a boy, an older boy who’d been held back in school, and I didn’t understand what child-on-child sexual abuse was, that it wasn’t play and wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened. (I mean, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening, and I begged for it to not happen, but I didn’t know what it was that was happening.) Because things didn’t get really bad until I hit puberty. Because that’s when the penises came out. But they didn’t just find their way into my vagina and mouth. They were forced in. They were forced entries. These were things nobody, not even Ms. Malecki, could have prepared me for or helped me understand. We failed to ask all the right questions. Will we be molested? Will we be raped? Will we be sexually assaulted? I imagine her answer would have been I hope not.

I lived in a closet for a long time. Too long. In so many ways, I lived in a closet not unlike the one in my fifth-grade classroom. Afraid to come out. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid that, even once the lights were turned off, the threat would still be there, waiting for me to make a move, to run.

Wrapped

Our home is wrapped in thin plastic. We can’t get out or in. The doors are sealed, windows masked and covered. This is what happens when you can finally afford to pay someone to paint your house for you. You sit inside feeling asphyxiated.

I almost taste the plastic pulling into my mouth when I breathe the way it did when I was a child experimenting with airlessness—that “I know I’m not supposed to do this which is why I’m going to try it a few times and see what happens” feeling.

Oh, the rush of air pulling in with more than ordinary force and the way the mouth heats that air, then the alien sensuality of the bag connecting with the lips all the way around, followed by that sudden, hard stop when no more air can get through, the shock and aftershock of it all at once, like a symphony going silent after roaring from the stage at full volume, the timpanist’s hand held high above his instrument, the conductor’s arms hanging in front of her as if invisible wires control her wrists and the whole orchestra rigid, focused, tingling from head to toe and back again, the only thing keeping them in place is the downbeat, the one that’s coming, coming, coming, any second, any second, just as soon as the conductor gives her orders.

Then she does. She is me. The downbeat is the moment I pull the plastic from my mouth and air flows in, unrestricted and urgent and wanton. That cool air, that life-giving air oxygenating my body and bringing my brain fully back online. You could almost call it a form of rebirth if children who play with plastic bags are capable of such a thing. I was, or at least I think I was, but I’m not your ordinary child. Or perhaps I’m too ordinary. One can never know what one is or is not in comparison with others who may or may not be what they are or are not.

Light still penetrates the plastic-covered windows but it’s gray and gauzy like one of those days that happens all the time in Seattle but never here in Tucson. Even during monsoon season, storms make the sky dark, not the color of cement or that dull, not-quite-elephant color nobody uses in the forty-eight pack of Crayons. Do forty-eight packs still exist? I remember when I got my first set. It was thrilling to see all those colors lined up tidily in their box. It felt like as many colors as the world could hold. Then the sixty-four pack came out, and I suddenly needed those additional sixteen colors. Capitalism has had its fingers in my heart my whole life.

Some of the plastic is off now. That’s a relief. I could leave through the front door if I wanted to. Now that I can, I don’t want to. When I couldn’t, “I must leave now” was the only thought in my head. It pounded in 4/4 time as I wrote this, a percussive accompaniment to my hollow key clicks that only I could hear.

Maybe I felt like I was in the womb when all that plastic surrounded me. Maybe I felt like I was a cell inside its wall. Maybe I felt like I was going to turn into ooze and transform into a moth. Maybe I felt something darker, something only my body and animal brain remember, like my recurring dream of men who are wolves who are coming for me, and I’m inside a house but there are no walls, no locks, no doors, only gauzy drapes, so I wrap myself in them but the men see me, and I can’t run because the drapes only tighten when I try.

Fight

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.

On Writing, Poetry, Health, Trauma, Surviving, and Lucid Dreams

This essay was written on Twitter throughout the day on January 1, 2023.

—

I’m drafting a new essay here piecemeal, the way I write my notes for a story on a series of notecards, real ones, old school. That’s really all I ever do here: Write long stories in small chunks, in vignettes and aphorisms and observations. I’m doing that today.

Ginsberg didn’t have time for metaphors. I might not have the time or desire to fix my typos or to state things perfectly in this story outline. I certainly don’t have time to say things in order. That will come later. Or the narrative will remain disjunctive, which I also like.

There’s power in disjunctive narrative. Is disjunctive even what I mean? It’s not. What do I mean? I mean narrative that’s all scrambled up the way we think about our lives and stories. I mean: no imposed order other than capturing what the mind presents as quickly as I/we can.

Because we all do this. We all have minds. Our minds don’t live inside narrative. We have to learn narrative in order to survive. Narrative turns chaos into something we can respond to and live within. But today, the particular, infinitesimal part of the we doing this is me. This is my scrambled story.

Welcome to my mindfield. You have one, too. We all do.

You’re inside your mindfield right now. I’m inside mine. Don’t confuse the mindfield with a minefield. Having a mind is not the same as littering the land with weapons: the communal land; our lands that are shared but are not, and never will be, owned.

I’ll tell you the two endings to this draft essay right up front, where they belong in a scrambled story. First, this ends today. I had transient ischemia overnight, then SVT, then atrial fibrillation, then hypoxia. Diltiazem will end that until I visit Mayo next month.

Second, I had the most profound lucid dream in that hypoxic, crushed-heart state. About my trauma, of course. But also about healing. There was healing once I made the choice to leave the concrete place with the men and dance on sand with four women who’ve tried to be my mothers.

But it ends today. Once I have the diltiazem on board, along with the fludrocotisone, along with other treatments that are on the way, this will be over. What, you ask? All this trauma (re)processing. These dreams. This heart stuff. This near-death stuff. Over. And on my terms.

I’m fixing my busted heart enough for now to get back to real sleep, not the galloping, faltering sleep of the arrhythmic and heart-strained. I’m throttling my trauma (re)processing until I can do it slowly and sustainably.

That image, the one where I’m dancing on the sand with my four mothers, is where I’m landing with the trauma work for now. It’s what I’m holding onto. Because I did that. In my dream, I made the choice to leave the nightmare of concrete men. I went to my mothers in the soft sand.

[Interlude while heart recovers. Imagine soft music playing. Mill about.]

[Adding a note to clarify that I have my endocrinologist’s and interventional cardiologist’s support to take diltiazem. I’m not making that call on my own.]

I’ve been making use of a writing studio I rent from time to time. It’s ten minutes from my home, just on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa as the locals call it because of its dreadful googlable history. I’ve been able to drive to it since I started taking fludrocortisone.

I can’t sleep at the studio because of my heart issues, but I can be here during the day. This morning, on my way here, I encountered a rockslide that the police are monitoring. Then I hydroplaned twice. It’s been raining, a lot. The rocks and roads aren’t behaving.

Depending on what happens with the rockslide, I may have no way home this afternoon. The police officer said he didn’t think things would get so bad that all the lanes would be affected. We also haven’t had this kind of rain in years, so … [shrugs] … who knows?

I want to say “of course” about the rockslide and the hydroplaning. As in: Of course, this, too, is happening on top of all the other issues and impediments in my life that are or appear to be in the way of my living right now.

But there’s no “of course” about it. That would be my mindfield imposing on the rock, on the road, and on my travels in this time and place. The natural world does not collude. And roads are just petroleum-based gloop we smear on the land. Of course roads succumb to the elements.

Earth is not people. It’s chock full of us—mostly the dead, as Nietzsche observes—but it’s not people. It’s of us, in a way, but not us. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t conceal. It has no desire to do harm.

Earth is mostly not even of us. There’s so much in addition to and beyond us. We’re just people: a minority in the living, breathing world.

You might be ahead of me if you had an OK childhood. It’s taking me longer than it might have taken you to figure out people and their behaviors and what informs those behaviors. I’m also thinking about all of this in light of what I read by Aldo Leopold yesterday.

I’m watching rain fall from my writing studio’s eaves. It’s wearing little ruts in the decomposed granite in perfect little lines. I could align my knobby spine with the ruts and have perfect contact with the Earth—or at least with the decomposed granite lovingly spread on it.

I can’t speak to the collective mindfield other than to caution us against thinking we, together, know more than we know or are more important than we are. These thoughts feel basic, pedestrian. I feel silly sharing them.

We got into trouble when we made ourselves larger than the Earth.

My thoughts are as simple as a Yugo. I’m not a 1963 Ferrari 250 Gran Turismo Omologato thinker.

I want to talk about surviving. When my mother died, she left me a letter. Part of it read, Do whatever you need to survive. It was her last bent-tree message, her last encoded bit of wisdom, stripped bark-bare at the end of her life.

It’s what she’d been telling me all along, in words and through her example: Do whatever you need to survive. And I have. I’ve already survived, as have you if you’ve lived through trauma. Surviving is a process, not an end state. It’s not something we have to strive for.

You are here. You have survived. Your body knows how to do this and how to continue doing it, even when the seasons change, even when your heart is strained, even when new aspects of your trauma come tumbling out of your mind’s many closets.

I want to pause here and say this: Men deal with this, too. Men have power and privilege, but it’s not doled out equally, and men are asked to do so many unspeakable, nearly unsurvivable things during their lives. Everything from war to daily living is hard on men. It is.

Men survive unfathomable trauma, too. My heart is with those survivors. In the end, many of us are survivors, maybe most of us. Some of us don’t even know what we’ve survived, the enormity of it. The iceberg below the surface of it.

But when men come through great trauma and it’s paired with power and privilege, they can become dangerous in ways they wouldn’t be without that power, that privilege.

[Another interlude. My body needs me for a moment.]

[Also, Happy New Year. I’m expunging today. What are you doing?]

[I’m suddenly thinking about James Tate’s Jesus riding his little donkey. I think of that poem in moments of sudden, unexpected happiness while surrounded by what is awful. The poem pleases me in ways I can’t articulate or even comprehend. I mean, I could but I won’t. Explication is a buzzkill.]

[I’m wrecking grammar right now. I sort of love it: both grammar and the wrecking of it. Better than wrecking lives, including my own.]

[James Tate came after T.S. Eliot. Matthew doesn’t know that. Matthew thinks no poet has written significantly since Eliot. Matthew’s wrong. He was wrong in The New York Times. Writers write things down, so it’s not Matthew’s fault. Good writers can write the wrong things down.]

[The problem is the voice Matthew has, the power. Matthew is part of a larger system of power that’s a problem now and has been and will continue to be a problem.]

I’m drawing an iceberg now, an iceberg of something: behavior and what informs behavior? What we see and what we don’t see? I’m trying to figure something out.

My family and the Land Run, my family and Choctaw Nation, my family and Chickasaw Nation, my family and secret pregnancies, my family and the circus, my family and the rich husband, my family and a fancy house, my family and phonographs, my family and furs, my family and cars.

My family and suicide, my family and The Great Depression, my family and shipyards, my family and displaced Asian-American families in California, my family and racism, my family and fighting racism, my family and no farm, my family and no fancy house.

My family and being shunned, my family and learning to run, my family and fire, my family and oil, my family and power, my family and crime, my family and lies, my family and phobia, my family and rape, my family and incest, my family and trafficking.

Also, my family and surviving.

I forgot a big one: My family and the Dust Bowl. Also, my family and Freemasonry. My family and Mormonism. My family and (alleged, attempted) poisoning. My family and a gunshot to the back (at least, I think that’s how it was told to me). My family and mobile bars in GMC vans. Well, one van. One mobile bar.

[Interlude. Heart racing. I met a poet once who said she disdained any poet who feels anything while writing. That still has me stumped.]

In the dream, two men were after me. One was the devil. I was in one of those Russian-looking apartment complexes with exposed-aggregate concrete and iron rails everywhere and an open courtyard with all the apartments surrounding it, facing in.

I knew both men, but one was a shape-shifter, a self-identifying soothsayer. I never knew if he was there to help or harm. I saw the first through his window while passing by with a load of laundry. He was red, hot, everywhere in the room, and spinning like PSR J1748−2446ad.

The second caught me looking in the window. He saw me run toward the open concrete stairs leading to my apartment. He ran after me, yelling: I told you the devil was real. I told you to look to the angels. I fell, my heart arrhythmic. I clung to the rail, bleating.

I thought the second man was going to help me. Instead, he told me it was my fault. What had to happen now was on me because I didn’t feed the angels. He grabbed my ankles and dragged me, step by rough step, lower and lower. The concrete tore at my knees and shins.

I don’t want to do this, he said. He meant it. He was doing what he thought he had to do, what he was compelled to do by some imagined power. My skirt snagged on the stairs, exposing more and more of my legs, then pulled higher. I clung to the railing. I was so tired. I almost let go.

Then I did it. I said no to the dream, to the scene, to the weakness, to the surrender. To all of it. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was on the sand, in wildlands, no concrete in sight and no men.

Four women were with me: my mother, my mother-in-law, my dearest friend Pat Best who always said I was her daughter, and my neighbor—the one who recently tried to love me.

We stood in our respective traumas, unable to speak, tension in and between us like circus wires. Then the tension broke. We danced. For the Earth. For ourselves. For each other. For our bodies. For surviving. We danced and laughed and felt love’s malleable connective tissue.

Three of those women are dead. I love them dearly and understand them better now more than ever. It was just a dream, one I lucidly chose, but there was real healing in it. The one who’s alive can’t love me. We are tension in this life, but we are soft support in other realms.

I had four mothers: one cloth mother, and three cloth-wire mothers. It’s still four mothers. I’m lucky.

I had one motherlike monster, a skinwalker who trafficked me with her husband. I was also unlucky.

As we were dancing, one of my mothers had chest pain. She pulled out a blood pressure cuff and took a reading on her right arm. The other mothers laughed. Stop, I said. This is important. We all need to take our blood pressure readings now in both arms. Things got serious.

Our blood pressures checked out. No big differences between each arm. No heart disease. No blocked arteries. We laughed and continued to dance. I woke up.

That’s all I have to say today. The rest will have to wait. I’m staying on the sand with my four mothers, with their cloth and wire. We’re all together there, and we’re surviving. The cloth is for our bodies. The wire is what we’re using to skid over life’s glowing coals.

The First Face

I feel for those who’ve come out about Jeff Church and am especially moved by Young and Manning’s accounts of seeing Church’s face when they re-experienced what Church did to them.

I know that feeling of seeing a face overlaid on other faces and not knowing what to make of that feeling.

I know the feeling of entire states feeling marred, of a face overlaid on other faces within that place.

For me, it was Georgia.  But not just Georgia. Illinois. But not just Illinois. Missouri. But not just Missouri. Tennessee. But not just Tennessee. 

I had to trace my trauma all the way back to that first state, the one with the sound of home built right into it. And it was my home: Oklahoma. 

Oklahoma and its swirling faces. Its drunken faces. Its maniacal faces. Its aged hidelike faces. Its taunting faces. The home of that first face which jacked up all the others. The face of a man aptly named Jack.

The face attached to the body that held me after I was born. The face that posed with me in my first photos. The face I would later associate with one of my first words: “Daddy.”

When I was little, my parents marveled at the way I could spin a globe and find Oklahoma lickety-split just as the orb stopped spinning. “There, there, there,” my insistent little finger said, staking claim to that stolen state the way my ancestors had during the Land Run. 

There: that where, that no/where, that now/here I can’t shake.

That land where my father lies beside my mother—him in a silky casket, her more elegantly in a little black cremains box—in the cemetery that also has a Catholic section, a children’s section, and a section where forty children who died in a 1918 fire at the state mental hospital were dumped in an unmarked mass grave.

Oklahoma is eternal within me. No Masonic or Hermle clock governs its presence in my body. The trauma—that first trauma and the countless ones that followed—has no timestamp. The Red River is as it was then. The bullfrogs are as they were, plentiful and at times inconvenient, especially when they flooded the road flanking the river. The moon lowering and lowering until it meets the sandy riverbed and shimmers like an arched doorway to heaven or hell or maybe just to someplace better, someplace where pain might exist but suffering isn’t manufactured faster than mobile homes and oil pumpjacks.

The scissor-tailed flycatchers and red birds and robins my mother loved. All as they were. The starlings my father hated. As they were and also as they are now: outliving him, as am I.

The streets and highways and gravel roads that my father wore down, ditched out, careened along protecting and managing his drawling and sprawling fief. The sound of tires hitting seams in the concrete sections that made up a stretch of I-35 and the way the El Camero or later the Monte Carlo or later the GMC van shuddered a little when the front and back tires hit each joint. Ka-dung. Ka-dung. Ka-dung. Ka-dung.

My beloved dog is as she was, the one my father let me keep. She still runs back and forth from one window to the next over my lap as we reach either our city home or that other home in Texoma, depending on whether we were coming or going. I’m still there with her, as I was, laughing, delighting in her joy. Because she brought me joy, even in that family, even in that life, even growing up with an unspeakable father, a boundaryless father, a cradling father who broke the bough over and over. One who made me fall then told me he was saving me when he caught me. Where being saved was his bed, almost every night. And his friend R—. And his friend C—. And the strangers on the other end of the CB radio, the ones he made me talk to. And that one trucker the day my father pulled over and met up with him. How my father called me out, made me stand beside him, showed me off. How nervous that trucker looked. How he wanted to leave. How my father compromised him by making him drink a beer before he left so he’d have the smell of alcohol on him if he tried to do anything like call the cops. How the man said he didn’t want to drink the beer. How my father made him. How the man complied and ran away after doing so. Or maybe he didn’t nearly run away. Maybe he liked the beer, the danger, even my father, just not little girls. No. He didn’t like my father. My father terrified him and meant to.

That father. That first face. That first confusing, crushing pain. That leader. That schemer. That pistol. That man who shocked everyone into quaking compliance.

That man who doesn’t scare me. The one who (s)pawned me, the one who toyed and turned me into a toy. The one who passed me, passed me, passed me around. It was like being on a merry-go-round only without my mother, Merry, there to catch me when I fell.

Light, Capture and Release

Sometimes our lives don’t turn out the way we would like. Sometimes we imagine futures that never materialize. We keep trying to have those futures, but even though we spend time imagining ourselves inside them—happy and confident and secure—they never appear and allow us to be who we want to be or have what we think we deserve.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it.

So we become revisionists. We look at the past and try to make it into something close to what we want. We let nostalgia kick in and do its tricky work of glazing over details until nothing hard is left in our memories and our experience of our lives has been worn as smooth as a worry stone.

I had worry stones as a child and developed an almost unnatural dependence on them, carrying several in my pocket at once and running my thumb over the hollow in the middle every time I was afraid, lonely or nervous.

My childhood is the one thing I don’t clean up when I think about it. Recently I was asked to share a baby picture of myself for a “fun” game of guess-which-adult-the-baby-picture-belongs-to. It was difficult for me to open the album containing photos of me as a child. Most of them showed me in close proximity to an ashtray or a glass of vodka. Those certainly wouldn’t do. I finally found one of me as a toddler wearing an adult’s baseball cap. I looked happy. Children are too simple and hopeful not to be happy despite the realities of their lives—or at least to be optimistic, as if each moment carries bright promises on its back that glimmer like sequined wings, throwing light in all directions.

I’m sure the photocopy of my baby picture is in the trash now, the silly game of match-the-adult-to-the-baby-photo long over. Seems appropriate. If only it were that easy to drag all my childhood memories to the trash, like computer files I no longer needed. If only I could overwrite that block of memory with something new, or even leave the space blank until something, anything, worthy of being remembered came along.