Across the creek, cows have replaced horses. The windmill has given up on the idea of spinning. Rust keeps it still even on windy days. I dreamed I was beheaded, and Stephen Miller joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. He rented me a pastel house in the middle of nowhere while I grew a new head. I lived there with Jason Statham, who let me see the world through his eyes until I had my own. He wore all black and sharpened knives incessantly. Folks like to walk into the wildlands at the end of my road. They always come back, like my head did. It was the end of times in my dream. Thirty days of unspeakable violence. CBS was inciting it by cutting their stories in a way that made us hellbent on destruction. The end of times. The end of the road. A nowhere going nowhere fast. A head that grows back but why. Even a cow knows better than to attempt such a thing.
Death
White Salamanders
We invented numbers, then we assigned meaning to them, both everyday meanings and special meanings when they show up in a certain way, like 11:11. That’s how everything we do works. We make something up. We agree on what it means, or at least some of us do. We find aberrations that appeal to our cognitive biases and imbue those aberrations with magic, extraordinariness. We can’t just accept that everything is extraordinary all the time, no sleight of hand needed. No tall tales.
But we love stories, don’t we? Stories like the white salamander letter. (Look it up. You won’t regret it.) Even I love that story and am terribly sad it was based on a forgery. A real untrue story, fully committed to, is better than a con, I think. It’s close to poetry. Maybe it doesn’t matter: origin, intent. Something in us needs stories, and we’ll get them one way or the other.
I dreamed I was in a large, tiered, auditorium-style room looking for a place to sit so I could read a book and drink some tea from a demitasse teacup. I was dressed like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Everyone else in the room was male or male-bodied. All the seats were leather and moist from the glandular skin of those who’d recently sat in them. None of the seats were right for me.
I suddenly felt scared and ran out of the room into a long hall. It was a secret part of the library in my hometown at the university where my father worked. Red carpet and decor. Brown spines. Brown wood. Books covering every wall all the way to the ceiling. The smell of dust and leather and cigars. The air hazy.
A man in a tophat and his rabbit held open the curtain to an adjoining room. The curtain was maroon and heavy, with thick twisted gold fringe, the kind where each twist is under constant tension from being held in its contorted shape. I walked through it. I have no idea what happened next, but I know something happened next.
I write stories in my sleep, that rich world I visit every night. What comes to me is essential, life-giving nonsense. I couldn’t live without it. That world is loose, vivid, surprising, and informed by every moment of my life, all outside of time. Ah, time. Now, we’re back to numbers, their rigidity and our desire to break them out of that box they must live in most of the, ahem, time to serve us and let them walk through the curtain into who knows what, who knows where. All we want to do is follow.
Death Is Not a Jinn
I dreamed the poetry community was a psychosis-inducing haunted mansion that all the poets had to live in together. My room had a closet with a secret panel. Behind the panel was information about a poet who’d died in the 1800s. Behind that panel was another panel with warnings about not ever opening the second panel ever no matter what. The second panel popped open on its own. Behind it was the corpse of the poet laid out in an open casket. It was Emily Dickinson in her white dress. Behind the casket was a tunnel that led straight down to hell. I bumped the casket. Dickinson’s corpse slid down the tunnel. I almost followed but braced myself against the tunnel’s walls. Once I was back in my room, I sat on the bed and vowed to tell none of the other poets what had happened. The panel covering the tunnel had no latch. I waited for whatever was going to come through to come through as fear crawled up my spine. That fear was the devil. Downstairs, the other poets laughed and drank and carried on, unaware.
Death is not a jinn.
It’s a hollow limb snapped off
the tree, a portal.
Proof of Something
The dead have a way of killing the living, as do the living. That’s what I woke up thinking at 3:30 a.m. when my rodeo neighbors flew their helicopter over my house and the walls vibrated and the bed vibrated and I vibrated.
I’ve been dead and alive for months now, maybe years. Maybe since I learned about the sex trafficking in the communities my father moved in and moved me around in.
Maybe since I learned that [REDACTED]. They’re rotting aspens, my family, carved with graffiti and missing bark, their leaves falling dead to the ground. All dead. All hollowed long ago but still demanding their remaining branches reach the sky somehow. For what? A sun that heals? A sun like a dead god who will help them forget how they’ve lived, if you can call it living. What do you call all that fluttering in the air above rot?
Definitely since my brother-in-law began dying from early-onset colorectal cancer last fall. Definitely since then.
Then there’s the call of the living who are dying or think they’re dying, the living I love, the call I will answer whenever it comes, even if it comes in the dead of night like a helicopter tangling the desert sage as it passes over. Or in the form of my husband. Or in my neighbor in Tucson, whose eyelashes are gone from chemo, and more, and more.
I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. In Tucson and elsewhere, Indigenous people are being detained and told they aren’t citizens. And that’s just one atrocity that’s been happening over the past week. You can read about it in the news. I’m not the news and don’t want to be the news. I’m barely a person right now and am certainly in no shape to be reporting on anything.
Last week, I got the results of an extensive genetic test back. I’m not viable. That’s the bottom line. Yet here I am. I’m in the 99th percentile of fucked or fucked up on just about everything that matters. But genes aren’t everything. We know that. Whatever keeps me going isn’t my genetics. I’m in the 99th percentile for atherosclerosis, so yesterday I had the interventional cardiologist review the CCTA he ordered for me in 2022 when I was having heart issues. The test wasn’t done to determine how much soft or hard plaque I have in my arteries, but the cardiologist was able to pull it up and interpret the results. Jon and I stood in the exam room as he scrolled through the images from the test as if my interior was one of those flip books children make. Nothing. No plaque anywhere. My first thought was great. My second thought was why not me, why him. Him being my husband.
Risk doesn’t mean you have disease, the cardiologist says.
It’s good to know risk, but what we want to know is if you actually have disease or are on your way to having disease.
In this case, I’m high risk, no disease. Jon’s low risk, disease. Fuck risk factors. I mean, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. Just fuck maybe.
I had a dream two nights ago that took the form of a prose poem. Trump had dismantled the EPA and shut down all environmental cleanup sites, telling builders contamination won’t matter once the sites are developed.
It’ll be buried, Trump said. The waste will be buried. Just bury it. What’s buried can’t hurt anyone, almost as if he was talking about his own father, as if dead family can no longer do harm. I’m here to tell you they can. Look at my father in his grave, nothing now but bones caving in, obeying gravity like a falling apple only rotten all the way to the seed.
In the dream, I thought of Midvale, Utah, and the outrage locals felt in the 1990s when more than ten million cubic tons of toxic slag by the Jordan River were haphazardly covered in plastic with no lining underneath, vented, and later turned into commercial and residential developments. Folks in Utah wanted the EPA to do more, not less. They fought hard for more to be done but lost that battle. What would they fight for today? Less? Little? Nothing? Probably nothing. Just cover it up. Abolish the EPA. Who needs them. Who needs water and soil and air and viability for living beings.
In real life, not in the dream, we lived on that slagged land when we first moved to Utah, just down the street from Overstock, which was owned by the now-infamous Patrick Byrne, whose round concrete building with a peace sign on the roof was also on that land. Byrne got a deal on it, and he liked a deal. Jon worked for Overstock and for Byrne. This was right as he, Byrne, was transitioning from being a three-time cancer-surviving neuroatypical genius to whatever he is now. Maria Butina. Voting machines. Deep state. Trump as savior. Bars of gold and hunks of cheese stashed in Utah caves so he could feed and pay his employees in the event of an apocalypse. All of that. We’ve seen a man move from brilliance to chaos. We know what that looks like. We recognize it in others. I recognize the potential in myself. I certainly have the genes for it.
I’m afraid of myself. I feel like I’m full of slag, like my teeth and mind will loosen and fall out any day now. I don’t know how the Trump thing was a prose poem in my dream, but I know my mind was telling me to write. For me, writing is the way through, the only way through. Through to where, I don’t know. That’s the thing. What are we. Where do we start and where do we end. What is starting and ending, even? Some way to explain why we taper into fingers as slender as unlit candles that continually graze what is not us, or so we believe.
Almost as soon as the helicopter made the house rumble, it was quiet again. The house, I mean. Also the helicopter, which had landed on the neighbors’ helipad. But I was still quivering, my organs like china on a glass shelf in a display case nobody can open or illuminate other than a doctor who uses a mouse to drive through me one image at a time showing me how perfect I am, how goddamned perfect I am, despite everything. Proof of viability. Proof of life, at least for now. Proof of something.
You are also something. I can tell you that much. It’s all the news I can muster.
Dead, I Wanted to Live
I dreamed I died. I saw my body lying on its side on a gurney. I was wearing a blue hospital gown. I was sort of in the fetal position, but my arms and legs were positioned unnaturally. I’d been turned and folded into myself after my death like someone trying to fit more garbage into a can.
I watched myself from above trying to figure out what happened. My mouth was partially closed around a laryngoscope. A tube had been inserted partway down my throat. Then I felt it: the heart attack that killed me. I remembered the shock, the pain, the flooding warmth like contrast dye used in CT scans, my belt-tightened chest, the last wild hoofbeats of my heart, then nothing.
The staff didn’t try to revive me. This one’s not worth saving, I heard one of them say. They rolled me into a side room that wasn’t monitored and left me there, where I was now watching over my corpse.
I don’t know how long I’d been dead, but the part of me that was disembodied began to feel cold. Everything went starry and black. Time wasn’t gone, but it was everything together all at once, not sequential. There was no past, present, or future. And it wasn’t a human time scale time. It was the universal time scale.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be cold forever, and I was pissed that the doctors and nurses let me die. I fought my way back to the hospital room where I was lying. The next step was to get back in my body the way I’d always done in lucid dreams when my consciousness became untethered. I laid down inside my corpse, but I wasn’t connecting with it. When I moved, it was just my disembodied self that moved, effortlessly and mass-free. Finally, with great concentration, I was able to move my arm. Nobody noticed because the room was empty. My heart began beating, but there where no monitors to alert the staff.
I was pretty fucked. I knew I didn’t have much time before I died again. I used all my inner strength to throw myself off the gurney and drag myself to the nurse’s station using my fingers. Boy, we’re they surprised. They immediately picked me up and fussed over me. “We did everything we could,” they told me as they dusted me off. I knew they hadn’t.
I knew then that I cared more about staying alive than anyone else cared about keeping me alive. Even when I was dead, I wanted to live, so I did.
I also knew I couldn’t tell the staff I remembered what they did. If a knowing look even momentarily hardened my face, they’d see it, and I’d never get out of the hospital alive. I had to pretend they tried to save me when they actually discarded me. I had to let devils be angels.
There was one hitch. I’d been dead long enough that I could no longer speak or write without every word being replaced with a different one. No matter how careful I was when I communicated, the wrong things came out of my mouth or appeared on the screen. That’s when I realized I should have stayed in All-Time rather than returning to Earth. Living is nothing if it’s gibberish, if every important word is replaced with a meaningless one, like vole when you mean love or oval when you mean love or leave when you mean love.
The Sixth Bird
What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull
Evening. My husband and I walk south over wet sand at Cannon Beach, roughly parallel to the ever-shifting waterline. We come across a dead seagull. Another. Another. A carcass every few hundred feet. Each body we come upon is more recently dead than the one before—more in tact, more body-like, more recognizably bird.
We pause at the fifth carcass. It is clearly only hours dead, if that. Thirteen seagulls surround the body. They systematically strip it of flesh.
It seems at first like a random attack but is in fact an organized effort. At any given time, three gulls have the dead bird in their beaks, one at the neck, two clasping either leg. The three pull in unison, stretching the still-pliant body into an expanding triangle until chunks of feathers and flesh tear away. The body breakers hop off to devour their share as three gulls from the larger group move in to perform roughly the same maneuvers as the last.
What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull
Sky burial, this is a kind of sky burial, I think. The flightless, the dead, being consumed by the living. The dead weighing down the living. The dead being carried off in so many ever-expanding stomachs.
What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull
Here and there, clumps of feathers stick out of the sand: What is left over after the harvest cannot be called bodies, can it. Cannot be called flight, since it takes more than feathers to fly. Half-buried dirty broken ornaments these feathers are, nothing more.
The sixth bird is not yet dead. It sits facing the wind. It does not move, except to blink, shiver. Between the wind and the cold, it has been a hard day here for gulls. A dog named Lana tries to attack the dying bird. Lana’s owner pulls her away. Wind blows sheets of dry sand just over wet sand. A pile of sand accumulates in front of the dying bird’s body. Soon the bird is caked in sand, most of its feathers no longer visible. It continues to blink.
I sit alongside until dark. My husband stands behind me. A woman pauses, looks at the bird, says Circle of life before moving on. I pick up a small stone near the bird, slip it in my pocket, wish the bird well. We make our way back down the beach, toward the dead, deader.
I wonder if the gulls will wait or begin eating the sixth bird while it is still alive. They gather around the dying gull as we move away.
What is dead: seagull
What is dying: seagull
Dana Henry Martin 