Essays

Neighborly

Morning Prayer October 16, 2024

I’m listening to the chickens on the other side of La Verkin Creek over in the Cholla neighborhood where people have lawns and shade trees and gardens and orchards and side-by-sides and motorcycles and religion-themed Little Free Libraries and trampolines and waterfall-edge pools and corrupt former city council members and huge parties with DJs where all the dirty words in songs are replaced with nice words and big flags and banks of photovoltaic panels and gazebos and bermed landscapes and guns that they wear all the time and men who come out of their homes and surround you and ask what are you doin’ and accuse you of looking in their windows when you’re just out birding and saying you better not be a liberal and asking you what state you’re from ’cause if it’s California, you got no place here and telling you that you can’t be on city property and pointing to the No Trespassing sign they’ve posted on the city-owned bridge that connects your neighborhood to theirs and they pretty much do whatever else they darn well please, like having chickens.

I’m clearly not a fan of Cholla, but I do love those chickens. Listen to the way they greet the day. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW. They don’t care about Cholla. Bu-CAW. They just want to chicken. Bu-CAW. So they chicken. They chicken hard, and I get to listen to it from the relative safety of my home because their vocalizations don’t stay in Cholla. They go where they want and are received by those who need to be reminded how to live above repression, above cultural toxicity, and on their own terms.

Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW.

Anyhoo. For the record, I’m not from California. I’m from Oklahoma. And I’m not a liberal. I’m an outsider American Leftist who’s not a tankie. And I really was surrounded by three of Cholla’s HOA members a week after we moved here when I decided to go out birding. The city almost took the bridge away when it found out what the Cholla folks were doing to intimidate folks in our neighborhood. I wrote a letter to the city saying it was all good. I made those men chocolate-chip cookies, and they brought me a passel of pomegranates, and we smoothed everything out on our own. So the bridge remains. You’re welcome, Cholla. (You can look all this up in the Toquerville City Council Meeting Minutes from 2020, which are online. I am not even exaggerating about the city threatening to take away the bridge if residents couldn’t play nice. The whole thing was ridiculous but not inconsistent with the rest of my experience in Southern Utah.)

I got distracted. Here’s the prayer part: May we all Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu bu-CAW today. Let’s chicken. Chicken like there’s no tomorrow. Chicken for those who need to hear you chicken—maybe across a creek, maybe on the other side of the world. Chicken because chickens rock and you rock, so you really should chicken.

The Brain

When I was a senior in high school in Oklahoma, a local bank sent toys out to folks in the community as a promotion. The toys didn’t come with instructions. To get them, you had to visit the bank, where they would try to get your business.

The toy was called The Brain. It was a gorgeous thing with a black base, moveable black wedges attached to black pins and transparent layers of clear plastic stacked on top of each other. Each layer had different shapes cut into it. Together, they could either lock or unlock each pin. The goal was to figure out how to move all the pins out and then back in.

It wasn’t easy, but I cracked the code. That’s not what’s important, though. What matters about this toy is that it was the first time I was able to wire up my brain and my muscles and my whole being. I not only cracked the code, I learned how to solve the puzzle in record time. My fingers moved without conscious thought or, rather, so fast my thinking couldn’t get in the way of the movement.

There was a tactile component to the game that was central to the experience. The moving pins clanked like a computer keyboard. To this day, I still look for keyboards that sound like The Brain. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. It wasn’t just one sound, either. The components in each layer of the toy rattled slightly alongside the ticking of the main pins. In the right hands, that toy was a tiny, quivering percussion instrument that sounded like ice cubes rattling in a glass. Its real calling wasn’t being a toy sent out to promote banks. It was being an instrument in an avant orchestra that only performs graphic scores.

The Brain made such an impression on me that, the other day, I noticed I was re-creating its rhythm and sound while taking my vitamins. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. I have a complicated system for retrieving a vitamin bottle, tick, taking a vitamin while retrieving the next bottle, tick-tick, and so forth while also arranging the bottles, tick-tick-tick, in a particular way on the counter and then placing them back on the shelves, tick-tick, following another pattern once I’ve taken them all.

The Brain taught me how to be a better flutist, how to be a writer—how to live in language at all for that matter—and how to process and store information with exceptional efficiency. Runs of notes became compact units that could be compressed in my memory and expanded when I needed to retrieve them. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Language became something I could enter into because I could type at least as fast as my thoughts. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Memory in general became something I could store in chunks without taking the time to think the words I was thinking. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick.

Notice there are eight ticks, one for every pin. The Brain taught me to compress language, music, and thought in packets based in octals, like a computer. The Brain is actually billed as a computer. The side of the box reads, “Can you out-think the computer?” But that’s not what it was about for me. It was about streamlining my thoughts, perfecting my movements, bringing my whole self into unity, into the present, into being-ness, and not having to slow down or get mired in the difficulty of whatever I was performing or creating.

This was profound, and it was my way of making my dyslexia work for me rather than against me. It was an assistive technology that unlocked me as a person. It was an extension of me that led me back into me in ways that had been inaccessible before The Brain. It was a teacher. It was a sage. I will forever be grateful to the bank marketing team who mailed The Brain to my home and to the company that created and sold it.

Someone stole The Brain from me in college. I think it was my friend Terry Holsti. He played the trumpet and had a bag full of teeth and hair and giggled all the time and had a different moral compass from most people. He was fascinated by The Brain. He always asked me to give it to him. I hope it’s making him as happy as it made me. I really do.

O The Brain! It’s smart. It’s beautiful. It’s mysterious. It’s a see-hear-touch explosion waiting to happen with the patience of a lama. And it’s marked sold because it’s on the way to my house in Utah. I shall not navigate this place alone. I shall have The Brain by my side. Together, we will gleefully tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick who live in this area instead of allowing them to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick run us out of here.

Toquerville Bypass Road

You know that bypass road in Toquerville that I wrote the sad porcupine poem about? Well, while we were away, a boulder the size of a truck unexpectedly dislodged from the lava outcropping they’re slicing through to accommodate the road. The boulder fell straight down into the newly paved roadway while construction workers looked on, then it sat there for weeks because nobody could figure out how to move it.

Apparently, the boulder was eventually blasted to pieces using dynamite. The neighbors told us all about it when we got back. It was the talk of the town and even made it into the local paper. (Tom Bennett from neighboring La Verkin managed to catch the boulder falling on video, which made for a good online news story.)

The company building the road won’t comment on what happened or why they failed to anticipate it. There are many more boulders where that one came from. The outcropping that’s being opened up is heavy, dense basalt on top, but below it’s a combination of veins of hard and soft sandstone deposited over time that have been completely upended by geological forces so they may run almost perpendicular to the ground like the ones behind our home do. That’s important because it means water can erode the now vertical or nearly vertical veins more readily than if they were sandwiched horizontally between harder layers. Within all that sandstone are boulders of varying sizes, apparently including those the size of a truck.

There are houses up on that outcropping, too, which makes no sense. A little ways over by the Virgin River, a house slid into the gorge a couple of years ago. Other homes have been abandoned or are at risk. We saw someone trying to shore their property up with a massive retaining wall that eventually slid into the gorge along with their hummingbird feeder. Those people are gone now. They left their Joshua tree behind.

We’re in an erosion zone here as well, so everything is always cracking and crumbling and siding down to the lowest point it can find. This land’s essence is change. It doesn’t care one iota about smooshing people, houses, and roads as it continually changes.

But we care. So we talk about the big boulder and incorporate it into local lore and Henny Penny about it for weeks on end—and when the bypass road finally opens, sure we’ll drive on it, but probably not without looking up and saying a little prayer. We’ll be looking for boulders, to be clear, not toward the heavens.

I’m not sure how this bypass road conforms with Chapter 16 of Toquerville’s City Code, which requires the preservation and treatment of sensitive lands, including ensuring no hazards are created, such as rockfalls, and protecting and preserving significant natural and visual resources, such as lava outcroppings. But what do I know? Maybe I’m still just upset about the porcupine. (I’m definitely still upset about the porcupine.)

Wet Hair

Good morning. What are you all doing today that’s poetry-related or not at all poetry-related? I have some big poetry plans but first I need to work up the will to wash my hair.

Here’s the impediment: I have a strong aversion to wet hair, including loose strands of wet hair that cling to my hands and arms and legs, wet hair matting drains, the feeling of wet hair as it’s being styled, wet hair stuck in brushes, wet hair on the floor, and so forth.

I just got chills, the bad kind, as I wrote about wet hair. I hate the way it looks. I hate the way it’s so soppy and formless. I hate the way it tangles. I hate the way it drips. I hate parting it. I hate smearing hair products around on it. I hate scrunching it. I hate having to coddle it by wrapping it in a towel until it’s dry enough to allow me to dry it.

I hate the towel. I hate the way the towel throws me off balance like Lucy in that one episode where she has that giant headdress on and can’t get down the stairs and everyone is laughing but she’s mortified because all she wants is to get down those stairs gracefully. I mean, it really is a funny scene. I’m watching it now.

My life with my wet hair is never funny. If I could inject humor into it, things might be different. Maybe if I had some Vitameatavegimen I’d be able to deal with my wet hair or I would stop washing my hair altogether and just lie around writing trippy poetry while my hair grows greasier and greasier, which is also a state I don’t like in hair, but more Vitameatavegimen would probably cure me of that aversion, too.

This is part of my sensory processing differences, which make me love the majority of sensory experiences but detest a few specific experiences, like looking at, touching, cleaning up, and thinking about wet hair. Or greasy air. I like clean, dry hair. I love to touch it. I love the way the strands lie together smooth as bristles in a Purdy paint brush. I love the clean lines, the tapered ends, the glimmering color in each strand, the way it feels against my face. I love the expressiveness of dry hair. I love looking at photos of dry hair. I also love beard hair and have an entire Pinterest board devoted to beards, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

I just need to wash my hair, then I can focus on poetry.

And no. I’m not going to shave my head to address the issue. (I have both the wrong face and the wrong head for that.) I won’t wear a wig, either. (They’re too hot, and I don’t like the way wig hair feels, even if it’s human hair. I hate how heavy they are and how they feel against the scalp and how the lace has to be trimmed, and the glue that has to be used, and the powder that has to be applied to the part, and the very real possibility that one would become dislodged in the wind. I live in extremely windy areas. Wigs are a no-go.)

So, yeah. What are y’all up to today?

Wildness

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter. I want another d or n. Something. Maybe a second i or one of those slashes right through the middle that allows the word to be at once one thing and two things. Wild|ness. That still doesn’t look right.

I had a thing to say about poetry, a quip or an aphorism that I came up with while I was making the bed. Then I saw my husband’s blood on a white pillowcase and lost my train of thought. He cut himself working on the house and didn’t think he needed a bandage. He needed a bandage. Because he had no bandage, the pillow became his bandage.

There’s something about the blood-red of blood on the bright white of white that makes the non-brain parts of my body react. To what, I don’t know. I saw a beaten woman bleed all over her white eyelet skirt at substitute teacher training last year in St. George, Utah. But this goes back further than that.

There are also, of course, the white floral handkerchiefs women used to carry that had crimson berries sewn onto them to disguise the blood they were coughing up because they had TB. But that’s not it, either.

It’s something from my childhood, something I saw or experienced. Blood drowning white cloth. White cloth destroyed by blood. Frantically trying to get bloodstains out of white fabric.

My mother knew how to do that. She removed nearly all traces of what happened to her, what she survived. She had a wildness that couldn’t be beaten or shaken or ripped out of her. I mean another word there, not ripped—a word I can’t say here on Facebook. Remove the i and one p. Add an a. Yeah, that word. By my uncle and later by my father.

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter.

Trauma is one of those words that looks like it’s packed with bodies.

Mother is one of those words that looks like it can be anything at all. Moth. Ether. Mote. Other. Tome. Moot. Mere. Mete. Hoe. Tooth. Hoot. Root. Home.

But most of all: There, there. There, there.

And the blood washes down the drain like always.

An Imagined Craft Workshop with Mary Ruefle

This may or may not be anything she would say:

Poems are everywhere. Find them. On social media, in thrift stores, in the air, tucked inside your body, in old typewriters, under rocks, on islands, in what you misread, in the margins, in dreams, in the dead.

Pay attention. Not the kind of attention that excludes multiple forms of attention, but rather the kind that embraces polyattentionality.

Write everything down. Keep it or throw it out, but always save what you’ve thrown out or at least part of what you’ve thrown out. Maybe tear what you’ve thrown out down the middle and rewrite the missing half or join two different halves and see what happens. Maybe take some Wite Out to ninety percent of it and see what emerges. It might be what you were trying to say all along.

Save what others throw out. Rummage through lives and handwritings not your own. Put a gilded frame around discarded words and see if they wriggle back to life.

Don’t be afraid to see a poem in a grocery list or a patient education handout or a menu or a box of rusted paperclips.

Collect things. The stranger, the better. Handle what you collect with love, always. All things are related to each other and to us. Treat things the way you want things to treat you.

Do the work. Make your way. Write as yourself and for yourself. Never write for others. To others, perhaps—letters are a lost art, after all. But if you write for others, you may get lost inside them when you need to get lost inside yourself.

Find one poem you wish you could write but can’t. Carry it with you until the paper it’s printed on is worn thin. When you can write that poem, find another poem that you can’t yet write. Carry it until you can. And so forth.

Know that you will die. If that bothers you, write about it. If not, just write.

The Subtle Ordering of Words

One thing that was interesting about the first piece she read was the subtle ordering of the words and how each word relates back to the other words even though the whole piece is rather sparse.

My husband just walked through the front door and said that to me. It’s what he was thinking about on his morning walk with our dog, Lexi—last night’s poetry reading by Mary Ruefle. He didn’t even say Mary Ruefle or Ruefle to identify her. He just said her, like he was saying aloud the last part of something he’d already started saying to himself during the walk.

My husband doesn’t write poetry or read poetry or even like poets much because of what happened to me in 2009. He’s still not sure exceptions to the rule in poetry are actually exceptions. He’s not sure there are actually any rules at all where behavior toward female and female-appearing poets is concerned.

I’ve tried to tell him the exceptions are exceptions and that there are ways to stay safe within the poetry community. I’m navigating all of that myself. My initial response was to leave poetry and never write again. But that is not living. I managed to eek along for seven years. I took up birding. I took up weaving. I love birds, and I love fiber, but I also love words. I loved words first—well, second right after classical music—just as soon as I was able to navigate language, which wasn’t easy because I’m dyslexic.

What a joy I found language to be. An absolute delight. A place to play, work, imagine, create, build, live, linger. I was thrilled to see that Ruefle’s reading had an effect on my husband, that her reading helped loosen language up for him. He’s a software engineer who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility with words and finds writing and speech tiresome. He’s also dyslexic but went in a different way in his life: away from language rather than toward it. Or, rather, toward a completely different type of communication, the many languages of code.

We have a safe word for poetry readings and other outings. It’s a phrase, actually. If either of us says the phrase, that means we’ve seen or sensed some kind of red flag, and we need to leave the situation. After what happened last year with the couple at Snow Canyon State Park in Utah, we’ve realized we can never be too careful. We’re especially careful around poets.

I’m glad the safe words weren’t what was rattling around in my husband’s head this morning. Mary Ruefle doesn’t know it, but she and the entire audience at the Poetry Center helped my husband feel like I’m safe, or at least safer, in poetry these days. And he feels safer, too. Now, he can play inside poems like Ruefle’s and find new things to love about language—within those sparse words that do so much vital work.

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.

Falling in Love with Places

I fell in love with Tucson today. That means I’m now in a quintuple with three cities: Walla Walla (Eastern Washington), Greater Zion (Southern Utah), and Tucson (Arizona). I may be in love with all of Southern Arizona. We’ll see how the relationship develops over time.

Here’s how it happened! Actually, I don’t really know how it happened. My love for places tends to emerge after I’ve been somewhere for a little while. It’s like simmering cinnamon, vanilla, orange peels, and other stuff on the stove. You forget about the concoction, then suddenly the sweet perfume permeates your body. You can’t say which component you’re responding to because it’s not one thing. It’s all the things together.

That’s how it happened in Utah. I was downtown and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” came on the radio. I looked around and saw all the quaint little shops like MoFACo, which has since closed down, and the pawn shop that’s really a gun store but also has nice T-shirts and beaded keychains. The sun was bouncing off the Mormon pioneer-era bricks, accentuating their texture and calling attention to the fact that each one was made by hand.

I fell, hard. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t my history or that folks there didn’t really want me in that place, as a poet or as a human being. I loved it. That was that. I’d already decided I wasn’t staying in Utah by that point, but that didn’t make my love for the place any less real or enduring. I know I complain about it and can’t live there and find it extremely problematic on a cultural level. But I do love it.

Walla Walla was different. My husband and I had been out that way once during a major snowstorm, so we didn’t see much when we were there. We made the move there from Seattle on a clear, crystalline day. As we got to the outskirts of the town—Jon rattling along in the moving van and me following close behind—there were suddenly golden fields everywhere flanked by low-slung, heavily eroded purplish mountains that seemed to encircle a whole, otherworldly place, or at least that’s how I remember it.

I fell in love with Walla Walla then and there. I began weeping and calling my friends to tell them how immersive that landscape was. I think I even made some audio recordings to document the moment.

Tucson was a simmer, no doubt about it. We’ve lived here for four months. I didn’t know if I’d ever have that “falling” feeling replete with crying, full-body chills, and that distinctive dizziness I get when falling in any sort of love, even (or especially) when I fall in love with a place.

But it happened. Some alchemy occurred between the music on the radio, the landscape, the roads winding through wildlands, the people and their graciousness and their quirkiness and their fragility and their strength, the creativity embedded in this city, the smell of the grocery store and its worn concrete floors and its awkward layout and its enchanting shoppers milling about and the chip display and the meat- and vegetarian-meat display and the slightly sad produce and the immunity shots that were on sale and the children looking for their favorite healthy sodas and …

It just happened. Like that. Lickety-split. I know for sure it’s love because I’m all the way back home now, and I still feel this way. I love you, Tucson. I really do. Oh, now I’m crying again.

Heartbreaking Wombat Poem

I will describe the heartbreaking wombat poem I wanted to write last night when I was too tired to write because I’d been messing with poetry submissions for fifteen hours straight. (I actually submitted zero poems after all that effort.) The time for actually writing the heartbreaking wombat poem has passed. But here’s what I kind of think the poem would have done. Keep in mind, I never know what the poem will actually do until I start engaging with it for real.

—

The Poem Has Some Kind of Title

The poem opens with something about how a wombat can’t survive in the wild with only three legs.

The poem goes into detail about the kinds of things the wombat can no longer do because of the missing leg, making reference to an individual wombat who’s experiencing this situation. Evading predators. Foraging. Climbing.

(The poem’s not sure wombats climb. The poem will look that up.)

The poem starts to talk about the wombat in ways humans can relate to, especially those of us who are growing older.

The poem turns to humans explicitly and all the things we can’t do. The poem provides lists here because they can cover a lot of emotional territory. Accretion can be an effective technique in the poem and help the poem avoid sentimentality and other gobbledygook that mucks up poems and may muck this one up despite the poem’s efforts.

Here, the poem may take a turn toward the emotional things we can’t survive, not just the physical things. Traumas. Losses. Unimaginable suffering. The poem will provide some examples, perhaps those pulled from recent news or perhaps from the poem’s past.

The poem might move out from individual traumas to larger traumas by talking about groups of people who are like wombats, ones who’ve lost their lands and are being driven from their homes into the harsh reality that the world is no longer designed for them if it ever was. It’s for others, many of whom want them gone the way they want wombats gone.

The poem may bring up Marky Mark and the way he brutally beat two Venezuelan men when he was sixteen years old, namely how that’s not dissimilar from people attacking and harming wombats, though of course the comparison is problematic because humans aren’t wombats and Marky Mark does whatever he wants, and it’s funny how the history of celebrities always seems to be getting lost, as if it’s all being tucked inside the pouches of wombats never again to see the light of day.

It’s risky, but the poem might talk about the emotional lives of wombats, perhaps discussing how we can’t know the interior lives of nonhuman species, but we can make some educated guesses. And we really don’t know that much about our own interior lives, do we, and that doesn’t keep us from talking about ourselves and each other, so why not allow the stretch here. It’s a poem, after all, not a scientific lab that experiments on animals. (And thank goodness it’s not.)

Now the poem may list a bunch of stuff a wombat can’t do after certain types of emotional damage, like being attacked or run over or left in the road or being burned or losing habitat or whatever. The poem may feel this is an effective way to bring you into the animal’s life quickly, before you can stop reading.

The poem wants you to feel all of this, both for the wombat and for other humans, but its mechanism of action is to get you to feel. You must feel what the wombat feels so you can feel what you feel and then extend more compassion and understanding to those around you.

That’s what the poem wants.

The poem will end but not before it tells you the wombat died. Humans made the decision to euthanize the wombat once they realized the leg couldn’t be saved. The poem may offer a kind of prayer here for safe passage from this world, but the poem knows it’s better if there were safe passage within it.

The poem will leave. It will disappear into the margins because the poem always has safe passage into silence.