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Ribbety

When we fail to recognize sanism and ableism in all its forms, we fail to protect ourselves and each other.

Give us ribbety or give us death. — Sign at No Kings Protest

Me: I’m going to have a nice day.

My Intestines: Not so fast.

A group of frogs can be called an army, a chorus, or a colony. I call a group of frogs a democracy.

I used to want to be the cylindrical container that shot through the pneumatic tube at the bank. I also wanted to be the money inside the container. Anything to not be human.

I made a bunch of big decisions, I’m in the bed, and the life partner is bringing me no-bake cookies, ice cream, and caramel corn is how I am. My therapist said this is OK. I’m not so sure.

I stole the last Zevia in the house from the life partner is how I am.

I’d rather be too soft for this world than too hard.

I’m eating caramel corn while lying in bed with my dog on me is how I am.

We can be born after we’re born, and it doesn’t need to happen in a religious framework.

The Harvest Moon Supermoon and the Waning Gibbous Moon are stealing my dreams. I need those dreams. They’re for me, not for various and sundry moons.

Half of what you’ve done has already been done before and by half I mean all.

Whole in Your Wholeness

Sometimes, you travel somewhere and leave something behind: the body of your pain, which is taken into so many mouths and carried into the air and consumed and changed and spread until it becomes one with earth, water, air, and fire. Until it transmogrifies, and you think finally, finally, because you’re ready to let it go. You wanted to let it go a long time ago but now you can, so you do, and your doing becomes something done, something you did, have done, as if the past in all its verb forms exists independent of the present, as if you exist now and only now. And right now, you do. That’s exactly what you do. You are here, sometimes, whole and aware of your wholeness. Say hello to who you are.

Called to Serve

When Sandra Cisneros spoke at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writing Conference yesterday, I felt like every poet and writer in the audience was being called to do our best and be our best as creators and as human beings. I felt a sense of purpose and responsibility, the way our country’s leaders used to make me feel when I listened to their most inspiring speeches. I haven’t felt that way in a long time, and I’ve never felt that way as a poet: encouraged to live and write thoughtfully, mindfully, with presence, and with clarity.

Obstacles and Destinations

The life partner has informed me that he’s no longer angry with me. We just woke up. We haven’t even interacted today.

The white-crowned sparrows have arrived for the winter, which means joy has taken up residence in this desert.

I just thought about baby animals, and I’m suddenly very happy.

When I see nothing but darkness, teach me to see the dark. When I hear nothing but darkness, teach me to hear the dark. When I feel nothing but darkness, teach me to feel the dark. When I realize I am darkness, teach me to love the dark that I am. The darkness of my body. The darkness of my mind. The darkness I came from and will return to. The darkness that is all that is.

I would really love to be in a room where I feel wanted, welcome, like I don’t have to hide essential parts of myself, where I don’t have to listen to things that are painful and othering, and where I can speak in full voice without shame and trepidation.

When you think you’re the destination, but you’re just the obstacle.

The only thing worse than having wet hair is having wet hair in a new place.

Your cracks are how the universe enters you.

I just googled what is a sand time thing called is how I am.

I wrapped my king-sized chenille blanket around my waist and am wearing it like a sarong is how I am.

Sentence from my dream: Like gods in Greek myths, we are gilded, guilted, and gutted.

You’d think I’d put all my dopamine to better use, but no. I make fiddly spreadsheets.

I’m doing a deep dive into facts and fictions about the Osage orange is how I am.

A list of my bad habits:

1. All of them.


Doffered

Meanwhile, locals are sharing a hate flag—you know the one—in Facebook comments on a news story about someone here who’s trans, including one made by arranging four pride flags in a particular way. Tell me two poets misgendering Andrea Gibson over and over at a local literary event is no big deal, especially in this larger context. Tell me I need to be more forgiving. To forget. To get over it, all of it. To at least raise my concerns quietly, privately, and with decorum and grace. Tell me I’m the problem. Tell me.

Quiet never got anyone anywhere other than silenced, gone, or dead. What others say openly will never be a secret I carry. I’m done bouldering men’s shames. They won’t go with me to my grave. Hell, I won’t even have a grave. I’ll be the dust my life partner holds to the Southern Utah wind. I’ll be southwesterly then. You can sing a song to the four elements when the time comes. Right now, there’s work to be done. Do it with me or don’t. Draw scars on the face of the world if that’s your thrust. Make hate not peace if you must. Fulfill your flimsy purpose like a lace doily under a dusty candle in an abandoned cabin in some forgotten town. Be dimity. Go forth and doffer. Tell me again why I bother.

One (Sanist) Country for All

I emailed the organizer of the poetry event I was at and sent a letter to the faculty member whose comments concerned me. I don’t expect anyone to support me or even understand my concerns, but here’s the letter.

—

I’m deeply troubled by your comments yesterday about Ezra Pound at the [writing conference]. Many accounts support the fact that he had a psychotic disorder. Whether you believe that or not, your venom toward him and your characterizations about what a terrible person he was were emblematic of sanism. Your comment about the authorities not being able to put him in prison or kill him were incredibly painful given that they came on the heels of Fox news anchor Brian Kilmeade’s comments two weeks ago about those who are unhoused or who have mental-health issues needing to be killed, not to mention the July 24, 2025, Executive Order that trammels the rights of those who are unhoused, have mental-health issues, and have substance-use issues.

I stood up and took a risk by sharing my own mental-health issues with everyone at the conference in the context of helping those in my community overcome stigma about mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experience only to see you reinforce stigma and nearly seethe over someone who had a psychotic disorder. You undermined everything I tried to do, and you made that space unsafe for me and for those like me who are just trying to survive, which is especially hard to do here in Utah if you live with a mental-health label.

Your flippant comment about Pound being placed in an asylum (because he couldn’t be put in prison or killed) denies the reality of those institutions and the myriad harms they did to people in this country and all over the world. My mother worked in an asylum-turned-psychiatric hospital as a nurse. She was also subjected to great harm in similar hospitals as someone who lived with bipolar.

Those places are not a joke, should not be talked about lightly, and were the setting of, and justification for, countless human-rights abuses. This is the crux of my work as a poet and essayist: uncovering and documenting abuses that those with mental-health issues have experienced and continue to experience.

I was ashamed of myself yesterday, of my existence, as you spoke. Then I realized what I’m actually ashamed of is you: your attitude, your words, and your carelessness. Nothing you shared is why I paid the expenses associated with [the conference], why my husband took time off work to accompany me there, or what I hoped to learn during the event. If you hate Pound that much, you should have chosen a poem that wasn’t by him. Then the entire rant could have been avoided.

I’m nobody to someone like you, but I’m writing this to you anyway because I’m somebody to me, and I’m somebody to those I fight with and for. I will not stop speaking back to bigotry and hate, even when I encounter it in the unlikeliest of places.

—

I should mention the fact that, thanks to the July 24 Executive Order and its erosion of decades of protections for those it targets, it is now legal to hold anyone who’s affected by the order, including those with mental-health issues, in prison indefinitely. That’s yet another reason the faculty member’s comments are poorly timed and extremely insensitive.

—

In response to a comment on Facebook about this note, which was initially shared there: One of my concerns about Pound is that scholars who are not experts in psychiatry have tried to make the case that Pound either didn’t have a psychiatric issue or was feigning one. We aren’t in a position to make that determination, both because we aren’t there to assess him and because we don’t have the background that would allow us to do so.

The literature I’ve read that makes the case that Pound did not have psychosis doesn’t hold up and betrays more about the person doing the long-distance, time-traveling assessment than it does about what it’s like to have lived experience with mental-health issues or to have had them during a time when diagnoses, understandings, and treatments were rapidly changing.

Pound was in the asylum right before my mother had her own experiences both as a psychiatric nurse and as a psychiatric patient. There’s actual overlap there in terms of the dates. My mother’s diagnosis changed many times, as did her treatments, as did the degree to which she was affected by her psychosis.

Pound is challenging, difficult, and complicated. We can’t complicate him more by injecting one or more layers of sanism on top of his story. This was a class about concision in the poetic line. We weren’t there to study Pound or fascism or history or mental health. We weren’t. And to bring that into the conversation in a way that lacked skill and an understanding of what’s happening today in the United States to those who have mental-health issues, with a proposed resurgence of asylums and all, is alarming, heartbreaking, and soul-crushing, at least for me.

Just a couple of months ago, I saw a prominent poet get a whole group of poets riled up here on Facebook about another poet who was clearly experiencing psychosis. The pile-on was awful and included sanist labels, attitudes, and outright attacks. We need less of that kind of thing in the world and in the world of poetry, not more. I feel the way Pound was discussed two days ago promotes more of that kind of thing in the here and now, not less.

My Kingdom for a Pencil (in the Psychiatric Ward)

Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.

I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.

I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.

I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.

In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, “If you do that again … ” without completing the threat.

I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.

Folding and Unfolding

This is the two-year anniversary of my stay at the local inpatient psychiatric hospital where the psychiatrist described me as being involved in sex trafficking, as if I was trafficking others as an adult as opposed to having been trafficked as a child. The psychiatrist also said my trauma had nothing to do with my mania, told me in so many words to be a better wife when I expressed my concerns to him about my husband’s behavior, refused to help me get services from the local organization that helps people who’ve survived sexual abuse, and wrote in my chart that I had a poor prognosis because I have no insight into having bipolar.

And he was supposed to be one of the better psychiatrists at that hospital.

This is also the day I briefly saw Utah poet laureate Lisa Bickmore and thought she was some kind of healing Earth goddess, which I still think is the case. When I’m manic, I see essences. Lisa is a lot more than a healing Earth goddess, but she also has the essence of a healing Earth goddess.

These are the final days of my hegira, the one I declared over before it was over. Over the next few days, I’ll be sitting with everything that happened two years ago in a process that’s like folding now and then together the way two ingredients are combined in baking. Not that I bake. I prefer folding time to folding things like whipped eggs and melted chocolate. When I need to eat something, I just eat it. I rarely mix it with something else.

The Others

The last lines of Linda Gregg’s poem “The Girl I Call Alma” read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scar me,
              not you.

But the first edition of the book, which I have, has a typo. Those lines read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scare me,
              not you.

For years, I thought the poem with the typo was the correct version. It resonates with me because of my trauma history. Being scared. Being scared. And wanting the person who’s scaring me not to be the person who’s scaring me. Father, mother, like the parents in Sharon Olds’ poem “Satan Says.” Like that. And more. And others. And this always-fear like the fear Hannah Gadsby talks about, only it’s not just a fear of rooms full of men. It’s people. People do such harm. They are terrifying. Maybe Jon’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t write poetry because poetry puts me in the world, and that’s hard for him because it’s hard for me. And he doesn’t like it. And I’m not scared of him, at least there’s that. But I’d rather face my fears than hide from the world even if the latter makes him happier or “us” happier, as he says.

Scare. Scar. I’d rather be scared than scarred. Both work. Both versions of the poem work. I’m probably scared and scarred. At least I no longer think I’m a monster or the devil, both of which I was pretty certain of a couple of years ago. Because I am of my father. Of him. Of that. I was always his. And he was a monster, a devil.

Mary Reufle’s ‘Lapland’

Mary Reufle created a powerful moment for the audience here in Tucson when she read at The Poetry Center last fall. I was there and will never forget what she did. She read her poem “Lapland,” which she wrote fifty years ago. Then she read an essay about how the word Lapland is not offensive, but now it is offensive to use the word Lapp to describe the people in Lapland. She ended her essay by saying that although the poem’s title is “Lapland” and it’s set in Lapland and the word Lapp appears twice, it’s not about Lapland. Then she uttered this sentence, which enveloped the room:

“And if you don’t understand that, then I would go so far as to say you don’t understand poetry.”

Then, in the tradition of several poets who’ve come before her, she read the entire poem again without comment. So that we would hear it. So that, with our hearts and minds adjusted, we could hear it or have the hope of hearing it.

It was powerful. It was incredible.

Click on the image below to experience Reufle reading “Lapland,” then her essay, then “Lapland” again. The recording of the entire video is on the VOCA Audiovisual Archives. I’m just sharing the section that contains “Lapland” so you can have the experience attendees had that night at Reufle’s reading.