Something incredible happened today, and the only person I want to tell is my mother, who died twenty-one years ago.

The poems are too good today. I can’t take any more. I’m going to listen to devastating music now and stare into a sky heavy with wildfire smoke where things are taken and given, but they’re never the right things, only sometimes they are, which is the scrap we cling to, isn’t it, because we’re here and have nothing else. I’m sorry to break it to you. Your talon is just a hand. The scrap is what’s left of your baby blanket. It will never reweave itself. You will never fly. You are impossible. And yet.

Poems are in it. They aren’t above it, below it, beside it, behind it. They are in it.

I put water out for the wild critters who congregate in my yard.

In the drought-stricken West, fire is the four-letter word we wear like dead skin on our lips.

I looked up and saw twelve Gambel’s quail, two white-tailed antelope ground squirrels, a rock squirrel, a juvenile western fence lizard, and a butterfly on my back patio. They were either hiding from a predator or digging the shade from the pergola. Or maybe the animal uprising has begun.

Pantoums are like that weird sex thing you try once because you’re curious, but after that one time, you’re like, Naw, I’m good. I’m gonna stick with regular stuff.

I will swallow Earth whole before I write another pantoum.

I carry my father’s war in my body.

A poem can’t just be a counterpoint sung above a nonexistent plainsong. I mean, it can be, but why.

Poets, may I rise from the beautiful destruction of your work. May I live another life, another day, through your poems. Grant me the strength to be burned clean and fly like that fierce mythical bird or even to outlive ten phoenixes like one of the Nymphs—all because of your writing. May we rise through and because of each other. May that be our eternity.

He was also like rain.

We need to dispel once and for all the myth that the federal land footprint cannot be changed. — Utah Senator Mike Lee

We need to dispel once and for all the myth that federal lands are like disposable body parts that can be amputated, bagged, and sold to the highest bidder on the black market that the federal economy has become. — Dana Henry Martin

Most of what’s not in the DSM-V is what’s most pathological in our country. Those with pathologies wrote the DSM in the first place, each ever-proliferating version of it. Power and control wrote it. Normalization wrote it. Coercion. Scapegoating. Blaming. Gaslighting. It will be rediscovered in the distant future and seen as the cultural artifact it is: a testament to colonization and the endurance of colonized mindsets and systems, and as evidence of one of the myriad human-directed harms of colonization. That’s assuming the future isn’t characterized by colonization and therefore unable to see this document for what it is. The DSM says more about those who created it than those it attempts to characterize, treat, and control.

My friend Jeff said this about my work, and I love it so much:

But I think one of the great strengths of your poetry is that it does exactly that, stare the reader right in the face, in a way that is so freeing for some and so frightening for others, haha. For me, maybe only like 25% frightening.

I stole all my husband’s guitar picks because they’re colorful and sparkly. I’m officially (not) a crow (or any type of corvid because apparently their reputation for liking new and shiny things is based on myths, not science).

It’s almost light. I can almost make out my bookcase, its white shoulders, its white doors. Within, its inks are blood. Its papers are bodies. But its heart is formless, a force, an energy, the static from a balloon. Here, my eager hands. Here, my eager mind. Here, my own heart, battery-like, waiting to be charged. The birds are singing. They’re singing for my bookcase, for me, for you if you happen to be a book, for the whole damned world.

Sleep didn’t go as planned. I had a nightmare about not being able to reach the books on the bottom row of my new bookcase because my knees hurt too much to crouch or bend over. When I woke up, I couldn’t stop thinking about my new bookcase, namely the smell of it, that light, woody scent combined with hints of paper, ink, and time. My heart started racing. I’m still trilling inside. I told myself not to get out a flashlight and go look at the bookcase in the dark. I told myself to wait until it’s light out to look at the bookcase. I kind of want to go back to sleep, but I also want to watch the sun rise with my new bookcase. This is its first day in the world, the world that is on fire.

You have a mouth the shape of joy. I have a mouth the shape of despair. It’s the same mouth.

The world is our corpse flower.

I’ve never come out, but I continually come in: in to who I am and am becoming, in to my truth, in to my experience, in to my personal and family history, in to my communities, in to my survival, in to my resilience, in to my heart, in to my mind, in to my body, in to my creativity, in to my rhythms, and in to my language. Yes, in to my language.

Sell our lands, sell our soul.

Don’t thank me for helping you grow if you grew at my expense.

I don’t know what’s out there, but there are currently nine Gambel’s quail, a juvenile Western fence lizard, and a desert kangaroo rat hiding in my rock wall. Hawk is my guess. Could be cat, but I think it’s hawk. I’m glad my yard is a safe space for them.

I have all the flowering native plants, which means that, as of this morning, I have all the screaming fledglings. My blossoms bring the floofy babies to the yard.

One thing I know: The desert doesn’t need lawnmowers, but here they are in the desert.

Kitty still here.

I’m not here to be the person with trauma and mental-health issues whom folks accept without that acceptance leading to a larger investigation on their part about the ways in which they may be biased against others who live with similar issues. Accepting me needs to go beyond accepting me. I’m not here to be a token. I’m not here to be an exception because I’m not an exception. Accepting me—or engaging in what passes for acceptance, which is often self-righteous tolerance with a side of derision—doesn’t mean someone’s addressed their discriminatory thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. I’m not a one-and-done. I’m not a shortcut. I’m not proof that someone who accepts me is -ism free. I’m not interested in such psychological loitering. Folks need to do the work, all the work, not just scribble my name in a column and call it good.

Sanism and ableism make a person weaker, not stronger. They keep folks from thinking and feeling and instead allow them to slap a label on people and situations, usually while mired in hate and its correlates: anger, defensiveness, dehumanization, and even cruelty. These forms of discrimintation are accepted and even encouraged, yet they do untold harm. Hate in any form has no home on my page, not in response to my work, not in response to me, and not in response to others.

In the United States, a diagnosis is a label that, when applied, results in exorbitant medical charges.

Apparently, John Donne’s work is often analyzed through the lens of queer literary theory. (AI said so, which means it must be true.) It makes sense now, the way I was so hot for him for two years. I actually wrote a paper decades ago about his work that explored his challenges to dualities around sex and gender, but I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I was living in Oklahoma and had never heard of queer theory or queer literary theory. Queer was still a word that lived in my dead father’s mouth.

A fly lives with us now. His name is Jeff. Jeff just bit me on the calf. That’s his way of saying good morning.

Everything is fucking diagnosable.

Lesser goldfinches gather out front to eat and spread desert marigold seeds. They’re rewilding my yard, the flowers and the birds together. Who am I to stop them? I never unwilded myself. Now the goldfinches are calling, their sound the shape of a slide. Tee-oow. Tee-oow. They move into the distance. My eyes settle on the old farmhouse across the creek. It’s yellow like the birds, only less vibrant, the way they are outside of mating season. What’s here is going, is gone, cannot be gotten. Claws. Carpels. Cladding. All going, all gone.

I dreamed I was a double-basin sink in a frat house. The frat members kept shoving their fists in my drains. I didn’t have a garbage disposal in either drain, so I couldn’t stop them. I tried to scream, but my mouth was full of water. All I could do was gurgle as they queued up for their turn. When they left, it was worse than when they were there because I knew they’d be back. My baffles couldn’t relax. I just wanted to be left alone so I could be a sink and experience being a sink.

I’ve been ill the past couple of days and sleeping most of the time. All my dreams have been disturbing. The others involve my father, who I haven’t dreamed about since right after his death forty years ago, other family members, neighbors, the home I grew up in, and neighbors’ homes. Themes include abandonment, isolation, and fear bordering on terror. But the sink dream was the worst of them all.

The longer we live, the longer we live in the past.

I dreamed I invented sardines sold in jars. Their brand name was Jardine.* Dolly Parton did the jingle to the tune Jolene. She substituted the product name Jardine for Joline. It was brilliant.

—

* I decided the brand name should be Jardine, so I’m changing it to that right now, even though I dreamed it as Jarline.

A baby-sized cyst wins the prize for the strangest health news I read today. From MedPage Today: A fitness trainer from Tennessee who avoided doctors for 7 years despite unusual symptoms ended up with a baby-sized cyst extending from the left upper quadrant to the floor of the pelvis.

My husband thinks Robert Plant is the most interesting member of Led Zeppelin. I think it’s Jimmy Page. I am right. Jon is wrong.

I take my water without ICE.

IKEA is having technical issues today, so I don’t recommend ordering anything from them unless you want to find yourself rage-chugging a couple of zero sugar Cherry Cokes before 8 a.m. while talking to one of their chatbots about all the snagglefuckery.

I call him Jeff, the chatbot. Jeff says he’s a human being. Isn’t that what all the bots would have us believe? Jeff doesn’t appear to be able to read screenshots or remember what he’s already said or track with a simple conversation. Maybe Jeff *is* human.

I just misread The 10 Best Sandals as The 10 Best Anals, so that’s how my morning is going.

This country.

I’m a lot of things, but quiet queer isn’t one of them.

My dog saw a white-tailed antelope squirrel when she went outside to potty. She darted at the squirrel, who in turn jumped in the air, did a big flip, and scurried into a hole in our rock wall. Now, another white-tailed antelope squirrel who witnessed the whole thing is screaming incessantly from a nearby basalt boulder.

Yesterday, a dear friend read a poem by Charles Bukowski that moved him. He sent me the poem so I could see it. I’m touched that those I love think of me when a poem means something to them, and that we can connect across distance and time through that poem, both with the work and with each other. Such a gift, such proof that love abounds.

My job right now is to hold my silence while it screams.

Stripped of my emptiness, yet I remain empty.

This desert rain, desperate. This desert heart, wanting.

Love, like grief, can blossom.

Kris Kristofferson is my spirit animal.

“The ‘Man-Eater’ Screwworm Is Coming” is one of the best titles for a scientific feature I’ve read in a while. I feel like the man-eater screwworm is coming for all of us.

Managing my to-do list consists of moving everything to the next day.

Here in the land of erosion, time is down, not back.

The bird makes my mind bird.

It’s alarming what the very few can do to the very many.

I wish someone would steal Wax Dana and take her somewhere nice.

Mushrooms freak me out.

This wind is as my mind is.

Arizona highways are so bad that several screws on our desk vibrated all the way out and feathers wriggled through our sofa cushions. We brought an antique piece back with us that partially turned to sawdust.

Facebook just showed me an ad that says I can become a certified sound healer in just fourteen days. My first thought was: Aren’t poets sound healers? My second thought was: Doesn’t it take several decades to become skilled in the art of sound healing through poetry? My third and final thought was: YOU MEAN I COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING IN FOURTEEN DAYS AND POETRY WASN’T EVEN NECESSARY?

The thing about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threatening to bar scientists at the National Institutes of Health from publishing in leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet is that it totally sucks. That’s it. That’s the post. It totally sucks.

Because someone thought this, I should also think this is not a thought I think I’ve ever thought.

Tonight, I stood beneath seven common nighthawks as they caught insects midair. I’ve never seen so many at once. They were flying so low they barely cleared my head. One of them called rhythmically, as if they had an invisible tempo they had to follow and he was in charge of keeping time. A bat fluttered between them for a bit like a soloist who didn’t quite know her part. What was my part? None. I watched them because I wanted to. I did not write myself into their world or write them into mine.

I like a lot of birds together but not a lot of frogs together. I think it comes down to texture. Not the way they feel but the way they look like they feel.

With words, we make and unmake the world.

Others can debate whether poetry is therapeutic until the cows come home. I have no need. My cows came home a long time ago. They’re poems, and they don’t charge me for spending time in their pastures. More cowbell, please.

Dear moon, dear man sprawled across my bed. I wake to you and your intrusion. Now you’re gone like you never happened. I mistook you for light, not your cold body that set me spinning. I’m not a tide rising to meet you. But of course I am. Tonight, I’ll pull the shades and sleep in the dark, the near dark, while bright predators dangle in the sky.

She who typos first thing in the morning will typo all day long.

Early morning, the moon spills across my bed like it’s too tired to get under the covers after staying out all night.

I exist in two states: having just peed and having to pee.

I’m too young to be this age.

This is the first time I’ve heard my neighbor laugh since her daughter died.

My dog threw up in my hands last night. It was everything she’d eaten since her dental cleaning. If her system is still shut down this morning, we’re heading to the vet. She’s in my arms right now. We’re listening to some bird who doesn’t quite know how to sing.

One thing I dislike is a fawning AI. You’re right. I was bad. Give me another chance. Forgive me. I’m so sorry. Where is this coming from? Who taught AI to interact like this? Oh, right. Us. We did.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

Creative writing entails taking risks. That’s hard. Attacking people doesn’t. That’s easy.

I didn’t read that poem. That poem took me inside it. It became my habitat. I dwelled in it as it dwelled in me. Old ghosts, those trees, a haunting, that land. I was reading the poem, then I was in it, around it. I’m still there, floating in its waters, drinking in its waters, face to the sun, belly to the sun, toes to the sun. I almost can’t see the world I actually live in. I see it through this other cross-eyed world. World of the lost, world of thorns, world of watery devils coming closer with every ripple.

—

A response to the poem “Down in the Gully,” by Dominic Leading Fox.

Good morning. The laccolith is purple right now, the reddish-purple I always imagined the majestic purple mountains being when singing “America the Beautiful” as a child. It was hard to work that out when I was young and didn’t have a nuanced understanding of color. How could mountains be purple? It took some time to see tints and shades and anything beyond the bright colors foisted on kids in books and toys and clothing. Everything that wasn’t bright seemed to be sepia-toned, almost, including my father’s El Camero, whiskey, and mountains, which I rarely saw anyway outside the Arbuckles, since we lived in Oklahoma. But yes, indeed, mountains can be any of the colors we loosely describe as purple, namely at dawn and dusk. My laccolith is comprised of fifty-six mountains. Think about that. Fifty-six mountains purpling all at once in the blush of a new day. Tell me you could look away.

Looks like I’m graduating to shoes with a big-ass toebox.

Al-Anon needs a counterpart called AI-Anon for those who have folks in their lives with an artificial-intelligence problem.

Thanks to Chansonette Buck, I’m putting shallow dishes of water around the house for our resident spiders so they don’t get dehydrated.

One bloom at a time, two lesser goldfinches tear up the desert marigolds outside my bedroom window. They methodically toss petals onto the gravel and sandstone below like unnecessary thoughts, throw-aways. It’s safe here. No cats. No snakes. No roadrunners. Not in our yard, at least, which nestles a great surrounding wildness that seems to have no end.

The mess of spring doesn’t just happen. The wind makes it. Plants make it. Animals make it. Every living thing makes it. Things grow, fall, rot, renew. That last part is nearly invisible, but the evidence is all around in that sand, that leaf, that wing, even in you, wherever you are. Your very existence is renewal.

One of the goldfinches flies to the front of the house. The other bobs on a trio of clutched stems and sings. We are all the bird that flies, the bird that sings, the bird that feeds.

A bird keeps asking the air the same question.

When I was young, I didn’t think Billy Idol was hot, which is how I know I’m not entirely heterosexual.

Every time I want to love nobody, I end up loving everybody.

What music did I listen to when I was processing difficult emotions as a teenager? Samuel Barber, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Gustav Holst, Carl Orff, Led Zeppelin, Dmitri Shostakovich, Simon and Garfunkel, and Tears for Fears.

I ache for this place as if I weren’t in it.

I want to tell the rat who lives in my rock wall that he’s safe. But the snakes, I think. But the hawks and roadrunners. But the neighbor’s pesticides. But the other neighbor’s cats. The rat wants to tell me I’m safe. But the memories, he thinks. But the body. But the mind. But the others. So we do not speak. We watch each other making a home out of nothing, in a crevice, in a house, each of us building a little future, a place with a scoop of light, a dollop of air, so we can sleep and wake and build a little more, a little more, until a mouth envenomates the memory, until a wing casts shadows on the body, until poison enters the mind, until the cats or the others get hungry and become a single thing that eats.

I dreamed about all the ways children experience pressure and coercion around sexuality and gender, as well as the sexual abuse and violence many children also experience. The dream went on and on. It was personal and universal. It was in the past and present. Everyone I know was there. We were a traveling circus going from place to place and weaving through time with our pain and our healing in tow. We were helping. We were trying to help. Children grow up but don’t stop carrying what harmed them when they were young. At one point, the dream was so profound it exploded like the big bang then sucked back in on itself until it was the size of a marble. That marble contained the experiences, the suffering, the worlds of the collective. I held it in my cupped hands. I carried it into the night.

Let my life be a study in benevolence and compassion, for the environment, for the land, for all living creatures. Let me life not be any other story.

Some things are cute, but they’re not real. Other things are real, but they’re not cute. When things are cute and real, they’re puppies.

I picked up some collagen today in the hope that it will make me look a little less like a piece of corrugated cardboard.

Quit trying to outrun your life. Outgrow. Outgroan. Outruin. Outmode. Outmine. Quit it all. Put out of mind this notion of escape, of lamentation, of destruction, of obsolescence. Run it down, your life. Don’t run ahead.

I want Dark Woke to be like Dark Green environmentalism: systems-oriented, comprehensive, and thoughtful. I don’t want it to be snapbacks designed to get media attention and that, often, resort to hateful language that’s sexist, ableist, sanist, or some combination of the three.

I’m reading Allisa Cherry’s An Exodus of Sparks and Derek Thomas Dew’s Riddle Field today. I’ve pulled other books close: ones I’ve read or need to read again or need to read more deeply. My only distractions are wind and cloud, horse and horse, laccolith and barn.

My husband and I were into some really kinky stuff when we were young, like sleeping in on the weekend.

Since I’m apparently busy naming all the things this morning, I think there should be a graphic-novel character named Dark Woke and a punk-rock band called Keto Crotch.

Is there a poetry collection or anthology titled Gripe? Because there should be.

Why does Facebook think I want to buy spare tires for a Tesla?

When a door closes, you have to open a window. That’s how God works—through you and the choices you make.

Three nights ago, I dreamed about letting my kuhli loach down, the one I had twenty years ago. In the dream, I gave him to a man who killed him because I was careless, because I didn’t know any better, because I didn’t see how dangerous that man was.

The turkey vulture forgives the living for being inedible and praises the dead for being life.

I’m trying. Those are my two words for today.

I’m devastated. I sat here for an hour and could only come up with those two words.

Writing poetry has little to do with my brain, much to do with my body, and everything to do with my mind.

People are kind to me in the way that they feed a dog scraps while leaving her outside chained to a fence without any shelter.

Hell is that I woke up. I woke up to hell.

Where you saw someone who needed hating, I saw someone who needed help.

People leave when you have cancer, too, not just when you have trauma. I’ve had both. I know the taste of emptiness, the shape of it. Praise be this silence, this bell with no to tongue, this bird with no song.

Belonging and understanding are two things I will never have.

I just unfriended and reported a Facebook friend for swearing at and bullying the poet who’s having a mental health crisis. He did this even after reading my posts about why that type of behavior is harmful and could contribute to a disastrous outcome. Shame on him and everyone who insists on behaving in this manner.

Every time I accomplish something, it feels like a funeral for a part of me that feels like it’s died. A funeral in which I speak for that part, I honor that part, I remember that part. I did what that part wasn’t able to do.

The innocence of a cat living in the mouth of a god.

I have as many questions and concerns about poets and the poetry community as there are bees in my blooming purple robe locust.

I like the town I live in because it almost has queer right in its name. Toquerville. See?

The bees and the flowers are one thing. The bees and the flowers and the trees and the air and the soil and the water. Always the water. Nothing about water without water.

The war was and is and remains a long poem. — My misreading of something Matt Jasper wrote

Today, I feel grief, which doesn’t surprise me.

Carry poems in your mouth like fertilized eggs until they hatch. Then set them free or eat them. It’s your call.

Butter Recall Over Feces Concerns is not the headline I wanted to wake up to today.

I’m tired of standing up and saying folks like me are human only to see others continue to dehumanize folks like me.

It’s amazing how long a bell can ring—longer than some lifetimes.

It’s hard to erase history when folks keep making history.

We will not yield.

There’s so much we can learn from each other, much of it wrong.

At daybreak, all the birds have black feathers.

I wake from a nightmare into a nightmare. The first is personal. The second is global.

I want to put giant googly eyes on my refrigerator.

Jon and I were talking about what skill we’d use in the apocalypse. I said I could weave garments for people. Jon said he could impregnate people.

What do we see in each other? Ourselves.

You can’t blindly promise people hope. You need to give them reasons to have hope.

Hey, Walz: How’d that “He’s just weird” message work out for you and Harris? It’s ludicrous that you used an ableist childhood insult to frame Trump as nothing more than a schoolyard misfit, as if he didn’t have a massive political apparatus supporting him, one that has more funding than we’ve ever seen, an extremely detailed horrific playbook that will usher in untold suffering and eventually the apocalypse, and that’s steeped in and caters to the worst impulses humans possess. He was never weird. He was a monster, and that message wasn’t the one the American people needed to hear. They needed to understand the atrocities that were underway and on the horizon. I am just saying.

The Delusional States of America.

A mosquito got inside my pants and bit me. No, that’s not a euphemism. A mosquito really got inside my pants and bit me.

Is it wrong to call the firefighters every day to say there’s a snake in my house?

Lately, my Fitbit seems more like a Zoltar fortune-telling machine than a legitimate fitness and activity tracker. It says I’m sleeping soundly when I’m awake and swimming when I’m sitting at my computer and that I’m always ready to do things, which clearly I am not, ever.

I just saw two curve-billed thrashers ushering something along right outside our Arizona room. It was a large rattlesnake.

Correction, see comments: It was a large gopher snake.

Am I in a bad mood? No. I’m in all the bad moods.

So, gum is full of microplastics.

I dreamed hospital campuses were the new cities in our blown-apart country. As everything from democracy to the environment collapsed, people who could provide medical care and those who needed it congregated in these places where humans have lived and died, survived and succumbed, for thousands of years. Those who cared for others would invariably end up needing care. Many died. Sometimes, everyone died when a virus made its way through these improvised communities, turning each building into a mausoleum. This is what heaven is, I thought in the dream. It’s what we do here and now, what we choose to do or avoid doing, together. Yes, these hospitals were heaven in a time that looked like hell. And hell was those who refused to help, to care, to save, to die while saving. Hell was everywhere. It already is.

I woke up in the middle of the night after having a vivid dream. You know what got me back to sleep? Looking at my beautiful Trello boards.

My dog just wrapped herself up in the arms of her stuffed octopus and fell asleep.

Pliny the Elder threw salamanders into a fire to see if they could really extinguish flames. I love myths, but this is what happens when we extend them too far and take them literally. Don’t throw our democracy on the fire like a doomed salamander because your stories about the world have ossified into brittle truths.

Our HOA hired a landscape-maintenance crew to blow dirt away from dirt and onto other dirt.

I dreamed my internal organs were salamanders.

Here’s how much I love organizing my Trello boards: If I were at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) right now, I’d be sad that I wasn’t at home organizing my Trello boards.

Spring is a bird defending its nest in the middle of the night from a threat I can’t see or hear. It’s coyotes howling in the morning, a sound I mistake at first for my empty stomach contracting. It’s learning that a wombat joey named Petrie who was rescued after her mother was killed by a car has also died. Her leg was broken in the crash. She was too little to set it so it could heal. She was euthanized wrapped in a pink blanket that matched her pink body, her toes curled, her back legs crossed. I was pink like that, too, once. I had feet like hers, minus the claws. I was a combination of awe and sleep, dreaming more than waking or thinking or doing. I imagine Petrie staying in my spring forever, or maybe I’ll stay in her fall. Part of me. The part that splits off and remains where my heart beat faster, where I feel more deeply, where I love and yearn for love. Those parts of me peel away all the time, in every season, every state, in every universe if there really is a multiverse we all move through from moment to moment. Or at least in the endless blending of past, present, and future that makes this spring every spring that ever was or will be, which makes everything a process and an absolute all at once, including living and dying.

In my 20s, I worried I’d be bored all my life. In my 50s, I’m delighted when I get to wear my favorite underwear to bed.

March 24, 2025: Spring is two gila woodpeckers who blare like stuttering car horns from still-dormant trees. It’s the body that doesn’t want to wake or move or walk into spring or at least onto the patio, which is where spring wafts in through the screen. It’s the body moving anyway into the garish light, into what opens and what will open. Spring is remembering the first snow in Oklahoma that was heavy enough for making snowmen. Spring is remembering snow in spring.

I took another nap with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Apparently, I’m no longer a person who can read while lying down.

I don’t know why I’m here. This is total bullshit. The refrigerator vibrates like it wants to get out of its body. It’s not the only one. Outside, Gambel’s quail seed the brush with their calls. They’re a caravan of tiny feathered clowns, and I love them. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Spring is full of detritus and dust. I can’t stop coughing. My visions are sand in the eye, motes of awe. There, there, Buddha’s here. God’s here. I know because I feel them in my aching spine. Soon, it will be hot enough to sit around in underwear all day and call it grace, call it ease, call it devotion.

I wake with so many wrinkles in my décolleté that I could use it to grate carrots.

I learned a lot about mindfulness from my hamster, Tater McGee. She would sit up on her back legs for hours with her front paws hanging loosely in front as she stared into a distance far beyond her cage, the room we shared, our home. I swear she was looking into eternity or whatever approaches or approximates eternity. Can a hamster be enlightened? I think so.

La-Z-Boy is getting dangerously close to designing a chair that you’re born in, live in, eat in, shit in, fuck in, die in, and are buried in.

Spring is two gila woodpeckers who blare like stuttering car horns from still-dormant trees. It’s the body that doesn’t want to wake or move or walk into spring or at least onto the patio, which is where spring wafts in through the screen. It’s the body moving anyway into the garish light, into what opens and what will open. Spring is remembering the first snow in Oklahoma that was heavy enough for making snowmen. Spring is remembering snow in spring.

The vultures and the storm arrive together. Below, the dead, waiting. Below, the dry land, waiting. Famine, feast. Drought, water. A blue tractor pushes a single bale of hay across the pasture just before the rain begins to fall.

Time to eat a whole thing of dark chocolate dessert hummus.

Poets enter into themselves to create and enter into poems to be created. — Dana Henry Martin

—

Adapted from Thomas Merton’s quote: “The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created.”

I dreamed the Target in Southern Utah was bought by Christian Nationalists. They would call their customers all day and all night. Target loves you, an associate would say. Target is protecting you. Target is watching you. Target can see everything you do. Don’t do anything Target wouldn’t want you to do. They even had a makeshift radio station between 103.1 and 104.1 where you could hear Target sending faint messages through the static. Have you visited your Target today? Have you tithed to your Target in the form of a voluntary but strongly encouraged ten-percent upcharge on all your purchases? Do you carry Target in your heart? They called the program waferboarding, a love- and commerce-driven religio-capitalist form of waterboarding. It was inescapable. People couldn’t sleep because of all the calls and the fuzzy radio station blaring from houses 24/7. Whole neighborhoods roared like holy tornadoes. People couldn’t work. They couldn’t eat. They couldn’t even have sex. Poets couldn’t write. Nobody could do anything but shop. We wandered in a daze, half hallucinating, half wishing for a silence we would never hear again. When we tried to escape, we drove and drove and drove but always ended up at Target. Bless us, Target, for we have sinned. We’ll do better, Target. We love you and are not worthy of your love. Forgive us our transactional transgressions. Target, our word. Target, our lord. Target, our savings. Target, our savior.

I misread thoughtful as thoughful and imagine a sea of qualifiers, of despites, of even ifs flowing like blocky lava into my field of vision until I can’t see anything but the letters t-h-o-u-g-h piled on top of each other, shifting, creating friction, even though I know that’s preposterous, even though it’s not what the writer meant, even though my brain is trying to write itself, even though I want to come back to the actual sentence and stop all this lava, all this flow, all this heat, all this darkness, all this uncertainty, even though.

I avoid places that have too many people and not enough birds.

Cue lighthearted meme from 2020: I had a lot of things to do today, but you know what I did instead? I DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. IT WASN’T A VERY NICE NAP BECAUSE I DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. I DIDN’T GET ANYTHING DONE AND I ALSO DIDN’T TAKE A NAP. 03.12 You turn the object into a woman and the woman into an object.

I call this sleep position someone threw me out of a small plane and this is how I landed on my mattress and nothing is broken thanks for asking but I can I get a couple of Tylenol.

Poetry was dead to me yesterday. I couldn’t read it or write it. Every word sounded like a gong struck while someone was holding it. Dead like that. Sound dead. Sight dead. This means I was dead in the world. I refused to believe my skin touched air, exchanged molecules with it, was in conversation with it all day long. Thunk. Thunk. That’s the sound I made when I moved, so I stopped moving. Thunk. Thunk. I stopped speaking. Thunk. Thunk. My body did not tingle here and there the way it usually does to communicate with me in its peculiar buzzing code: around the left side of my heart when I feel love or anticipation or concern bordering on worry, in my forearms and the center of my chest when I read something that astonishes me, around each ankle when I’m scared or suddenly want to run. The language of my body was dead so of course I was dead and everything was dead, even as three coyotes slinked past our house, even as the Gambel’s quail came over and over and over the hill like footsoldiers, even as the singing bowl tried to call me back to the world and my place in it. I am not alive yet, but I’m getting there. The door to life is cracking open. I won’t barge in, but I’ll enter quietly when I can.

Did you hear? Love has been transformed into a supersolid. It’s light, actually, but I misread the headline as love.

Facebook, how would I watch two rescued prairie dogs eat grape tomatoes without you?

My neighbor has two big red onions, a can of soup, and a straw hat on top of his dashboard.

You turn the object into a woman and the woman into an object.

I dreamed I met the two women who were going to save the world. Their names were Maya and Nissa.

Woke to rain here in the Sonoran desert and birdsong from curve-billed thrashers and Northern cardinals. The pip of a Costa’s hummingbird sounds like water dripping on metal from a distance. Now the water-slick trunks and branches darken. Now clouds muffle the sky like batting. Now the trill of a bird whose song I don’t know plays on repeat. You can know something without knowing its name. You can. In the senses, in the body, in the heart. Now more rain. Good morning.

With my eyes, I have tasted the world’s first ambers.

Good
Trouble

I don’t like to eat my cookies when anyone’s in the room with me. I like to eat them alone.

Without horse how can you imagine running like a horse? Without shadow how you can imagine falling like a shadow? And so forth and so forth until you’ve named all the things you can name because they exist and you exist through them and as them though you are not them even if you are a little them. Without horse give yourself a name. Without shadow give yourself a name. What do you fall on, darken? What do you run with and on, and to and why? Why do you run I mean? Why do you run? Toward or away.

I love the way branch shadows fall across the body of a wild horse, making the tree part horse and the horse part tree. And, somehow, making me at least part love that brambles the world or is brambled by it or both, back and forth, for as long as there are horses and trees and trees and horses so I can imagine myself in those terms.

Once, my house was almost a library. Then, I donated all my books and started going to the library. Now, I want my house to be a library. Also, I want to keep going to the library.

𝐶𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑙𝑢𝑚 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑎 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠. That’s terrible Latin for “My cookies as a whole are divided into three parts,” a play on Caesar’s quote 𝐺𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑎 𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑜𝑚𝑛𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑣𝑖𝑠𝑎 𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠. What I mean is, I’m eating no-bake cookies for the next three days. Technically, I started a little early by having some yesterday evening, but the three-day undertaking officially starts today. Yesterday was kind of a pre-event event like the ones literary conferences have.

I have some spines for sale if anyone needs one. They make great gifts.

I accidentally ordered six cases of Bubly water instead of six cans. Between that and the coconut water, almond milk, Muscle Milk, Cherry Coke Zero, and Jon’s kombucha and diet Mountain Dew, our entire grocery order for the week is almost all liquids. And no-bake cookies. Plus, the debit card got locked while Jon was picking up the groceries. He was trying to get cash for the poetry reading we’re headed to so we could buy the reader’s book. The machine took the card and wouldn’t return it. He came through the door announcing: I’ve worked out my anger about this, and I’m in control of my emotions, just so you know. Then he showed me all the beverages and told me the debit-card story. He’s trying. He is. I’m eating a bunch of cookies, some of which taste like deodorant. Good thing I have a selection of beverages to wash down whatever it is I’m eating.

I keep reading the MedPage Today headline Smartphones Assess Cognition as Smart-Ass Cognition and thinking it’s a condition I suffer from.

I dreamed I was invited to a party and was all like, “Wait. Let me get my infographics!”

I dreamed I was the handle on a mug.

In the “Oh Look a Strawberry” meme, the United States is currently the fourth strawberry. We’ll be lucky if we can get back to being the third strawberry at this point. First strawberry? Forget it. Second? A long shot.

I had a friend who was sexually attracted to a mannequin. He’d walk over to the window where it was displayed and look at it during his lunch break. He took me once to show me what the deal was. I didn’t get it. The mannequin had no head. He had a wife with a head. Was the head the problem? He liked its breasts, the way they looked in sheer clothing. Its nipples, the way they defied gravity. He liked its white skin, its arms with no hands. His wife had hands. A head and hands. Skin with color and texture. He never went inside and looked at the mannequin’s ass. I would have if I’d been into it. You always have to look at the ass. Everyone knows that, even if it’s a mannequin. Why did I just think of this? Of all things.

We do not want this on their tongues any more than we want it in their hearts.

Not a good day for democracy, poetry, or marriage.

My feet are bleeding all over. I used a compounded cream on them that was apparently meant only for my heels. My heels are also bleeding, though, so yeah. This pain pairs well with the loss of our democracy. On fleek, as they say, or as I think they say. I have no idea how to slang anymore. Or walk. Or American.

Fill my bones with henbane seeds.

And the award for most interesting way to die goes to the man whose brain was turned to glass through high-temperature vitrification during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It’s the only case like it in the world. I’ll include a link in the comments. Have at this, poets. This is premium subject matter.

I dreamed my pillows were clouds, and they ate me, but in a good way.

I dreamed I was lying in bed dreaming that I was lying in bed dreaming that I was lying in bed dreaming. This went on and on until I woke up. Somewhere, I am still dreaming this nested dream of dreaming.

I dreamed Donald Trump was sitting in a sandbox using a play shovel to dig up rare-earth elements. They’re here, they’re here, he kept saying while all the children backed farther and farther from him in a perfect expanding circle, like rings pushing away from Saturn, that oversized gassy giant with its 146 clueless moons, some of which have names like Hesgeth, Kennedy, Musk, and Vance. Soon, Trump and his little moons were all alone. He had torn up the entire playground and found nothing. And there was nobody other than the little moons and one Russian planet called Uranus left to faux worship him. Everyone else had fled. It was not enough. Trump needed more attention. Trump always needs more. My kingdom for attention, he wailed, then drove an armored Tesla full of his little moons right off his flat earth.

Windy day. Outdoor restaurant. Downtown Tucson. Wind-driven menu turned weapon, its laminated edge a blade headed straight for my neck. I ducked and was unscathed. But I could have been done in by the lousiest of all texts, the uninspired casual dining menu. Decapitate me with John Donne, with Gertrude Stein, with Anne Sexton, with Jack Gilbert. Anything but Ben’s Handhelds.*

—

* That’s literally the name of one of the restaurant’s menus, which is actually pretty entertaining.

Zelensky’s not the one in that room who’s unsuited.

I can’t see the entire landscape in American poetry. I just can’t. Its lowlands, its highlands, its rivers and plains. Its coves and quicksands. It would help if I could, if I had more information than what I see from my position and in my experience. Without that broader perspective, I’m liable to either over- or underestimate how much generosity, inclusion, and kindness there is in poetry. And having a good sense of that matters as I navigate poetry and try to find my community or communities.

He’s the demon Mara. Time to touch the Earth.

I would go all the way straight for Zelensky. This is not the time to say that, but I’m saying it. (Jon knows. It’s fine. He has Olivia Munn.)

I showered and put on my pantaloons and corset as a form of self-care. Also, Donald Trump is a fucking monster.

Uniformity and exclusion are as shit in poetry as they are in our institutions and communities.

Dana Henry Martin is out of order. There is no handyperson coming to repair Dana Henry Martin. Please enjoy what’s left of Dana Henry Martin before she becomes rancid. Be careful: Parts of Dana Henry Martin have already spoiled.

Sometimes, we just need to be with each other.

Thank you to those who make me feel like I belong—in poetry, in my communities, and on this planet.

Poetry can be a matter of life and death, even for the poet whose work you don’t admire. Some things are more important than anyone’s precious standards, namely human life.

I spelled tyranny incorrectly yesterday, but that won’t happen again. I was dealing with all caps, which is always disorienting. Plus, I haven’t had to use the word much until now.

A power outage just ended here. Everywhere I’ve lived, folks can’t go outside when the power’s on and can’t stay inside when the power’s off.

I’m going to put googly eyes on this two-liter of Cherry Coke and call it my best friend

The present we remember as the past is the future.

This body remembers democracy.

Me: Do not start the day crying. Do not start the day crying. Do not start the day crying.

Oh, menfolk, jump into my life and save little old me, said me never.

When I wear a corset, I’m not bound like a woman, which I am not. I’m bound like a book, which I am becoming.

I just adore a beautiful font.

Creating is resisting. Create. Resist. Repeat.

Jocelynn Rojo Carranza

Unpopular opinion: Some songs hold up better than some poems.

Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.

If you think the now-famous male mandarin duck and male mallard hybrid pair here in Arizona are just friends, you’re living in a hetero fantasy world.

I call them Adam and Steve.

Blessed are the newscasters for they shall usher in fascism.

There’s a tiny “museum” of art on the moon that contains six drawings. The first is a penis by Andy Warhol. The second is a line drawn by Robert Rauschenberg. The third is a black square with thin white intersecting lines by David Novros. The fourth is a template pattern by John Chamberlain. The fifth is a geometric variation on Mickey Mouse by Claes Oldenburg. The sixth is a computer-generated drawing by Forrest Myers.

highly irregular = totally illegal

The sanist diaries: Some of my closest friends are sanists.

The sanist diaries: Nothing brings folks together like sanism.

Dear supporters of all this bullshit: Have fun in a world without us. Have your fucking fun after you chain us up, drive us out, imprison us, intern us, force-labor us, dehumanize us, and make living not at all viable for us. Have all the fucking fun in the world. It’s yours now. Even the birds will hate you.

Note to self for a future essay: amygdala regulation by time-stamping events in our lives through and with writing and art.

Tell me you’re a female-bodied Gen Xer with trauma without telling me you’re a female-bodied Gen Xer with trauma: A young man once told me I was too pretty to have an asshole, and I was like “I have a great asshole, Asshole,” then I had a bunch of boring sex with him because I didn’t know how to do better and also because I wanted to have sex with his girlfriend but she didn’t like me so he was as close as I could get.

I’m pretty sure our leader sees a dead American as a profit and a living American as a loss.

We remember. We are rendered.

The oilbird’s diet is so high in oily fruits that the chicks were once collected and rendered for lamp oil.

I dreamed we had to wear vinyl records as hats.

I dreamed I used my thighs to choke a ten-foot-tall man who represented the patriarchy.

I just misread a jumble of headlines as “Trump Gives Musk Tuna.” I wondered what tuna was code for and if they’d both need penicillin shots.

Thanks to inflation, it will now be more expensive to eat the rich.

Why do I write about Oklahoma? Because 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.

In my dream last night, I invented yambushing, which is pretty much what it sounds like: ambushing people with yams. I was eight years old in the dream and had to fend off my bullies. They did not see the yambush coming.

I dreamed I made millions writing Mormon erotica.

𒆪𒋆

That translates as Kushim and is the first known record of a person in writing.

The largest known human coprolite is 1,200 years old. It’s 20 centimeters long and 5 centimeters wide and was discovered in 1972 in an ancient Viking settlement in York, England.

It’s weird how old some things are, like murder.

Tonight, a fellow writer asked why I write about Oklahoma and my family’s history there, as if writing about the past and the place that made me who I am is of no value. It’s 2025, and you live in Utah, he said. I write about the present, too. But poets have pasts, and those pasts matter. They inform the present and the future. We live in many worlds and many timelines. Not everything is now, though then becomes now when we breathe life back into it.

I just learned that some canaries were kept in cages with oxygen tanks so they could survive after warning miners about dangerous levels of carbon monoxide.

And this ink is a suture. And this paper is a body. And this poem is a prayer for healing written one stitch at a time.

Will Journavx make me feel like I’m still living in a democracy?

In this light, ink on paper looks like sutures in skin.

I have no words to meet this moment.

Do whatever you need to survive. — My Mother

I’m here to share. I’m here to learn. I’m here for joy, surprise, and to feel awe shoot through me like sudden light. Every one of you is a purveyor of awe. Here, now. Then, again. Always.

When light enters a certain way, it feels holy. Our eyes are wired for light. Our hearts. Our minds. We are vitreous chambers with the wisdom to let light through unimpeded, unquestioned. So flower can be flower. So sky can be sky. So love can have a body with pores and wrinkles and folds. A body that, in the right light, becomes light. Nothing but light.

I’m waiting for you in spring. Make your way to me through winter.

As you sit on winter’s hard ground, remember that you may be someone’s spring.

And just like that, a poem brings me back to the world.

Poems are not office memos.

January 18: Fell asleep to a dog barking. Woke to wind howling. Inside it, the dog continues to bark, but all the desert slopes repeat now is wind and more wind.

I want to wallpaper my writing room with scenes from Days of Heaven and then write like that movie. That’s what my manuscript Crude is supposed to be. It’s supposed to sound like the narrator from Days of Heaven and look like everything in Days of Heaven.

Leonard Peltier. Fuck yes.

Curve-billed thrashers woke me up this morning. The sun stared me down through our patio door. Saguaros threw up their arms, exuberant as always. Coffee tastes better here. Reading poems is better here. My keyboard sounds better on my Mesquite writing desk than it does on my IKEA desk in Utah. Music is more immersive here. Love gets bigger and bigger here. You can’t even find its edges or measure its volume or figure out its overall shape because it has no shape. Love is in everyone and everything, more evidently here than in other places I’ve lived. (Kansas City may be the exception.) I love Tucson because Tucson is love as incarnate as I’ve ever experienced it. Imagine the fruit of the prickly pear cactus as my watery heart laid bare between spines. That’s me on Tucson, baby. Good morning from the Sonoran desert.

Last night, I dreamed I was produce. I was in a cardboard box with a head of leafy green lettuce and an unwaxed cucumber. We all came from the organic farm and were part of a CSA delivery. I don’t know what, exactly, I was. Maybe a red bell pepper. I was trying to work that out in the dream when I turned into the cardboard box the produce was in. Before I could fully experience being a box, I was cut apart, folded flat, and loaded onto a barge for “recycling.” Me and all the other recyclable materials—nut-milk jugs, tin cans, egg cartons, and all kinds of plastics—jiggled and jingled our way to a nameless atoll that was packed with other recyclables. We were all just trash, really, part of some scheme to offload us with minimal effort where nobody would find us. I spent my final days there being broken down by salt and water until I didn’t know what I was anymore, or who, if ever I was a who at all. Parts of me stayed on the island. Parts of me floated farther and farther into the ocean, above the dead coral, where I met bits of other recyclables that were indistinguishable from me, if I could even call myself a me.

I know less about existence than twin fawns who died inside their mother days before she would have given birth to them.

I was listening to the Twin Peaks soundtrack when I learned David Lynch died. I met and interviewed him for a feature story for UWTV and ResearchChannel. He was at the University of Washington for a talk about Transcendental Meditation. He also talked about living in a sea of creativity and dissolving the suffocating rubber clown suit of negativity in order to have freedom. “The pain and suffering should be in the art, not the artist,” he said in the talk. That stuck with me. We sometimes get that backward. To the stars, David.

House sparrows aren’t sparrows. They’re weaver finches. (And that is how poets tell you the news.)

After all everybody is as their coffee maker is. Everybody is as the maker is quiet or loud. Everybody is as there is maker or no maker. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of brew, their kind of viscosity, their bitterness and their aftertaste, and their pouring and their sipping and their drinking. — Gertrude Carafe

Yesterday, I saw an ad for a ceramic Baby Jesus being sold on Etsy, but the swaddled body looks like a vulva, and Baby Jesus’s head looks like an oversized clitoris. I can show you the photos if you don’t believe me. Good morning.

There’s a poem in my throat. I don’t want it there. I don’t even want it there.

Love is coming at me from every direction. That’s how I know we’re all dying.

My husband is up. He sounds like rain.

There was a time in my life when the answer to everything was poetry. It’s still that time.

I hydrated, styled my hair, put on lotion, lifted weights, sat by my light box, color-coordinated my outfit with my jewelry, reading glasses, and handkerchief, and put on some sick tunes. Now I’m going back into my poetry database, where I will stay all day hyperfocusing on the task at hand: consistently formatting every poem, adding appropriate metadata, and moving every post from classic mode in WordPress to the blocks format.

See you on the other side. If I don’t make it out, bury me in poems. Good ones.

I organized my poetry database all day long. I got pretty obsessive about it, and now I can’t shake the buzzing feeling inside me that is screaming, “Organize more things, STAT!” My hands are vibrating. My feet are vibrating. I’m covered in fake butter because I ate popcorn while I worked. My pen is buttery. My keyboard is buttery. I haven’t brushed my teeth for hours. I didn’t bathe. I didn’t style my hair. I didn’t exercise. I just sat here typing and formatting and labeling and blah blah blah blahblahblah. There are more than one thousand poems in the database, and that’s not counting collaborative work I’ve written with various poets over the years. It’s so many poems. It’s too many poems. I think I might be pretty obsessive about writing poems, not just organizing them.

I’m embarrassed about how much fun I used to have in poems.

It’s hard, but not impossible, to see a man as a hook.

New Order’s “Leave Me Alone” makes me feel a certain way about my childhood, like I’m back in it. Not only that, but that I love it, that past, exactly as it was because every transcendent feeling I had was only possible because of the dirt I lived in, because of my Oklahoma crude family, because of the everything of everything. My body hummed. It sang. It insisted. My terror had nothing on my joy. How I trilled at being alive, my roots growing down, my crown hitting the sky.

On a thousand islands in the sea / I see a thousand people just like me / A hundred unions in the snow / I watch and walking, falling in a row / We live always underground / It’s gonna be so quiet in here tonight — New Order

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. — Carl Jung

New Year’s Goal: Write poems that make readers blister.

I just learned that white-tailed deer chase Canada geese. My friend Kelly would have loved knowing that.

I just got a nice rejection from a literary journal. The editor wrote, I’m grateful to have read your work, especially “Persephone.” The last stanza is perfect. God. Damn.

I feel like Mike Birbiglia is in my digestive tract right now throwing himself around on an improvised stage he’s set up on my pyloric antrum.

Last night, I dreamed octopuses who could no longer live in our polluted oceans. They devised a scheme that involved attending open houses, sneaking off to the bathroom, running a bath, throwing in some salt and rocks and stuff, and taking up residence for as long as possible. If they did this toward the end of the open house, chances were the home would sit vacant for at least a few days if not longer, especially in a bad housing market. They’d have it made. And it wasn’t that hard to drain the tub and hide during an unexpected showing. I happened upon a pair of octopuses at an open house. They were mating. The male’s hectocotylus was rammed way up in the female’s siphon. Startled, I shouted, “Get an aquarium!” But I knew what they needed was an ocean, a clean ocean.

It’s interesting how love expands when we’re scared but contracts when we’re angry, which is also just being scared.

Coming off the sudden stress of the past few days, I’m in a space that’s part relief, part surge of emotion. This means I may tell every single one of you that I love you—and mean it.

Some poems are like passivation layers on exposed aluminum. They protect the poet from vulnerabilities beneath the surface, maybe reader, too.

I’ve been watching a looped video of a hydra every day for months and thinking about hydras’ many arms reaching, feeling, without thought, without the conjoined burdens of meaning and purpose—planted, going nowhere, wanting for nowhere. Hydras are completely embodied. They don’t have brains. We have brains attached to hydra bodies that make us yearn, strive, interpret what our bodies are doing, usually incorrectly.

Some poems feel like de-icer.

Jon and I were driving into town this morning and going over our lists of things to do if the other one dies. Things like cremate body, inform relatives, get death certificate, alert life insurance, and so forth. For the scenario where I die before him, Jon suddenly blurted out—wait for it—call Oliva Munn. I’ll allow it. I might even make him an Olivia Munn playlist in case he needs it. Just music I think she’d like.

Some poems feel like licking an old sofa.

The light is moving. Slowly, slowly, the light.

Writing is breath. As breath, writing is life.

Did you know tin cries when it’s bent? That’s because its crystals are twinned, meaning two crystals grow into each other and share points along its lattice structure. When bent, the crystals rub against one another, creating a pressure wave we hear as a cry or a squeak. The phenomenon is known as deformating twinning but is commonly called the tin cry.

There’s a poem in there somewhere, but I can’t find it, at least not today. Maybe you can. I know the poem’s title: “The Tin Cry.”

Slowly, the sky turns violet, its true color. Suddenly, the laccolith turns coral, as if to say: “You had your night, sky. The day is mine. Give it here.” A common raven flies between the two, a glossy witness, all ink and no page. Both the sky and the mountain turn gray.

I feel kind of bad about my perfect-poet post yesterday, my future-husband post, like I’m betraying E.R. Fightmaster.

I hear the stars hidden in the blanket-swaddled sky. I hear them beating.

In my dream last night, I’d just finished a poetry manuscript. It was an exquisite thing heavy with history, like a body that’s lived several lives. I bound it with ribbon, placed it in the passenger seat of a new Cadillac, and pushed the car off one of the cliffs here in canyon country. Someone tried to stop me. What are you doing, they asked, laying a hand on my left arm. You wouldn’t understand even if I explained it to you, I answered before giving the car one final shove.

Just enough light these days to give thanks to darkness.

I picked out my next husband. I showed photos of him to my current husband. He’s a poet who looks like a cross between my husband, Prince Harry, and someone who’d nail a guy’s hand to a table if the situation warranted doing so. In other words, he’s perfect. My next husband might be a wife, though, or I might just marry myself. I have a friend from high school who did that. She had a ceremony and everything. She’s very happy together.

Note: I would only go with another husband or wife if Jon’s been dead for at least ten years. Maybe twenty.

It’s super quiet now in the ER. I’m weirded out.

I can’t believe I got all gussied up for this CT scan.

A wallpaper-installation company whose slogan is We’ll help you get it up.

Last bird seen in 2024: rock wren.

First bird seen in 2025: Anna’s hummingbird.

They don’t know it, but the birds are competing to be the last bird I see in 2024.

Poems aren’t looking for advice or solutions. They don’t want to be told to see a therapist. They don’t give a rat’s ass about shaping up or shutting up or being shut down. Don’t treat poems like people, not even like the poets who wrote them, about whom you know little to nothing. The poems aren’t telling you all about the poet, not exactly (if at all). Poems are telling you about the poem. That’s what poems care about. Being poems.

My body’s resisting action, resisting thought. It’s off in the worlds Justine Chan creates, and that’s where it wants to stay. There are things she does in her poetry that make me think about how my poems operate, how they mean, how they exist. But I don’t want to move into the writing now, not yet. I want to listen to music and remain painlessly, effortlessly pried open.

Today has a stagnant-water vibe that I don’t particularly mind.

Oh, Jimmy Carter.

How do you not see that everything is everything?

At least my vomiting and diarrhea are being polite and taking turns.

I die and live, marking my days divined and madmade. This stoma of life strickens me. I am mummified.

(Trying my hand at some of the techniques Catullus uses in “Odi et Amo.”)

Love woke me today thinking about love. The cow love bought who gets to spend the rest of her life in the pasture. The tunnel love carved under a house that serves as a way out. The milk in the breast and bread in the mouth. An arm held close but not too tight. Branches tinseled with sudden ice. The stunned finch taken back by unbroken sky. Two old horses eating fresh hay. The dead in their humble pioneer graves. The broken fever. The cast spell. Dead words alive on the page. The prayer in the breath. The breath in the asking. The love of pleading, of desperation. Love of body, of cell. Love inside passing time, within lapsed memory. Those fettered by love who love even when they don’t want to love. Those shackled by fear who hear love mooing low in the distance.

It really hurts to write about dead people and dead birds and dead lands.

It’s gonna be a long night.

My job right now is to hold my dog while she dreams.

I dreamed I was dead but didn’t know it because my husband used petrification to preserve me perfectly. I looked like I was still alive. I couldn’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel, but I thought I could. I experienced the world as if I was still part of it, not realizing my husband was carrying me everywhere: from the bed to the sofa, from the sofa to my desk, from the desk to the car for long drives in the wildlands.

The angel’s in the details, too.

This poem says you belong.

I dreamed words were written on my back, but I couldn’t read them because I didn’t have a mirror.

Awake again. I feel like a helium-filled balloon that drifted from the party, got snagged in a tree, deflated, was eaten by a bird, and is now killing the bird slowly by blocking its intestines. Or maybe I feel like the bird. Or the tree. I definitely do not feel like the air or the rising helium or the child wailing about the lost balloon or the parent trying to distract the child with hand puppets. Maybe I feel like the hand puppets who know it’s all fun and games until they get wadded up in a drawer for another year and eventually stop coming out at all because the kid’s into 3D modeling and AI and sustainable farming, her days of being entertained by balloons and hand puppets long behind her.

I woke up early. I feel like warm Dr Pepper.

May we all be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.

I just got ageismed by a cashier at Lin’s Fresh Market in Hurricane, Utah. And they didn’t even have the one thing I wanted that nobody else carries, which is the only reason I didn’t go to Davis Food and Drug in La Verkin where everyone is super nice and never ageisms me.

I will get your attention, and when I have your attention, I will speak.

The world is bad enough that my poems make sense in it now.

Dr Pepper was once served as a warm drink with lemon. It was called Hot Dr Pepper. Hot Dr Pepper sounds like something that would pair nicely with winter hiking.Dr Pepper was once served as a warm drink with lemon. It was called Hot Dr Pepper. Hot Dr Pepper sounds like something that would pair nicely with winter hiking.

Other dreams last night, each an extension of the psyche dream: 1. A metallic spiderlike creature with telescopic presentation pointers for legs was singularly focused on continually mending the surface of the personal unconscious. 2. In the collective unconscious, I saw the face of a person who had eyes that were also a nose and a mouth, a nose that was also eyes and a mouth, and a mouth that was also eyes and a nose. These elements were randomly smooshed together rather than consistently arranged. I don’t think I was supposed to see that person. I don’t even think that person was a person.

Muse it or lose it.

I have a muse. It’s me.

Winter hiking sounds as awful as floor sleeping or day working.

The cow with a face like a skull is up on one of the steep rock formations near our house. Someone let her and the other cows I visited last week out to graze. I saw what I thought was an oddish set of brown and black rocks against the pale-green scrub. When I grabbed my binoculars for a closer look, the cow with a face like a skull was staring in my direction. What a surprise.

I dreamed I had talons for feet. Incredible talons.

Every day, I break for this world and want to be broken.

I’m thankful for anyone who will sing me away from this world when the time comes for me to leave.

My earlier years should have been happy but weren’t. My later years shouldn’t be happy but are.

I’ve decided that I can write my way into belonging here in Southern Utah. If I write this place, I will be part of it. I insist that this is possible.