A man died last night in Toquerville where the bypass road construction is underway. He had just robbed Lin’s Fresh Market up the road a few miles and threatened to kill one of the store’s employees. He fled the scene and drove our direction. He crashed in the bypass area, was ejected from his vehicle, and was found dead by the police.

All the poems like woolen lovers.

I want to be the Marybeth Taylor of poetry. I went to middle school and high school with Marybeth. She was kind to everyone. Everyone. Not nice but genuinely kind. If I can manage to be her, someone needs to be her. All the kids in school needed her back then. Poets need someone like her now.

Oh, no. Woody Guthrie supported the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet invasion of Poland that occurred that same year.

Those who’ve been shaped from birth by trauma sense what’s coming in the world, in the country, in the state, in the county, in the city, in the town, in the neighborhood, in the home, and in those around us. We can feel it rumbling inside us long before others do.

My job is to navigate these exterior and interior entanglements, to learn how to interpret and translate them without being subsumed by them, and to stay balanced in the most unbalanced of times. My balance doesn’t need to be perfect, but I have to recognize my center of gravity and anchor myself to it.

We have to survive what’s happening. We have to. The we is I that is also the we. The we of me. The I of you.

Poems are wild creatures. We need to treat them as such. They haven’t been bred over generations to prefer the warmth of our laps or trained to mimic everything we want them to say. Let poems roam. Feel their hooves shaking the ground. Watch them sleep in branches and devour each other in rivers and lakes. Don’t brand them, whatever you do. They aren’t yours. They never were.

I recoil when the language of power and control enters a conversation, then I grieve for what that language has extinguished.

We are in deep shit. All of us.

In my experience, nothing good happens behind closed doors. Everything unaccountable happens there.

I do not suffer gladly.

The more time I spend with poetry, the more faith I have in poetry. The more time I spend with poets, the less faith I have in poets.

I often wonder if we live in a post-community society. Now, I’m concerned that we live in a post-poetry community society.

Do not let fear nettle your heart.

My dog is trying to get inside my shirt.

Die by starvation or aspiration. Those are the choices modern medicine has given my brother-in-law. That’s his hospice plan.

And the foolish shall mow the earth.

I gather the fat bumblebees my neighbor has killed with his pesticides. They fall off his bushes and land in our yard this time of year. When I have enough, I’ll show him what he’s done without meaning to, but he won’t listen, especially not to a city girl who doesn’t belong in these parts. I’ll keep the bees so they’re not forgotten, add them to my cabinet of curiosities that already contains a rat’s skull my husband found on the back tier, a tiny moth who still stands with her wings erect as if death caught her off guard, a chunk of sandstone with an iron band running through it like a broken timepiece set to two hundred million years ago, wings from the hummingbird hawk-moth the bats devour on summer nights from the dark comfort of our unlit porch, and half of a kangaroo rat’s skeleton that I cleaned myself and placed in a jar, some of the bones smaller than plastic seed beads. The little size of dying Anne Carson talks about doesn’t get much littler than this. Even the bumblebees, gigantic by bee standards, die so small most folks aren’t even aware they’re dead.

A fallen soldier was on one of Jon’s flights. His family was there when he was taken off the plane. His grandmother sat in a wheelchair clutching a photo of him. This would be emotional under any circumstances. For Jon, today, when he’s on his way home to his dying brother and his veteran father who both survived and did not survive Vietnam, it hit deep, about as deep as anything has in his lifetime.

The last word Carl Jung wrote in The Red Book is the German word “moglichkeit,” which in English means possibility.

The wounded are the ones who can walk among the wounded.

Think about earthspan, not lifespans.

The healing that’s in our cells, our genes, our families, finds its way into the world.

He takes all the girls to see taxidermied two-headed animals.

Now that it’s snowed, the winds have come, the white-crowned sparrows are here singing raspily in the shrubs, and the dark-eyed juncos have arrived to bauble in the trees, my transition to winter is complete. I don’t even have to rookie my way through this season. I’ve got the pros here by my side to guide me.

The dark-eyed juncos are here for the winter! I just saw half a dozen of them in my honey locust. I know their range map says they’re found year-round across Utah, but they really don’t hang out down in Southern Utah, or at least this part of Southern Utah, until it gets too cold for them in the northern part of the state. When they come down this way, they show up in large numbers.

Stunned, I walk toward a blue father I mistake for the moon.

Trees look better up close than faces.

The trauma in the world finds its way into our families, our genes, our cells.

When the rock is exposed, time is exposed.

I know I’m not having an actual conversation with my honey locust tree, but I feel like it’s saying that it’s happy to endure the wind because wind brings rain and rain means life.

I looked at a wind map this morning hoping Toquerville and Tucson’s winds were connected. They aren’t.

I just accidentally ate a stick.

Even in Toquerville—
doing whateverthefuck—
              I long for Toquerville.

— Dana Henry Martin after Issa

My neighbor gave me two pomegranates from her tree last night. They’re conjoined, stacked one on top of the other. They’re the pink variety, so they look a little unripe to my eye, but what do I know. I don’t grow them or know anything about them, really, other than Persephone ate three seeds from one, according to one version of the myth, and that’s why we have winter.

I was once two.

I think my dog’s sleep schedule is entrained on the phases of the moon and not on dusk and dawn. She was up earlier this morning than she should have been. That means I was up earlier this morning than I should have been. It was a big-moon night, no doubt about it. And it lingered. Moonset wasn’t until 7:57 a.m. here in Toquerville, Utah. (That’s 6:57 a.m. Tucson time.) I’m going to have to make sure she sleeps under the covers or her blanket until the moon settles down.

May the last thing I write be nothing.

A dozen house finches just silently dropped into my sage bush like that paratrooper scene in Red Dawn as if they had no bodies at all and were therefore immune to the effects of gravity. Now they’re in the locust moss acting like house finches again.

You could live all your life in a cold desert and think it’s paradise. But you don’t know the warm desert. You may never know the warm desert. I know the warm desert. I almost know it. I’m learning it like a new language or a new instrument or a new key. I will weave the warm desert as I’ve woven the cold desert. I will write the warm desert, but first I must write the cold desert. I’m writing the cold desert now. I’m trying. It wants me to write it. I have to believe this or I won’t write it.

It’s hard to change times if you’re in the wrong time. But I believe it can be accomplished through poetry—without running headlong into the future or clawing your way back to the past. At its core, poetry is time travel. Let’s go.

What’s dying is already dead before it is dead.

What living is already living before it has lived.

What’s brewing has already brewed before it has brewed.

I was, too, once.

The white-crowned sparrows have returned for the winter.

We’re back in Utah until late November. It’s so beautiful here. Our home is situated in an ecotone where not two but three ecological communities meet. There are no words for these lands, this place. I would stay here for the rest of my life if I had adequate healthcare, acceptance, understanding, support, community, a sense of belonging, and a welcoming and vibrant poetry and arts community.

Birds are so sweet. I don’t belong on the same planet as them.

Early morning, dreams wash past into the present. Halls of unlocked doors.

I was lonely last night, so I asked AI to tell me some facts about Cooper’s hawks.

Morning Prayer October 3, 2024

Good morning. I hope to be as enthusiastic about this day as the Gila woodpecker in my yard who just found a tasty berry to eat and was moved to announce his glorious find in all caps: CA CA CE CE KI-KI-KI-KI!

May you all CA CA CE CE KI-KI-KI-KI at least once today, preferably when you’re alone and in public.

There should be a literary journal called Crouton.

Good morning, riven world, riven minds, riven hearts, riven creatures, riven lands, riven waters, riven air, riven fires.

My water is over my bridge right now. I say that knowing there is literal water over literal bridges in parts of this country and that bridges and every other imaginable thing, along with people and animals and lands, are being bombed out of existence right now. But my water is over my bridge. I try to keep it under my bridge. That’s how I survive. Otherwise, I will be my own undoing, and I don’t want that. Kris Kristofferson says, “You don’t paddle against the current, you paddle with it. And if you get good at it, you throw away the oars.” I guess I’d better figure out how to paddle. I need to find some oars before I learn how to navigate the current without them. I think poetry might be my oars. It better be.

I think I’m done posting about Kris Kristofferson. It’s like my whole life has been a deck of cards precariously balanced, and he was one of those cards, so I’m moving pretty swiftly into old pain as my cards fall. I’ll clean up my timeline tomorrow. I just want to leave all my posts up until then.

There weren’t many good things about my childhood. Thinking I was going to grow up and marry Kris Kristofferson was one of them.

I’m sorry. I never thought about the fact that I’d one day have to live in a world without Kris Kristofferson. I was not prepared for this.

Animals know fear. I know that much.

I think I’m entrained on curve-billed thrashers singing in the morning as opposed to being entrained on dawn. That’s fine, I guess, since the thrashers are entrained on dawn. What bird will signal morning when I’m in Utah? I may need a curve-billed thrasher alarm.

I just earned twenty-two active zone minutes putting away the one hundred twenty-three diet sodas my husband brought home this morning. Apparently, they were on sale, so he bought one hundred twenty-two more than I asked for.

I asked my husband to run out and get me a diet soda. He came back with one hundred twenty-three sodas.

Say what you want to say and what you need to say when you want to say it and when you need to say it.

You never know what lives your poems are living outside you.

Who’s to say / how old I am / in poetry years.

The painters unwrapped my house while I napped on the sofa. I woke to sunlight turning my eyelids into glowing pools. I am reborn. I want nothing. I want everything.

I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today. I will not hyperfocus today.

I’m messing around with my poetry database again today. It’s not going very well because I’m pretty high. Our townhome quad is being painted, and the fumes have made their way inside our house. The new color is decidedly ’80s dusty rose, a real blast from the past. It was supposed to be copper. It’s not copper. But the older women who live in the three other townhomes absolutely love it, so I will try to love it, too.

For no apparent reason, Meta AI sent me a message describing the geologicial features of Douglas, Arizona.

I managed to send five poems to one literary journal. That only took about forty hours of work. Now, I have to eat.

I want to write a heartbreaking poem about a wombat, but I am too tired.

I revisited my Eastern Washington poems yesterday. Now, I’m aching for Eastern Washington. I never left. (I left before I arrived.) I took it with me when I left. (It wouldn’t come with me.) It asked me to stay. (I didn’t stay. It never asked me to.) I left myself in it. (I left it somewhere inside myself.) I left it. (It was already leaving me.) I drove away. (It drove me away.) I was moving. (I appeared to be in motion.) I wasn’t still. (I wasn’t in motion.) I was the one who moved. (It was the one that wasn’t still.) We are both still now. (We are both still moving.)

My husband woke early and made the world light before it was light.

Someone left the moon on all night.

I sit in the dark. A cricket sings in the courtyard. The moon is gone.

I’ll stir when the rufous-winged sparrow stops singing.

Lots of coyote talk this morning, too.

I heard a western screech owl this morning and got a recording of its call. I’ve never heard or seen an eastern of western screech owl before. All the birds were communicating because a Cooper’s hawk was in the area.

We’re on our way to Target to get a second weighted therapy dinosaur so we each have one and they can sit at our dining room table and hang out together. I am super excited. They may even have a tea party. Yes, we’re in our fifties. Between the two of us, we’ve been on this earth for one hundred seven years. I guess that makes us almost as old as dinosaurs.

Edited to note that the second weighted therapy creature we bought is a dragon, not a dinosaur.

Lizards seem to have time on their hands. I could have talked about this with my friend, but she’s been dead for twenty months. The last time we spoke, she said, “Of course bees play. Of course they do.” I want to tell her how lizards climb and cling and swim and glide and run and how one teases my dog every morning by hanging upside down on the patio screen. I don’t want to have time on my hands. I want someone to call about lizards, someone who birds land on and who rescues cats and dogs and names them after characters in books, someone who knows the hearts of animals because animals helped her survive the unsurvivable until she didn’t and was no longer an animal, no longer part of time.

The dead usher us toward death simply by being dead.

As soon as I think about sending my poems out, they quit glinting and turn into sand, sand, more sand, so much sand.

Facebook is trying to sell me on an AI boyfriend. I already have an OI husband: an autodidactic neuroatypical advocate, artist, composer, electronics wiz, gamer, hacker, mentor, musician, outdoor enthusiast, pet lover, and software engineer. Organic intelligence for the win.

I learned some Spanish today from my fellow Tucsonans: Chinga tu maga, no mas naranja.

Now that you’re a bird, not my father, I can look at you. I did that. I turned you into a bird.

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Open this gate. Tear down this wall.

Carbs made me love you. I love everything on carbs.

I saw a palo verde tree wearing a green tie today in Tucson. Nothing else. Just the tie.

He is dying. He will not tell me what he would carry in the pocket of his spacesuit if he were walking on the moon.

Jon is home now. Last night, his father asked him why he had to leave, and his dying brother begged him to stay forever.

Me Crow Wah Vay. That’s how an automated voice on a TikTok video pronounced microwave in a video I just watched. Me Crow Wah Vay.

Perhaps life is just a process of cyclically confronting the unfathomable until it’s fathomable, and then we die.

I just found a 20-pack of thong underwear for $27 on Amazon. I’m sure workers had safe working conditions and were paid fair wages to make them. I tried to make my own underwear years ago. I do not know how to do that. I forgot to use elastic, and the pair I sewed fell off immediately. Never have I failed so splendidly outside of a poem. Most of my poetry has no elastic.

My therapist made me feel good about myself, and it got me all messed up.

If you don’t understand trauma, you can’t create trauma-informed spaces. Studying trauma, theorizing about trauma, and following the rules about what is and is not trauma-informed isn’t enough. You have to know trauma inside and out or you’ll end up creating environments that are traumatizing, which is detestable when you say you’re trying to do the opposite. Worse yet, you’ll bring people into your “safe” spaces and harm them.

The world is not how I left it.

I saved myself from myself for myself.

Neil Armstrong carried two artifacts in the pocket of his spacesuit when he walked on the moon: a 1.25-square-inch piece of muslin fabric cut from the Wright Flyer’s left wing and a piece of spruce wood taken from the plane’s left propeller.

Maybe I’d carry my mother’s high school valedictory speech, which she wrote when she graduated at age 16 so I won’t forget where my ability to write comes from. And I’d carry my father’s Sigma Chi ring so I never forget who he was, what he did, how he wielded power, and what I overcame.

If I could, I’d carry my mother’s heart and my father’s brain: the first so I could feel through her, the second so I could resist thinking like him.

Hope is just a nope whose ascender grew over time.

He didn’t show emotion because he’s neurodivergent. He showed emotion because he’s human.

Trauma set my body clocks

It’s not death I fear. It’s spending eternity with my father.

I dreamed a poem last night that was either terrific or terrible. Either way, it’s lost now. The waking world devoured it.

We no longer have the luxury of moving mountains one tablespoon at a time.

While watching the apocalypse unfold, people will be pissed that there aren’t snacks. We want to nibble while Rome burns.

Out of nowhere, I started playing the melody from “In Trutrina” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on my new toy piano. And just like that, I’m healed—at least for today.

Ableist culture, go fuck yourself.

I bought a toy piano. I will John Cage my way out of despair.

Sometimes, in our misguided endeavors, we fly a one-winged unicorn into the side of a crystalline mountain. That’s OK if our intentions are flawed but genuine. Sometimes, we have a crew of willing or unwilling riders with us, and our carelessness sends them careening. That’s not OK regardless of our intentions.

Where we discriminate against one, we discriminate against all.

I just realized they’re called pancakes because they’re little cakes you make in a pan. WHO KNEW? Dyslexia’s fun like that. I can identify complicated words with Old English or Latinate roots, but I can entirely—for most of my life—miss obvious word combinations such as the conjoining of “pan” and “cake.”

I write quickly so my fingers can stay ahead of my thoughts. Removing thinking from my writing is my best hope for experiencing, understanding, and communicating anything meaningful.

Wear sequins today, even if they’re just imaginary ones pasted on your heart. Wear red, the deep shade tinged with black ink. Wear a slogan on your chest written in invisible letters. Be ferocious. Be affable. Be any instance of yourself that you want to be. Good morning.

I came across all the microforms for The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands at the library yesterday. Here’s what the National Archives says about that bureau:

Bureau functions included issuing rations and clothing, operating hospitals and refugee camps, and supervising labor contracts between planters and freedpeople. The Bureau also managed apprenticeship disputes and complaints, assisted benevolent societies in the establishment of schools, helped in legalizing marriages entered into during slavery, and provided transportation to refugees and freedpeople who were attempting to reunite with their family or relocate to other parts of the country. As Congress extended the life of the Bureau, it added other duties, such as assisting Black soldiers and sailors in obtaining back pay, bounty payments, and pensions.

Be full of care today. Be full of love. Be full of kindness. Remember to breathe even when you don’t want to breathe. You are here, solidly, in this world. It breathes alongside you.

My favorite thing I’ve done with my life? Survived it.

A poem about obsessively removing the insects that have invaded my home because I can’t do anything about the cancers that have invaded the bodies of those I love.

The body is an inpatient facility.

Our militarized mindsets will be our undoing.

The problem is we think communities exist in order to be policed.

Facebook thinks I should be friends with some guy named Ween. No last name. He’s just a big old Ween.

Content warning: This content contains content.

This morning, a woman at Fry’s stopped me to ask for help finding food for her husband, who’s preparing for chemotherapy treatment. She described the kinds of things his doctor said he should have. We walked and talked and found some good options for him.

It’s easier to remember being young than it is to imagine growing old.

Eight years ago, I thought we were post-narrative, post-storytelling. Now, I fear we’re post-community.

The problem is poetry isn’t part of our daily discourse. I’m serious.

Write the poem you want to see in the world.

The birds are acting strange today. The humans, too. And the dogs.

I’m the dark water, but I’m also the buoy cast into the dark water.

Again, I’ve dressed for the wrong desert.

I like having two houses. If I die, my dog will think I’ve just gone to the other house and she’ll see me soon. I’ll be away, not gone.