When you feel trapped inside rooms you didn’t willingly enter, I’ll draw clouds on the ceilings so you can remember the sky.

When they run, they run away. They are us or us in other bodies.

Your heart will speak to you one thousand times today. Let it.

It’s hard to find your way when you don’t know where you are, and that’s pretty much how I feel every day: lost and longing but also curious and free—moving instinctually toward where I think I need to go, who I need to be, what I need to feel, and what I need to do.

The terrible reality is that health is more expensive than disease in this country.

Trauma is a wound of the present, every day. — Anonymous

A member of a support group I belong to wrote this, and it is hitting me hard. I want to lie on the floor and repeat this sentence until it inhabits every cell—until my whole body knows that I understand, that I understand. That I hear it, feel it, sense it. That I know what it has lived through and still live through, often elegantly, nearly always silently, and sometimes madly, madly.

Dreamed I attended my own funeral. I looked good.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, if the suffering I’ve experienced will, somehow, be transmuted to beauty, to love, to healing—for myself or for anyone else. But tomorrow must come like kelp wrapping its lithe blades around marine life and glimmering bits of trash alike, and I must be there with it, bobbing at times, gasping for breath at times, wishing the water was colder or hotter or shallower or clearer and, much less often than I’d like, simply floating without fear in my heart, without terror in my mind.

Terror and awe. The lulling sounds of those words. Terror. Awe. Terror. Awe. A swing twitching in winter’s wind. A wooden metronome on an upright piano. Gauzy drapes sucked into and spit out of an open window.

I did not tar hope’s feathers.

Euphoric from the propofol used in this morning’s colonoscopy, I flop into bed to dream of cake and human kindness.

Why do I keep finding my words on your tongue?

Don’t quiet quit your life.

My mini-writing retreat ended up being a retreat from writing, one I needed.

Life: Losing a shoe and finding a sock.

Your studio is the middle of three, with a purple flagstone walkway and an image of a tree on the courtyard gate. Perfect. I’m on my way.

I keep listening to the Contagion soundtrack. Music for our times.

Brevity is the hallmark of someone who only writes on a smartphone.

All the ways things could have ended but haven’t.

I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.

I eat dark cake in the dark.

These days, writing retreats are just me in a room I don’t have to clean myself.

I am an error in chronology, a misplaced, event, object, custom. I am a thing out of place. I am incongruous in the present.

Woke from a nap looking like a combination of my mother, my sister, and The Elf on a Shelf.

I love every bird who is singing and every bird who is silent.

I feel like I swallowed a guillotine blade.

I’m not sure why, but I keep looking around stiffly as if I have a cast on my neck.

I suppose one can be at motion, as in standing on the cusp of it, as in looking onto or into.

In motion, not at motion.

My inconclusive heart. My errant clavicles. My wandering womb. My basted spleen. These parts of me at rest, at motion, steeped and parched. I thank them. I give thanks for them. I’m honored they’re here with me now.

I’ve just misread the phrase basted spleen as bastard spleen and bastion spleen. I’ve just typed spleen as sleep and peels. Dyslexia is my collaborator.

If the man who sexually assaulted me could see me now. He’d be so proud.

For those in Utah: Activism does not equal satanism.

The day I led you to a wooden cathedral in the field and, mid-air, hummingbirds flashed their jeweled feathers.

I was all typos this morning. Being wildly ill is affecting what my thumbsies do.

The wind’s blowing.

I found a little pie and ate it.

You don’t need someone to tell you the wind’s blowing.

I thought I could only raise my voice if others did the same. But they were silent. I had to raise my voice first, then they raised theirs.

My master of fine arts program offered free bonus coursework in trauma dissociation.

Imagine screaming for your life when trauma has its palm on your omohyoid muscle. And that trauma is other people. And they’re telling you to shut up. And they’re crushing your neck. And they’re calling it massage.

I’m at the weight-loss stage of my illness where people want me to eat anything: an exoskeleton, a hoof, teeth.

Ruin is my safe word.

Living in southern Utah means having a second chance at everything I did thirty years ago.

Let’s get some better language, folks.

But her emails, I say every time I send an email.

I never stopped writing when I left poetry. I just started composing elaborate Tweets and Instagram photo captions.

I don’t like it when the wind wheezes like a child with untreated asthma who’s just tried to run a fifty-yard dash.

The kind of wind that uproots thoughts.

Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.

Some kids tried to get my husband and me to race them on the highway tonight.

If you don’t love me once you learn I’m nonbinary and sexually fluid, then you never loved me.

One large organism. That’s what we all are. When part of us dies, part of a whole dies.

All the earth ever wanted to be was the earth.

I hate the poem “The Mower,” by Philip Larkin. The hedgehog wouldn’t have died if the speaker had checked the lawn before mowing it.

You didn’t bring me back to life. You brought me back to a trauma state that I used to associate with living.

I’m listening to sad songs. They’re all sad songs.

I’m getting tired. This question just popped into my head: “If you were my sandwich, what kind of sandwich would you be?”

Note to selves.

I used to think the internet was an oracle. Now, I think it’s a monster.

And yet I think it’s beautiful.

I can totally write a single sentence and stop there. But why?

The trinity I knew was guilt, shame and fear.

Finding joy. It’s like holding an extinct bird in my hands.

And if the sun doesn’t come up, I will never die. Nothing will die. Not one person, not one idea, not a single living being. Even the earth will be safe from death.

Until the sun comes up, I’m rejecting death on every level. Death of the mind. Death of the spirit. Death of the body. Individual deaths. Collective deaths. The death of democracy. The death of polyvocality. All deaths fitted neatly inside another death like death nesting dolls.

Imp, quit saying “The End” to shut down conversations. You’re neither a child nor a god. Children think they control beginnings and endings. Gods, as we imagine them, may have that ability. You don’t. You’re just someone acting at once childlike and godlike, a putrid admixture.

A living being is a living being is a living being.

I’m trying to stay alive until the truth comes out, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.

Brands are people now. They act like people, interact like people, react like people, and are informed by people.

Brands are people now. They have an insecure attachment to us, and we have an insecure attachment to them.

Brands are people now. They talk to us as if they are our teachers, philosophers, sociologists, leaders, gurus.

Brands are people now. They self-consciously expose their psyches, including the marketing tricks they use to lure us in, to keep us in conversation with them, and to make us experience ourselves with and through them.

Brands like Steak-umm are people now. They assume a teacherly, philosophical role. They tell us exactly how they’re manipulating us and how we’re being manipulated by other brands. And we do what they predict. They can’t shake us.

But they can Steak-umm and bake us. Or maybe we’re just there for the baking (and the taking).

I love Steak-umm, by the way, it’s one of my dearest friends. Because brands are people now.

Brands are people now. They act unkind toward us. They act indifferent toward us. Spokespeople like Sarah Silverman explicitly tell us they don’t even care if we buy what they’re promoting.

Brands are so people now that I want to avoid them the way I avoid all people.

What are brands if not a conglomerate person that arises from the human tendencies, limitations and impulses of all the people creating any given brand? And where does our consciousness and brand consciousness begin and end? Do we know? Do you know?

Who are you wearing? I mean that blouse. Who designed your ottoman? Did you get it at Target? Studio McGee? Oh, I love that perfume. What a great car.

Brands have been people since people have been in the business of creating brands. But brands are meaner now. They’re just as cruel and indifferent and loathsome as we are, which means we’re getting meaner. I mean, that’s obvious, right? That we’re getting meaner.

And more cynical. Look at how cynical brands are. That’s a clue about how cynical we are. Because we’re all brands, and we’re all people. And brands are cynical people now.We’re not buying the world a Coke these days. And perfect harmony? Try cacophony. The brands are people, and they know it. They know how much trouble the world is in.

Brands! You used to make me feel safe. You gave me hope. You were like the lyrics to Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” As a child, when I’d see you on television, you made me feel like I could live, like it would all get better.

You don’t know anymore, do you, brands? You don’t know if we can live, if things will all get better.

Brands, I believe every word you uttered when I was young. I got through being abused, being molested, being raped because of you. I got through all of it because of you. Now where are you? What kind of person have you become?

I know you don’t have any easy answers, brands. I know you’re scared, too. I know, I know. You’ve done your best. You were always a stand-in for religion and spirituality, for relics and icons and talismen. I know it was too much to ask of you. To play that role. To be all that.

Ace Hardware feels my feels. It just sent me an email that reads: “Let us help you.” Of all the brands, I believe Ace Hardware is the one that actually could help me. Ace isn’t cynical. It’s doesn’t antagonize. It doesn’t tell me my future is iffy at best. It doesn’t scare me.

In short, Ace Hardware is a good brand friend to have. But it’s not my best brand friend. Honestly, I think Ace is a little naive, especially these days. It has some things to learn about being a person-brand. I might need to seek out some new person-brands to befriend.

I would love to be a hippopotamus named Fritz.

I wish I could show off my feet and make someone love me.

No expression without digression.

Be inconvenient and all else will follow.

A picture of the hamster I had seventeen years ago came up today in my photo memories. I loved that hamster. Her name was Tater McGee. I’m a wreck now.

I need a better elevator pitch for telling people I’m not straight. Apparently, saying “I’m not straight” isn’t clear enough.

Imagine being dead for one hundred years and people still leaving books at your grave.

I feel the dead close. Closer than the living.

Water, water while away your sighs, spiral through my ridges. If today is a window, it’s a way out.

When I darken like wild rain in a quixotic moment, the shores of my life reluctant to wake.

When I see the sunset tethered, tamed. When I hear wood moving on a smooth creek.

The dock remembers water. I remember the feel of escape—dry as land, quiet as mercury stretched and spread and hardly here.

Across an afternoon, the boats away and away. I linger like a canyon, like someone’s love or lies.

Ruin.

Basalt: even darker after rain.

Listening to what screams outside in the deep dark.

Beauty, I can’t leave you.

I drove past the gorge and smell like the gorge.

All this land and yet no healing because of all these people.

I’m always moving inside the wrong water.

My local hardware store has a copy of The Iliad.

His mind is a gas burner that won’t light.

It’s like my clothes have been spending time on other people. They smell very good and not at all like me.

The burst of adrenaline that occurs shortly before someone destroys me.

Again, but without the pathologizing language.

Don’t make a long story longer by stating that it’s going to be a long story.

My wind is full of rocks.

Feel free to throw tomato soup on my poetry.

I used to think I was experiencing ennui. Turns out I just have a bad heart.

Mihi in odio est. It is hateful to me.

Do not give up. The earth needs our palliative care.

We live in a post-humane world.

Night of deep crimes. Day of mirage ceilings. During each, an orchestra of fire between my ears.

I’m some sound like a crow or crowbar, a cheap closet door fisted open.

Here, it’s an afterlife of branches and ancestors and hands on my shadows.

This autumn is unmetered, a dream of wind and shovels.

These ethics really get in the way of a good time.

They’re not unfriending you because they’re not paying attention to you.

You. Your tongue. Your bell-clap. Your drumming. Pull fistfuls of everything from my dress, my drawers.

Driving home, I blast rock music for the cows flanking the road.

Tonight, they got to hear AC/DC.

I met a Gila monster today.

My favorite hawk just ate my favorite lizard.

Wherever you find yourself, even if you find yourself lost, you can always map your way back with love, which is greater than any one man.

In parting, try to choose love. Because without it? What are you and what is anyone to you and why are you even on this glorious, broken Earth that we all need to share and share alike, not just with each other but with all living beings, all lands holy and desecrated, all trail leading out and out, away always away, but also back again.

I’m going home. I’m going home. Oklahoma, I’m coming home.

Take a little ride on my donkey, which is my surrey with the fringe on top, which is an American Airlines ticket and my seat in its belly. Don’t wail. I’ll be alright. We all will.

Nevermind. I don’t mind. I tried here. I really tried.

O as in zero, which is all, not none. I’ve said this all before. BefOre. Don’t you feel it here in Southern Utah, in our ore? Or …

O of want, that old bone Pinksy saw on the shore of his imagination. O of openness. O of passage.

No binaries or even trinaries. One. One. All one. AllOne. OneAll that reduces to our single sound, our collective O.

Yin yang. Here there. One space that is t/here. I’ve said this before. All of this before. BeforeAfter. T/hereT/here. LightDark. YinYinYangYang. Chitty chitty bang bang.

You’ve no choice if you choose to love. It does not tip the emotion wheel to one side, the one you like. Joy grows its roots in hell. Jung said that, or something like it. And grows its leaves in heaven.

Love is like just like that. We don’t have to know why. It’s precocious. It’s in the garden right now gleaning fallen pomegranates so others can eat, even birds, even slugs, even you.

Love scoops us clean and makes us more, more than whole, overfilled, stuffed.

To wreckage and back again.

To gutting and back again.

Because love is ruin. Love is ruin. All love leads to despair and back again to love, a Mobius strip, topological.

When we live through our deaths, we are reborn. When we live through the deaths of those we love, we die. Repeat. Repeat. Ad astra. Ad nauseum. Ad infinitum.

Despair: The hummingbirds have left. Joy: The white-crowned sparrows have returned.

I just got really excited about a cute pill sorter.

My heart is a grenade.

I love the land. I’m just tired of being with it all by myself.

Here we are in no-time, living with what seems sudden and what’s been moving within and between us for years, decades, generations.

Now, there aren’t even fireflies to distract and enchant. There’s only darkness, even in daylight.

How slow and fast it feels all at once: both like a river carving a valley and like a blinding cataclysmic event.

All was hope and promise, soft-bodied and flashing.

Words buzz through the air like the fireflies I watched for hours on summer nights in Oklahoma during my childhood.

None of this is right. None of this is love.

Some processes take so long time is imperceptible. Some events occur so quickly even words like “instant” can’t capture their speed.

I find your orientation toward time unhelpful.

May we hold each other’s shame with care until we realize there is no shame. Our delicate shame. Our gentle shame. Our terrified shame. May we gather around our collective shame like it’s a heart(h) where we can meet and greet it for what it is: s(h)ameness and name(less).*

* also known as love

My dog smells like the desert.

Currently, in Utah, people are screaming about California condors being released in the state. They don’t want any more “Californians” here. Sigh.

Sure, you’re free to denigrate one another, but why?

A short sentence came to me suddenly, as if uttered from afar.

I dressed and groomed myself gently, as if I was tending to someone else, someone I dearly loved.

The gorge was below, just as I knew it would be. The gorge that is a fact. The gorge that is an emotion. The gorge that is a process.

My MRI earlier this week reminded me of telephone dail tones. I’d completely forgotten about that sound.

It was all a sea: the river a sea, the sand sage a sea, conscience a sea that surrounded me, that surrounds every living being.

Remember when we didn’t know if someone had hung up on us until we heard the dreaded dial tone? We’d wait, hoping it wasn’t so, then the signal would start: callous, cold, indifferent.

One thing I won’t do: Go quietly.

I saw two cups and, in my haste, mistook them for a single cup. In my mis-taking, I divided my perceived single cup and suddenly had two cups again. But they were crucibles. Contaminated and useless. Each half couldn’t contain anything, not even contaminants, without the other. We are ore. We are bright, sometimes. We are chlorinated, sometimes. We are isotopes, sometimes, that glow hot like embers, like iodine-131 or it’s cousin, I-123.

Then the bots started controlling the narrative.

Guy Davenport on Ronald Johnson’s Transcendentalist Poetry. This headline makes so much more sense today. I initially read it as Guy Davenport on Ronald Reagan’s Transcendentalist Poetry.

When I was in middle school, my friend and three generations of a family died in a house fire. Her name was Katy. She was so kind to me. When I had her over to show her the doll house I made from a shoebox, she said it was great. Her living room was full of plants and animals. They were everywhere: snakes, lizards, spiders, and, below, cats and dogs. The wood floors were water-stained from all the plants. At least that’s how I remember it. I was ashamed then. Full of shame. Didn’t have kids over much. Didn’t know what to do with the kind ones. Katy. Katy Shay. The kids made jokes about her, about the fire, the very next day.

In chemistry, the prefix cis is added to the name of a molecule when two atoms or groups are situated on the same side of a plane of symmetry passing through the molecule, like a double bond between two carbon atoms.

In molecular biology, a cis-acting element regulates a neighboring gene when it binds to a trans-acting element.

The prefix cis comes from the Latin meaning on this side.

Some folks: You chose this [painful or tragic thing]. Me: You didn’t choose this [painful or tragic thing], but you can choose how to respond to this [painful or tragic thing].

I’m not putting a collar on my mind. If I lose it, I don’t want anyone bringing it back.

Near the border, owls hunt bats. Here, we hunt each other.

Water thick as cotton, the lake a drowning mouth. Swallow. Spit. Swallow.

I notice this pain. I feel this pain. I acknowledge this pain. I give myself permission to release this pain, even for a moment. I give myself permission to let this pain go.

Vial my longing. Flush my joy. Pump despair from my lungs. Displace the air that holds me up, even in water, that lets me float like a buoy in the cottonmouth-thick lake. Sterilize me. Ethereize me. On Prufrock’s table, label me. Tag me. Take whatever makes me.

Mamallian nightmares. Chelonian dreams.

Always write before you can think.

You were one leaf once, whole. You are still whole, even with that hole. The hole is part of your whole now. And now. And now. And ever. Good morning.

In three of the locust’s leaves: perfect circles chewed away; perfect holes; perfect absences. What remains, what surrounds, what the altered leaves tell us about presence and absence. Here and gone. Now and then. An encircling. A staying. A leafing anyway, with and without. You were one leaf once, whole. You are still whole, even with that hole. The hole is part of your whole now. And now. And now. And ever. Good morning.

Things I’d rather be right now: a cushion, a brick, anything that doesn’t ache.

The wind is styling my hair.

The leaves tell us to be alarmed by the wind.

Darting: critters, thoughts, molecules. How can we not be here for all of them?

I went outside. And that has made all the difference.

Just a few more minutes, and I can start dipping into tomorrow’s calories.

All night, my knee remembers the tear in my jeans: freedom of air, comfort of warm light reaching skin.

Crown me. Drown me.

Crown me dead. Crown me listless. Crown me longing. Crown me timbered. Crown me felled. Crown me lonely. Crown me. Own me. Owe me.

I’m a thing. A thing made of mud that speaks and eats and sleeps.

I don’t know when trauma took my life. Was I five, seven, thirteen? I’ve been dead for at least four decades.

I hear the rain but only see one drop.

Living with. Healing with. Loving with.

With others. With(in) ourselves.

It’s all the land I love.

I’m at risk of being overly involved in the lives of animals, the life of the Earth, and the lives of humans—especially my chosen and biological families and every child who enters or has entered or will enter this hairy, hoofed world.

Dear girl-child: Where do you go when you’re nowhere? Everywhere?

Those who other conditionally still other. Under what conditions are you willing to be othered by those who conditionally other?

Failbrella: When your umbrella flips inside out in the wind then slips from your hands in the wind then manages to open inside your passenger seat as you’re driving then gets stuck in your coat some goshdarn way when you try to open it after emerging from your vehicle to brave even more rain and wind.

Jungbrella: When all these things happen right after you’ve seen your Jungian therapist, so you can get all deep-myth about every single mishap.

Love is a non-count noun.

Our bodies are rentals. Our home is the universe.

Chronically Ill? Read poems.

(Chronically, I’ll read poems.)

There are two kinds of people: those who love you and everyone else.

PrairyErth. We are one.

As astra per aspera.

Just abandoned a poem because it’s past my bedtime and I don’t have time to wrestle with it. Come easy or go home, poems.

An attention difference thing I did: Googled “on-ramp” to see if it’s hyphenated, accidentally typed “on rap” instead, then spent hours learning all about the history of rap.

It’s not his fault I chose him. My trauma chose him without my knowing it was my trauma choosing him.

It’s not his fault he chose me. He chose my trauma without his knowing it was my trauma he was choosing.

The hardest thing is this: My stories are me saying I want to live, to heal, to survive. My voice is me in the world saying I want to stay, to learn, to earn my keep. Speaking and writing are my way of saying I’m here, of understanding the world and my place in it, of advocating and growing and empathizing. For my voice, my words, even my pleas to be a burden, something to silence or escape … what do I make of that? How do I process it? My self is at stake. My frozen self wants to run but can’t move a muscle.

You’re on a swing. When you go forward, you’re in the future. When you go back, you’re in the past. You don’t even register the present as you breeze by it.