Family

dif/Fused Ancestry in Ardmore, Oklahoma

For my dif/Fused Ancestry project, I’m mapping sites where I want to collect soil samples for my father. One of those is the Masonic Temple in Ardmore, Oklahoma. I won’t go into why that is an especially painful site for me. If you want more detail, read the section after the break below. I’ll just say that I need soil from that location.

When I looked up the temple today, I saw that it was torn down in 1990. I didn’t know that. Why not? Because time tends to stand still once we leave a place and never return. What happened in that building can never happen again because it’s pretty much a vacant lot now. There’s some fencing and what looks like construction materials being stored there. There are also big murals on the wall that joined the temple with the adjacent building. One of the murals is a variation on Rosie the Riveter.

We change places, and places change again and again. What was is no longer. In this case, seeing the empty lot, even just on Google Maps, is helping me release the past. I’m sure that feeling will be even more powerful when I collect soil from the site.

This is something I hadn’t anticipated about dif/Fused Ancestry, that it would be an experiential and visceral way of realizing time has passed, things have changed, places don’t have to be what they were forever, and we don’t have to be the same forever, either, because of those places. What better way to get that message through to the body than by digging in the soil and transforming it into art.

—

Ardmore is the epicenter of sex and child sex trafficking in Oklahoma. A few years ago, the Department of Homeland Security had a presence in the area. They taught local residents how to identify trafficking and report it. In 2022, there was a huge bust at Lake Texoma, where my father and his best friend had properties adjacent to one another. Men, including powerful men, were caught in a trafficking case that involved a “party” at two hotels.

Oklahoma has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in the country. I didn’t know that until I started researching the Lake Texoma bust. The crossroads area, where several highways intersect, is especially vulnerable, as are towns with transient populations, like colleges and military bases. My hometown had both at one point and the highway leading south from it fed into the crossroads. My father opened a business in my hometown called The Crossroads. Probably just a coincidence. After he died, I asked my mother why he liked that name. She said he liked it because the crossroads is where you summon the devil.

I have no evidence that my father was involved in any kind of trafficking beyond the ways in which he did so covertly with me. But it has been going on for decades. And it was facilitated by the availability of CB radios, which my father and his best friend both had. And he did have me talking to truckers on the highways down that way when I was in grade school. (They’d ask for me by my CB handle, Rainbow Unicorn.) And he did spend a lot of time down there alone with his buddies.

Since that bust in 2022, I’ve wondered if the temple was involved in trafficking in some way. Several lodges across the country have been caught up in such activities. I don’t think I’ll ever know. He may just have been involved in other criminal activity down there. He was always hustling. His whole life was a hustle until he got hustled by his own brother and died.

Images: 1. A photo of the Masonic Temple before it was torn down (credit: Mark Hilton). 2. A Google Maps screenshot showing the lot now, along with the murals on the brick wall of the adjacent building. There’s a butterfly you can take selfies in front of, a variation on Rosie the Riveter, and an image of an athlete titled “Ardmore Strongman.”

Post Oaks of Oklahoma

I met Scott LaMascus last night in Oklahoma City at McBride Center Writers, the generative workshop he and Aaron Pogue lead at Oklahoma Christian University. It was swell. I mean, my heart is swollen, and not in a cardiomegaly way but rather in a love way from that Big Oklahoma Love I’ve missed so much.

Everyone at the workshop was incredible, not only in terms of what they wrote but also in how they received other group members’ work. Selfishly, I want this for myself and for others in the area where I currently live, Southern Utah. But I can’t do something like what Scott does. His fluency with both poetry and people is remarkable. His care and kindness, coupled with his attunement to poetry and the craft of writing poems, is singular.

On the drive there from Tulsa, I almost rear-ended a semi because it almost rear-ended a gnarly, gloppy tar truck that decided to stop in the middle of the highway. I was like, Of course this would happen in the city where my father grew up! That horrible little tar truck is as monstrous as he was!

On my way back, I kid you not, Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome came on the radio—yes, in Oklahoma that really happened—just as a barred owl woke for the night, emerged from a tree by the side of the highway right in front of my car, then glided over the other lane and disappeared into the green belt.

Pines of Rome is one of my favorite classical works. I listened to it all the time in high school, volume cranked the way my mother liked it so she could hear it from the dining room where she spent most of her time.

My mother was in that music last night. She was in that owl. She was the response to the tar truck and to my fear and to my anger at my father for wrecking everything.

I’m telling you facts now, so listen. You are in that music. You are in that owl. Everything moves toward holiness, toward magic and mystery, which are synonyms for miracle and love. Even places desecrated by people and their actions, by people like my father, want to heal, have no choice but to move in the direction of healing, because healing never leaves people or places or this Earth or this universe. It never leaves, even when it seems like it’s gone.

I had new tires on the car. The brakes had been serviced. I didn’t hit the semi, and the semi didn’t hit the tar truck. I also didn’t hit the owl. Last night, Respighi’s composition about pine trees in Rome was an ecstatic work about the Post Oaks of Oklahoma and what moves through them, especially in the spirited night, where all is and will be and always has been both amuletic and talismanic.

Also, on the drive home, I identified the issue with my manuscript Thoracopagus, the one I decided is missing that Graviton quality it needs. My realization was that the thoracopagus doesn’t represent the connection between me and my mother, which is how it’s framed now. It’s me and me. I’m the thoracopagus coming to terms with being of my mother but also of my father. In Crude, I turn my father into Hades and, later, into the devil. I can’t just leave him in that state. I have to keep haunting him the way he haunts me until he’s not me and I no longer feel like a monster or like I’m evil — two beliefs that have been tucked away in my mind my whole life.

I’m going to need all the amulets and talismans I can get to write about that, meaning every emanation of my mother and her family that inhabits this red earth.

Reflecting Light

Speaking of loneliness, I once played with light as a friend. When my brother-in-law, who was much older than me and a physicist, was visiting one summer, he showed me how to capture light in a small mirror and project it onto a wall. After he left, I played with the light for hours and hours in an otherwise dark hallway, the one that led to my parents’ separate bedrooms and to my bedroom and to everything that happened in them. I don’t know what I thought I was going to accomplish by getting a ball of light to bounce around on those nicotine-beiged walls, but I knew it was better than going it alone in that house. My light friend was everything to me that summer. It only let me down on cloudy days.

Water Cracking Air

Happy Trans Day of (Indi)Visibility.

I just saw an ad that read: Turn Your Expertise into Jerome. I was like, Who is Jerome? It actually said Income, but I’m dyslexic and the font was swashy.

The yellow-throated warbler is the happiest of all warblers, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

I put a bird in a box
so it wouldn’t be hurt
by the wind

I put myself in the wind
so I wouldn’t be hurt
by the box

—

Inspired by an Oklahoman who put a native sparrow in a box on a windy day because she thought the wind would harm the bird.

I dreamed Bill Knott’s mind had been transferred to millions of pieces of paper. They were lying all around me in a vast room, each one folded like an origami prayer boat meant for a memorial ceremony, but there was no water anywhere on Earth for them to float in.

(ツ)_/¯ I guarantee my reasons for not liking our former sheriff are very different from our local alt-right extremists’ reasons for not liking the former sheriff. ¯\_(ツ)

This public speaker was being interviewed, and he kept saying co-creation, but I heard it as procreation. Imagine my confusion when he said he wanted to co-create with his partner, his co-workers, his friends, his family, and his children.

I’m doing the floss this morning along with a little song I wrote called “Our Shitty Fucking Sheriff Resigned” because our county’s shitty fucking sheriff resigned suddenly and without explanation. I had several frustrating interactions with him when I was dealing with complex PTSD and bipolar issues in 2023. He was unhelpful, clueless, patronizing, and demeaning.

Our shitty fucking sheriff resigned. Our shitty fucking sheriff resigned. Sing it with me now.

Oh, and he resigned on International Bipolar Day. Even better. What a gift. How thoughtful of him. And all I got him in return was this victory dance.

Someone from my weaving group is getting rid of four styrofoam heads, so Styrofoam Heads keeps showing up in my inbox. It’s weird. I love it.

Our little town has gathered to watch a rattlesnake climb the wall of a neighbor’s house. It feels like very olden-times entertainment. The life partner is down there with everybody. I am here with myself confronting the snake that is automated AI results embedded in the Yahoo search that’s somehow made itself my preferred search engine.

Evening, a sun-drenched power line is a whip of water cracking the air.

I just misread breaking news as heartbreaking news, and that should be what all breaking news is called these days.

I’m rage-eating gummy bears is how I am.

I’m threatening my nasal cavity with a neti pot is how I am.

Based on my last couple of Facebook posts, people appear to like poetry thirty-five percent more than they like bacon.

I just misread a beacon of hope as a bacon of hope is how I am.

I ate bread in the shower is how I am.

These days, getting to the end of a roll of toilet paper is exciting. I’m like, achievement unlocked. I literally say that.

I had to buy bigger underwear is how I am.

As an Oklahoman, I want to apologize for Markwayne Mullin.

I am dyslexia strong.

Book title, free for the taking: Plastination.

It could deal with the literal plastination of the body or the figurative turning of a country into something as caustic and inorganic as plastic.

I just misread donor organ as donor orgasm is how I am.

Oklahoma is like one of those relationships you just keep finding yourself in again.

If I didn’t have a spine, I would feel like I was one with everything. It’s this skeleton that makes me feel like a soul clinging to bone, something separate from, not part of, something that will one day break.

You know that feeling when you suddenly have to poop right after you take a shower? That’s how Monday feels.

Alex LaMorie

Poems may be forgotten, but they shouldn’t start out as forgettable.

My history is a burning history in a burning world.

If you don’t care about Oklahoma after reading my work about Oklahoma, then I haven’t done my job as a poet, as an Oklahoman, or as a storyteller.

It’s so windy here in Toquerville that I feel like I’m in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. Wind like this makes me cry. It is whatever my mind is, as Gertrude Stein observes. I am as my land and air is, as my cracking and straining house is, as raw as I felt the moment this wind hit my back in a dream and stripped the veneer of reason from me in one clean and somehow profound motion. I sit in the dark shaking, my heart beating like a wild nestling’s.

Something good happened and I can’t talk about it so I’m just eating a bunch of gummy bears is how I am.

Whenever I have something I want to tell the life partner, he’s like, Is it about gender or poetry or trauma, and it almost always is about one or more of those things.

Systemic issues don’t have individual solutions and can’t be offloaded to individuals who must then bear the burden for the systemic issues. We can’t self-love our way out of abusive, harmful systems or the attitudes they encourage and reward.

Some folks drive like they have donor organs in their cars.

What are these words, even?

Me looking at my own writing.

I worked on the new manuscript more today. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. Loved it. Hated it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What do you do when you have two manuscripts with presses for their contests and open reading periods? You finish a third one and send it out, too. That’s what you do.

Every time someone attacks me, I just eat dark, leafy greens and grow stronger.

I’m placing a bowl heaped with disco balls in the light and leaning over them, my face cracked across a thousand mirrors, is how I am.

My neighbor is killing weeds with a blowtorch connected to a propane tank.

Flirting with the life partner by showing him my new spreadsheet is how I am.

I smell like barf for some reason is how I am.

I got immunoglobulins all over myself today doing my immunoglobulin infusion is how I am.

I fell into an agave twice after thinking Don’t lose your balance and fall into that agave is how I am.

Like Him

Like father, like daughter is the most terrifying thing anyone could say to me. I was raised as a daughter. I was raised as his. Whenever someone catches me doing something he would do, or when I see those similarities myself, I feel like the floor of my life is dropping out from beneath me and I have to hope I’ll keep spinning until there’s a floor to stand on again. I used to say my biggest fear wasn’t death, it was living with my father for eternity. Even worse would be living as him for eternity. Even a second is too long to move through the world the way he did.

By Dirt, by Blood, by Oil

I could have called my family by its dirt. I could have called it by its blood. But it’s oil I settled on, the oil that extracted something from us as a family and as Oklahomans even as we came for it this way and that.

How oil turned to paper money then burned. How it burned us in the process.

I could have called my family by its horses. I could have called us by our broken land, our busted hope, our anger, our crimes, our laughter, our deaths, our abuses, our bruises, our fires—I mean real ones we set, places we took a match to when they stopped being to our liking. That includes our own bodies.

But it was always oil, my family, even before it knew it was oil.

Image: My great-grandfather and my grandfather on my mother’s side along with their horses. Either Altus or Headrick, Oklahoma, date unknown, probably 1920s.

Scattering Light

My manuscript Crude was shortlisted for the Lightscatter Press Book Award, judged this year by Heid E. Erdrich.

I’m from Oklahoma. Crude is set largely in that state. The work deals with issues related to trauma, healing, and the formation (and destruction) of identity through places and what happens in them. The word crude functions in several ways in the manuscript. It captures what is raw and coarse and also speaks to the oil industry, which informed so many people’s lives in Oklahoma through the 1980s, including my family’s.

Things like the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the oil boom (and subsequent bust) may seem like forever ago and like they have nothing to do with your story. But Crude is where we were and where still are, all of us. We are all hurting in one way or another in this crude country and this crude world. We are all healing in this crude world, too. Or trying to.

We’ve survived, my kin and me, the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unsurvivable. Surviving the impossible is possible. That’s my story. It’s that I’m still here and so are you.

Lightscatter Press is a micropress here in Utah whose publisher, Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore, and board of directors all live, write, and work in the state. It’s one of those dream presses for me because of the people involved and what the press embodies. I’ve said before that I don’t aspire to be on the biggest press. I want to be on a press that cultivates a sense of community and connection, a sense of people and place.

I’m touched by this. It’s good to know my work matters in some way to some people. After all, I’m not writing about what I’ve experienced for fun. It’s not an exercise. It’s a decision to enter into a way of being and to remain there for as long as it takes, which I hope is as long as I live.

The winner of the award is Sagirah Shahid, whose book SPIRIT: An African American Muslim Lyric, will be published in Spring 2027.

Image: My mother’s grandparents, father, aunts, cousin (who was passed off as an aunt if the rumor is true), and dog in front of one of their early homes in Oklahoma. This family photo and many more are woven into the fabric of Crude.

Flint

My father and his friends destroyed my childhood innocence. The poet who sexually assaulted me destroyed the innocence I reclaimed in adulthood. He did it in part by making me talk about how my father and his friends violated me while he violated me. I know you don’t want to hear about that. I know nobody wants to hear about that.

Maybe you want to write your poems. That’s what I want, too. Maybe you want to see your work in the world because you believe it could help others—and you for that matter. That’s what I want, too. Maybe you want to belong to something and feel proud of what you belong to. That’s what I want, too.

If there’s a difference between us, my guess is that you’ve been heard, believed. Or that what happened to you isn’t what’s been happening your whole life. Or that you found poets who are safe, kind, welcoming. Or that you conjured some kind of flint to restart the fire of your life.

Split

I dreamed I told my brother what our father did to me. He threw me out of the house. The moment the words left my mouth, our father died. My brother blamed me.

Later, my brother split in two: one who believed me and one who didn’t. The one who believed was locked in a room crying and wailing, not just about what happened to me but about what happened to him. The one who didn’t believe was standing over the one who did. He was pointing and screaming. He started to beat up the one who believed but instead fell to his knees, bawling.

I was all alone in another room. I thought they’d come for me once they realized what had happened to them and to me. They never came. They were lost in a world in which they could only console each other. It was like I’d never existed. But I did, and I do. I believe they exist, too, in one body: half believing, half trapped in disbelief. One brother cordoned off behind a velvet rope in a bewildering cage our father made for him that’s now his own.

December 25, 2025

The laccolith shoulders this inelegant sky, nothing to write home about, as if this weren’t home now but that other place, the one I’m from, a town that’s rotting building by building, foundation by foundation, the fences, the red brick, the sweetgums and their dejected seeds. But mostly the psychiatric hospital, which the state left to vandals years ago.

Where I live now is less town than scrub, less scrub than sand, less sand than canyon. Plenty of room for a word to get lost, to go out on the air and never reach a listener but also never boomerang back to the speaker who stands, silent, beyond language, at least for a spell, isolated from everyone, including themselves.

That’s when the laccolith comes in handy, a kind of giant anchor for thought, for yearning. Headless under dark clouds, the color of night before night falls. A heavy future, a heavy past, a sense of always about it that makes humans seem like baubles, a bracelet of seals surrounding a whale in a faraway watery world before one slips into its mouth unnoticed.

What rises here rises in the distance, with its monzenite and spruce, big-eared bats and fir, bitter cherry, dollarjoint cactus, pygmy rabbits, sandweed, spleenwort. We’ve never been liberated from names or naming. In my ignorant past, I didn’t learn what to call things or what to call myself. Cardinal was red bird. Finch was sparrow. Father was father. I was daughter.

I read that if you think enough about a relative, your genes flip on and off to become more like theirs. Ten minutes a day for thirty days is all it takes. In case that’s true, who should I think of? I’ll take my chances with my mother, the way the white-tailed antelope ground squirrels take their chances with the feral cat when the neighbor’s trees are heavy with apricots in late summer. At least her genes helped me survive him.

Pistachios escaped cultivation in nearby mining towns and made their way up into the mountains. Birds, the first landscape architects, move them around the foothills, where they grow like bonsai. Humans spread from place to place, trying to find and lose ourselves. We look for footholds. We lock in. Even if we only grow a little, it’s something. A small life is better than none at all.

Horses and cows come and go here, the way they do where I’m from. My mother came and went, into and out of the hospital as a nurse and sometimes as a patient. Those buildings feel like her body rotting, returning to earth with no dignity. Her broken windows. The word PSYCHO spray-painted on her side. Her interior waterlogged and full of God knows what in the one-time hospital chapel that hasn’t shivered with song in decades.

Inger Christensen says there is war all the time. There is war. There is war. War in the cells. War in the genes. War in the heart. War in the mind. War in the family. War in the mother. War in the father. But there is also deerweed and spikemoss, manzanita and mat muhly. There is histone modification and methylation, expression and heritability. There is asbestos and lead, observation hatches and safety glass.

There is what happened and what passes for what happened, in memory, in polite company, in our palm lines, in our bloodlines. There is war all the time, even under new paint and old dirt.