Kansas City

Demons

Was I creating demons when I was at a poetry dinner party in Kansas City with Carolyn Kizer, and the entire group attempted to elide over her comments when she talked about another well-known poet attempting to rape her?

Was I creating demons when a member of my poetry class in Kansas City started stalking me, leaving flowers, torn-up copies of my poems, and letters about how bad and offensive my writing was on my windshield?

Was I creating demons when a poet and publisher in Kansas City screamed in front of a large group of poets, including my best friend, that I wanted to fuck him behind a dumpster?

Was I creating demons when a poet in Seattle who had agreed to work with me on my poetry googled (from his IP address) the words married and naked in combination with my name before we met? When he then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. When he also created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems.

Was I creating demons when two other Southern Utah poets said my work was pornographic and I should find another state that would accept it, while refusing to let me join their two state poetry society chapters and telling me they’d stopped meeting when they hadn’t?

Was I creating demons when a poet who’d been following my work for months and said he wanted to publish some of my poems left a hostile, sanist comment on one of my microessays in which I was lamenting the fact that people are jumping from a bridge down the street? When he screamed that my writing was the last thing he needed in his life, as if he hadn’t followed me and chosen to read, and laud, my work up to that point. As if he didn’t have the power to stop reading what I wrote or unfriend me or mute me or any of a suite of well-adjusted options that were available to him. That poet later disappeared during a mental-health crisis. When I was asked to help, I skip-traced him to his brother’s house, and he was eventually found safe. Because that’s who I am. Not someone who creates demons or treats people like demons. I’m a person who helps people when they need help, no matter how they’ve treated me.

Was I creating demons when a poet asked to read one of my manuscripts, then replied that he was sorry he’d even asked to read it? When he then rewrote part of it the way he’d like to see it, infantilized me and my work, assumed the speaker was me, treated the work not as work but as the opportunity to intervene in my personal life and my past, and talked about me in extremely sexist ways. When I responded and he continued the attack and infantilization, using my own work against me by calling me a little fist of a girl, a line from one of my poems. When he continued to move between unwanted intimacy, flirtation, and attacks in successive emails, even after I asked him to stop communicating with me. Or when my life partner had to intervene to make him observe my boundary.

Was I creating demons when a poet I’d known for more than twenty years threatened me here on Facebook, publicly in front of the entire poetry community, saying I was committing both a transgression and a manipulation when I told him I loved him, platonically, as a friend, something my context made clear? Was I creating a demon when he did similar things to other women and female-bodied poets.

Was I creating demons when a poet messaged me about a gay Arab who had gotten ahold of a photo of him in bed without his shirt on and how upsetting that was for him and who then sent me that photo through DM so I could see what he was so upset about? Or when that same poet viciously attacked a woman who was experiencing psychosis and got a group of poets to gang up on and attack her, which could have put her life in danger. Or when he refused to take his public post about her down so she could get some help without being pushed further into a dangerous or life-threatening situation. Or when he later told me I was borrowing the term CPTSD and wielding the label sanism, implying I don’t live with the former like he does as a war veteran and therefore have no right to identify and address the latter. By the way, I helped that woman, too. I reached out to her directly and got her a welfare check. If I’d been in the same part of the county as her, I would have been there for her in person. That’s a lot better than telling her she’s a terrible person and getting at least a dozen other poets to do the same.

Was I creating a demon when my poetry mentor breached my trust seventeen years ago with his words and his body and his insistence and his intrusion? When he made me talk about the ways in which my father abused me and became aroused when I did so. While he had me pinned down with his body. While he talked real nice, real childlike. While he continued despite no and stop and no and no and no. That was not a demon. That was a man. And a poet. A beloved one at that. I didn’t create that man any more than I create demons.

More recently, was I creating demons when a poet told me my comment about mentors not taking advantage of their students, which stems from my own experience, didn’t need to be said because it was already implied in the statement that students shouldn’t sleep with their mentors? That, in other words, we should all just be following the programming we’ve been given, which is to place responsibility on victims for not being or becoming victims. Look at my paragraph above. What part of that looks like a mentor trying to sleep with me? What part of that could I have avoided under the circumstances? Was I creating demons when that poet interrupted me in front of a group of poets to make his assertion? How about when he turned my gender into a joke and literally wanted to tell it as a joke on his joke podcast. How about when he asked how my life partner felt about my having sex with whoever I wanted and continuing to ask me that inappropriate bullshit question even as I kept repeating the word asexual, emphasizing the first syllable in the hope he’d understand not only his error but the violation intrinsic in his question. Is that evidence of my demon-making. (Note to everyone: Just because someone uses language for their gender and sexuality doesn’t make it your right to ask personal questions about either, especially not when first meeting them.)

Was I creating a demon when a friend of the poet in the paragraph above, one who’d been supportive of me, my work, and everything I’ve discussed about poets and poetry—up until it involved someone he personally knows—sent me a message in response to my asking not to be invalidated in which he says I am marshaling evidence, finding demons, distracting from real communication, seeing a glitch as a serious issue—thereby invalidating my concern about that issue—calling me a wrecking ball, making it clear none of the poets in the group, my former friends, like me, not even the one who appears to like me, saying this very personal issue around my story of sexual assault should have been mediated in the group and as a group—as if my experience and my trauma should be on trial and the most painful parts of my life should be made freely available to the group? Then, when in order to drive the point home about what a terrible person he thinks I am, he says, I think you’re a great writer. That opinion is somehow impersonal and won’t change. Or when he ends by saying he knows his own mind and I am welcome in it anytime I welcome that.

And that was from a friend, a dear one, who in one paragraph tried to invalidate everything I’ve ever seen or experienced and to get me to see myself as nothing, as worthless, as a monster. He reminds me of my father. He reminds me of my father’s best friend. He reminds me of Ruthie’s father and her brothers. He reminds me of Shawn Green and Greg Kullich and Jack Ladd and Matt Rawlinson and my trigonometry teacher, Steven Knight. He reminds me of my nephew. And of my old friend Jared.

The life partner says I tend to be drawn to creative people, and they tend to be drawn to me. I need more boundaries around that, clearly: who gets access to me and when and where and how. In this case, I’m at a bit of a loss. I’d been close friends with this person for years, the one who reduced me to creating demons. It feels like another example of someone being with me all the way until I talk about someone they know personally. That happened around the assault seventeen years ago as well.

Ironically, the group I created where this rift occurred was supposed to be a safe space, a place for creativity to flourish, and a place for peer support around mental-health issues. That’s something I need in my life and know others need as well. Instead, my biomarkers have been negatively affected, I feel like I was attacked when being vulnerable, I feel like my story was submerged under the weight of those who don’t want to hear it, and I feel like this last email was designed to destabilize my mood and be health- and even life-threatening. One in five is the statistic for those living with bipolar, not even bipolar coupled with trauma. Knowing my past and what I’ve survived, I can’t reconcile how this poet, this friend, would choose to do the maximum amount of harm possible, including attacking my sanity, my motives, my perceptions, and my worth as a human being.

I’m at a loss. With regard to my relationships. With regard to poetry. With regard to this country. All I can do is honor my commitment to speak out and keep speaking out about issues and injustices at all levels. I am not on this Earth to remain silent. The moment I let someone silence me is the moment I stop living.

Light Music

Morning. I feel my hair feathering the sides of my face, a sensation I don’t like but can’t remedy because I’ve lost my hair clip. When I do find it, a section keeps falling out because it’s too short to reach the clip. I locate a smaller clip and ensnare that section separately from the rest. I look like I have tree stuff stuck in my hair, the fluffy, seedy matter that forms before the leaves do and litters streets when it’s shed to make way for actual leaves, actual spring, actual warmth, actual hope, whatever hope is these days, actual or otherwise.

I have to find my earplugs now because my fifty-five-year-old husband is playing a video game at 6 a.m., and I can hear him clicking the controller. CLICK CUCLICK CLICK CLICK CUCUCLICK. There’s no pattern to the clicking that I can settle into, make sense of. I feel like someone’s strumming my ribs with their nails.

Now, the refrigerator is trying to get out of its body as it does for several minutes every morning, poltergeisting the entire kitchen with its WAWUM WAWUM WAWAWAWAWUM. I used to have a wooden rabbit on top of the fridge, but it would vibrate off to the left side whenever these hauntings occurred. I didn’t like seeing it askew, putting it back, and seeing it askew again. At some point, we have to stop engaging in repeated patterns that will never change, never turn out any different. So no more wooden rabbit.

Oh, good. The refrigerator has gone silent, as if it’s been practicing self-soothing techniques. Cry it out, fridge. Cry it out. Breathe or whatever you do.

This is not the morning I want. I want om tare tuttare ture soha playing quietly while I read my new David Ray book. I want to sink into that sadness and silence and away from the furniture banging around in my skull. David, I have taken the counsel of trees / and wise enough to wait for dawn. I’ve waited and woken into all the things. I’ve taken my thyroid medication and had my morning zero-sugar soda and gentled my dog into the morning alongside me and plopped myself down in front of this big window that looks out into the wildlands surrounding Tucson. And David, you used to live here. And David, you lived in Kansas City where I lived. And David, Studs Terkel loved you. And William Carlos William loved you. And you were at one time one of the most celebrated poets in the United States. And now?

You’ve only just died, David. Last December at age 92. I knew before I picked up this book that you were gone. Somehow I knew, though I hadn’t read the news. But here you are on these pages. How can I call you dead? Let me tell you about the things in my head, David. All that furniture that lives inside sound. My husband’s clicking. His footfalls. The sound of him urinating right now with the bathroom door open. Pouring coffee. Clearing his throat. Opening a door. Closing a door. I love him, David. I do. But I am at the edge of the forest. I came there, as you did. Is the darkness before me, behind me, or all around me?

All of the above.

You’ve gone the way every one of us will go: into obscurity and into everything. Being lauded means nothing in the end. Living a certain way, writing a certain way, means everything. Good morning, David. Thank you for the gift of your “light music” over this scene.

Twin Fawns, Treats, and Sitting Right in Rooms

I dated a man who didn’t like to be touched when he ate. Never, not by anybody. Not even me. I tried a few times. It didn’t go well. He only liked square rooms, nothing with an angled or curved wall or a cutout of any kind. Cubbies were for sure off-limits. The house he was living in with his band off Gillham Road in Kansas City was one block over from serial killer Bob Berdella’s house, but that’s not what he didn’t like about it. The sitting room had cherry trim, which bothered him because the rest of the trim was oak. It was supposed to be different to indicate that the sitting room was special. That’s what they did in Victorian homes, at least in Kansas City. Architectural history didn’t matter to him. Consistency mattered, order, and not being touched while eating, which I suppose is order-enforcement of a different kind.

I’d say all of this was problematic, but at some point, I stopped being able to sit in rooms without being squared up to them. In bed, I have to lie in perfect alignment with the walls to either side of me or things feel super off. And curved rows of seating in a square or rectangular room? Floating in the space like that, maybe even with seats whose backs are to the entrance? No, thank you. I’ll find a chair against the wall or drag one there if needed, none of this organismic bacteria-esque drifting as if we’re all being observed under a microscope.

I also don’t like to eat treats when anyone’s in the room with me, namely my husband, or when the news is on or I’m reading a shitty anything anywhere from anyone. My treat time is my me time, and it has to be just right. I have a soundtrack I listen to when eating treats. It’s moody music like Eno and Radiohead. Everything I listen to is moody, or maybe I just hear it that way. Barber. Corigliano. Orff. I’m genre-drifting musically now, probably because I have treats nearby, but my fingers insist on typing this before I eat them (the cookies, not my fingers) despite the fact that my husband’s about to return home, which means there will likely be no treat time for me tonight, especially if I start in on editing this post. I also don’t eat treats while writing and editing. My brain won’t register that the eating has occurred, and I’ll get the keyboard all treat-sticky.

The guy I dated also didn’t like to read anything long, so he limited himself to short stories. Say what you will about that, but he introduced me to Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, and Kansas City poet and writer Conger Beasley Jr. I was still a music major then, as was he. I hadn’t drifted from music to literature and ultimately to poetry, where I remain a producer-consumer to this day.

The last thing I’ll say about him is he showed me twin fawns who died in their mother’s womb and had been taxidermied shortly after their death. They were on display with other preserved animal oddities at a toy store in a Kansas City neighborhood called Brookside. Years later, he bought them from the owner and gave them to his new wife, who’s an artist. They’re art now, those fawns. They live in a vitrine. The artist sells prints of a painting of them. I don’t think it was her, actually, who painted them. Someone did. The fawns were on television as part of an art-competition show. I’ve seen pictures of the artist with the twins beside her under their glass. I love them and hope they’re at peace. I hope they are loved in the real way, not any other way.

It’s hard not to feel something for a man who values taxidemied fawns and shows them to all the girls he loves. Their vitrine is round, not square. Nobody touches them when they eat. They don’t eat because they are dead. They don’t read because they are dead but also because they are fawns, and even living fawns don’t read. Somehow, this last fact makes me profoundly sad.

Five Things That Have Happened to Me as a Female-Bodied Poet

  1. 2009. A prominent poet in Seattle agreed to work with me on my poetry. Before the appointment, he googled (from his IP address) the words “married” and “naked” in combination with my name. He then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. But he didn’t stop there. He created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems. He later told folks associated with a book publisher in the area to ignore and disregard me.

  2. 2015. In front of a large group of poets, a prominent Kansas City poet screamed that I wanted to take him behind a dumpster and fuck him. This occurred after months of what I thought was meaningful friendship and seemed to be spurred, at least in part, by the fact that I was close friends with a more prominent Kansas City poet. The outburst occurred in front of that poet. Eight years later, he would tell me that I’m the one who harmed him because I’m a reminder of who he was at that time, and he doesn’t want to think about being that person.

  3. 2023. A talented poet who’s part of a tight network of poets outside Kansas City interacted with me for months as he was healing from a serious health issue. I was going to be in the area, and he asked if we could meet. I planned to give him the rare Japanese printing press I’d recently purchased so he and his friends could use it to make chapbooks. Before I left for the trip, he sent me a postcard with a poem of his on the back about how he never gets the girl, then he blocked me on Facebook. I still don’t understand what the hell happened there, but I know it’s bullshit.

  4. 2024. A Seattle poet I’ve known since 2009 decided to attack and threaten me yesterday after fifteen years of friendship and poetry camaraderie. We both lived in Seattle for years and spent time together in person on numerous occasions. Yesterday, he told me (and many others) that I’m cheating on my husband with him. That is not the case. I’ve posted screenshots of his accusations and the conversation he’s referring to because he threatened to out me publicly. For what, praytell? There’s nothing to out other than his unacceptable behavior.

  5. 2009. A poet who was my mentor sexually assaulted me en route to my MFA program in 2009. I’ve discussed that situation at length, including in a fifty-thousand-word essay on my website that was published for more than five years. I managed to stay in poetry until 2015—through my fear and my shame and my lost faith in poets and poetry—then I left for seven years.

I returned to poetry in 2022 with one vow: to never let anyone silence me again, threaten me again, terrify me again, or defame me again. This is a hard commitment to make, but I’m doing it. My responses will be swift when abuses occur, like the one that happened yesterday.

May nothing like any of the above happen again. May poets live up to what they are attempting to do in and through poetry. May poets who are women, female-bodied, queer, and otherwise marginalized find safety in poetry and among poets. May poets stand up for each other when it matters rather than adding ha-ha emoticons to posts in which poets are harassing and threatening other poets. May we find ourselves. May all these things come to pass.

Ad Astra

There’s a point at which there are diminishing returns with regard to learning more about a place, a culture, a collective mindset, a community fever.

There’s a point at which it becomes time to pray with your feet. I’m at that point. I’m not an investigative journalist nor do I want to be one. I’m a creator. I want to create. As Richard Siken says, I’m just a writer. I write things down. That’s what I do and what I need to do. I need to create. I need to bring beauty to what’s awful, to what we want to look away from, to what we want to deny and suppress and ignore. But the beauty part is key. Beauty first, beauty always.

I don’t want to be pulled further into what this place is and does and isn’t and doesn’t do. I don’t want to be somewhere that takes and takes and takes everything from me, leaving no me left to love, to grow, to write, to create.

I’m leaving, come hell or high water. There, I said it. It’s time. It’s beyond time. My return to this place in March was necessary because of my health, because of my trauma, because I had issues to resolve with my husband, and because I needed to make sure I’d done all I could possibly do to be part of this community. I’ve done those things now, and I’m done.

I’m going to Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri in September. I’m looking at MFA programs in Oklahoma while I’m there. I’m evaluating the healthcare system, housing costs and availability, and employment opportunities. I have family in Oklahoma. My family. My people. Oklahoma, my home, my home, my home.

I’m going to need help to do this in the form of love, support, and understanding. There’s so much more trauma for me to address now after living in Utah for five years and Southern Utah for three years. I’m a strong person, but I’m now a broken person. I can come back. I know I can. I can become who I am again, who I’m losing, who I may have lost.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ll be fifty-two. One year ago, I was radioactive. I was sitting in a rented tiny home overlooking the Virgin River Gorge because I had to be isolated for several days. I spent hours talking to Jose Faus on the phone after watching the gorge all day. I had just started writing poetry again. I read a short piece to Jose over the phone as he fell asleep. Maybe my words put him to sleep. That’s OK. I always fall asleep reading my own writing, too. Anyone out there with insomnia might consider using my work to help them regulate their sleep.

Seven years ago, I was sitting in a hospital room in Kansas City with my husband, my legs under constant pressure and a breathing device on the table that I had to use every thirty minutes or so—the former to prevent leg clots and the latter, I think, to prevent a pulmonary embolism. I’d just had my thyroid removed to cure my autoimmune thyroiditis. They found tumors during the procedure, but the doctor assured me they wouldn’t be malignant. He came into my room all ego and narcissism and said there was only a one-percent chance the tumors would be cancerous. That’s why he went easy, left a little tissue in sensitive places. That’s why he didn’t remove the lymph nodes. Then he wished me a happy birthday. The pathology report came in a week later. It was cancer, and it hadn’t all been resected.

What will tomorrow bring? My husband and I plan to look at the stars with a telescope we’re borrowing. I plan to visit a bookstore. I plan to play with our dog, Lexi. I plan to write and write and write and read and read and read. That’s the plan. We’ll see what actually happens.

Love to those dealing with health issues, emotional issues, addictions, dependencies, and any form of pain or suffering. Love to those who’ve almost died and managed to survive. Love to those who tried to survive and didn’t manage to do so. Love to you beyond place, beyond time, beyond loss, beyond memory.

Love to you all. All of you, love.

Ad astra per aspera. PrairyErth, we are one.

It’s not Oklahoma’s fault that I was abused in Oklahoma, that I was raped in Oklahoma, that I was trafficked within and beyond Oklahoma. Humans destroy each other. Humans destroy the land. The land never destroys us. The land never trafficks us. The land never rapes us. The land never abuses us. The land never destroys itself.

I am grateful for this pain. This pain is a compass. This pain is a signal. This pain is my dearest friend, my greatest protector, my guide, my heart. This pain is everything.

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. ― Matsuo Bashō

The Singing in My Veins

As a survivor of severe childhood trauma, I had a rule that I fastidiously observed until I was well into my twenties: Never own more than you can pack into your car. (This is why I had a futon for years as opposed to a mattress.)

Making sure everything I had could be wedged into my car allowed me to get out of any situation as quickly and as nimbly as possible. I could leave my mother’s house when she got too drunk or too sad or too cruel (or all three). I could leave my boyfriend’s six-pack apartment in Kansas City when he screamed at me moments after we’d moved in together, and he threw me out with nowhere to go. I could leave an unsafe Plaza-adjacent apartment building where men with guns surrounded me one morning in the lobby and told me how pretty I was.

I learned the fit-everything-in-a-car approach to living early in life when I ran with my best friend. She and I ran hard and fast in the day and in the night—especially in the night, in the dark, dark night. We had to run. We had to. But we also knew where to rest, where to hide, and where and how to find safety—often with each other but increasingly on our own as we grew older.

Running is an art. Running is a science. Running is a way to survive. It only looks like flailing to those who’ve never had to run to live, so kindly leave your pathologizing language and frameworks out of this, or I might be forced to say Bless your heart, my words like water moving around a stone so I can continue to speak.

I’m trying to tell you about running, about what we need to live, and about how to get what you need in a car, day or night, wherever you happen to be in the world.

By you, I mean me. By me, I mean anyone.

Once I got my first pieces of antique furniture—a dainty cast-iron bed, a 1920s English flip-top game table, and an Art Nouveau-inspired vanity—I could no longer fit my whole life in my car, but I could still fit what I needed into it.

What did I need when I came to Kansas? When I had to come here quickly because my medical situation was spiraling out of control with no hope or answers or treatment in sight in Southern Utah? When the hate and vitriol and threats against the LGBTQ+ community in general and against me in particular became its own form of disease? When my marriage desperately needed breathing room in the form of space and the clarity space can provide?

I needed the following, all of which fit neatly in my vehicle with room to spare: my books, my poetry collections, my writing notes and research, my professional portfolio, my college papers, my phone, my computer, my monitor, my mouse, my mousepad, pens, pencils, rubber fingers, a fidget spinner, one of my looms, yarn, weaving supplies, binoculars, birding guides, my flute, flute music, a music stand, baskets, a throw blanket, a dream catcher, my favorite kachina doll, my crochet mouse, my dog Hayden’s ashes, a small stereo, CDs, food, water, electrolyte drinks, clothing, coats, jewelry, gloves, shoes, an umbrella, health and beauty stuff, medications, and my medical records (ten binders organized by specialty).

Controlled flight, I call it. I deeply and unwaveringly honor what my body senses and knows long before my brain can interpret those sensings and knowings. I honor what my friend and I learned as children, as well as the way I’ve refined my running over the past half-century. I run now to what I need, when I need it. I run into the future so I can have a future. I run to my people, my land, my past—which is my present and my future all at once because there really is no time, is there?

But there is running. There’s also stopping and breathing after. There’s rest. There’s ease. There’s I made it singing in my veins. I hear it today in the rain.

I made it, my dear friend. I made it. I see you shimmering beside me. I will love you always. Let’s stop and breathe. Breathe with me. Hold my hand.

The First Face

I feel for those who’ve come out about Jeff Church and am especially moved by Young and Manning’s accounts of seeing Church’s face when they re-experienced what Church did to them.

I know that feeling of seeing a face overlaid on other faces and not knowing what to make of that feeling.

I know the feeling of entire states feeling marred, of a face overlaid on other faces within that place.

For me, it was Georgia.  But not just Georgia. Illinois. But not just Illinois. Missouri. But not just Missouri. Tennessee. But not just Tennessee. 

I had to trace my trauma all the way back to that first state, the one with the sound of home built right into it. And it was my home: Oklahoma. 

Oklahoma and its swirling faces. Its drunken faces. Its maniacal faces. Its aged hidelike faces. Its taunting faces. The home of that first face which jacked up all the others. The face of a man aptly named Jack.

The face attached to the body that held me after I was born. The face that posed with me in my first photos. The face I would later associate with one of my first words: “Daddy.”

When I was little, my parents marveled at the way I could spin a globe and find Oklahoma lickety-split just as the orb stopped spinning. “There, there, there,” my insistent little finger said, staking claim to that stolen state the way my ancestors had during the Land Run. 

There: that where, that no/where, that now/here I can’t shake.

That land where my father lies beside my mother—him in a silky casket, her more elegantly in a little black cremains box—in the cemetery that also has a Catholic section, a children’s section, and a section where forty children who died in a 1918 fire at the state mental hospital were dumped in an unmarked mass grave.

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.

The scissor-tailed flycatchers and red birds and robins my mother loved. All as they were. The starlings my father hated. As they were and also as they are now: outliving him, as am I.

The streets and highways and gravel roads that my father wore down, ditched out, careened along protecting and managing his drawling and sprawling fief. The sound of tires hitting seams in the concrete sections that made up a stretch of I-35 and the way the El Camero or later the Monte Carlo or later the GMC van shuddered a little when the front and back tires hit each joint. Ka-dung. Ka-dung. Ka-dung. Ka-dung.

My beloved dog is as she was, the one my father let me keep. She still runs back and forth from one window to the next over my lap as we reach either our city home or that other home in Texoma, depending on whether we were coming or going. I’m still there with her, as I was, laughing, delighting in her joy. Because she brought me joy, even in that family, even in that life, even growing up with an unspeakable father, a boundaryless father, a cradling father who broke the bough over and over. One who made me fall then told me he was saving me when he caught me. Where being saved was his bed, almost every night. And his friend R—. And his friend C—. And the strangers on the other end of the CB radio, the ones he made me talk to. And that one trucker the day my father pulled over and met up with him. How my father called me out, made me stand beside him, showed me off. How nervous that trucker looked. How he wanted to leave. How my father compromised him by making him drink a beer before he left so he’d have the smell of alcohol on him if he tried to do anything like call the cops. How the man said he didn’t want to drink the beer. How my father made him. How the man complied and ran away after doing so. Or maybe he didn’t nearly run away. Maybe he liked the beer, the danger, even my father, just not little girls. No. He didn’t like my father. My father terrified him and meant to.

That father. That first face. That first confusing, crushing pain. That leader. That schemer. That pistol. That man who shocked everyone into quaking compliance.

That man who doesn’t scare me. The one who (s)pawned me, the one who toyed and turned me into a toy. The one who passed me, passed me, passed me around. It was like being on a merry-go-round only without my mother, Merry, there to catch me when I fell.

My Dog, My Hands, My Buttery Butter-Stick Fingers

I know when my dog, Lexi, is happy. I know when she’s sad. I know when she wants to be tickled. I know when she wants me close but doesn’t want me to touch her. I know when she’s waking me up because she’s scared versus happy versus feeling playful versus wanting a tummy rub versus having to potty really bad.

This morning, my dog had to potty really bad at 5:09 a.m. That was a hard way of entering into today, but I did it because when I have to use the bathroom, nobody makes me wait until it’s convenient for them. And because I don’t “have” a dog, even though I used the phrase “my dog” above: I live with a dog, I love a dog, and I share my life with a dog. She’s family. And my bestest family member had to potty at 5:09 a.m. this morning.

I was sleeping soundly—my mattress and pillows are puffy clouds soundly—when Lexi woke me up. I was dreaming of something. What was it? A subway, glimmering tile, water in the distance, a weaver I know, an unnamable feeling, and some Southern Utah LGBTQ+ community overlord trolling my Facebook page telling me what not to say.

I didn’t want to get up, especially not at 5:09 a.m. in December, which feels the way 1:09 a.m. does in June. So dark. So nightlike it could never pass as anything other than night. Not dusk, not dawn, not the cusp of dusk or dawn.

My hands are cold. My keyboard is loud. My ears are sensitive. My fingers are sliding off keys. I’m writing off-key, too, because I’m typing letters in the wrong order, all of them. (Thanks, dyslexia.) There’s no flow in the writing for me right now, which makes writing unbearable.

My fingers are hard sticks of butter qwertying without finesse. I know my fingers are smaller than butter sticks, but that’s how they feel so I’m sticking with my imperfect metaphor. Do they make miniature butter sticks? If so, all the butter for this hard metaphor spreading across my nearly inoperable fingers at what is now 5:51 a.m.

A writer posted on Twitter yesterday about marriage being for everybody. I thought he said “margarine.” That’s emblematic of the unsolicited gifts dyslexia gives me daily:

Margarine: It’s for all of us, not just some of us!

Hilarity ensued as the writer and I had a good chuckle over the outdatedness of margarine and how, for now, butter has the upper hand, which is funny because we’re back to hands, which obviously makes me think of my hands or at least my fingers. We’re back to my sloppy butter/finger metaphor. (Yes, I went there. Sue me. Puns are a sign of intelligence.) There’s no escaping this metaphor. It’s smeared all over this bleary essay like butter on a slice of toasted bread.

The thing is, margarine has a hell of a story. It rose to fame during World War II when butter was in short supply, so it and other fats were rationed.1 Margarine had been around since 1869, but it had a problem, which was its color.1,2 It was white. It was plain. It was super meh to look at, which made it unappetizing. We eat with our eyes, after all. (That’s actually not entirely true, and it’s an ableist thing to say.) In a word, margarine suffered from oilism.

The solution to the meh-ness of margarine? Dye!3 Margarine was mixed with vegetable dye to make it look sunny, like the butter everyone knew and loved, the color we used to paint our kitchens before beige then gray then greige then white then apparently beige again shouldered color out of our homes.

And here’s the really interesting part: The customer had to do the mixing. Margarine was originally sold in its white state along with a capsule of vegetable dye, which the “home cook,” meaning the woman of the house, had to mash into the margarine until the concoction turned yellow.3

But I digress. I’ll write a proper essay about margarine later. What I wanted to say this morning is that my dog, Lexi, got me up early. I understood exactly why because she came from an abusive situation in Texas where she was bred by an unethical breeder. She’s learned how to overread and overcommunicate with humans in a way I’ve never seen any other dog do. Strikingly, in the year since she’s lived here, she’s learned how to imitate me when she needs to convey something, anything, everything. She can’t use language like I do, but she knows how to use her entire body—from her ears to her eyes to her paws to her tail—in various combinations to say things like, Mom, quit giving me those silly kisses. Please know I still love you, though, and want you here next to me. Just ‘no’ on the kisses, OK?

She talks to my husband and me like this all day long, and it’s the most adorable and endearing thing ever. Dad, why are you close to the back door with that coat on, but you aren’t looking at me like you’re about to take me outside?

Or Don’t you see me lying here like a piece of driftwood, so good and so quiet, but also so hungry? I don’t want to be demanding or anything, but you totally forgot to feed me. You’re at least ten minutes late doing that. Do you want me to be this sad piece of driftwood forever?

Or, a new one she added recently that I had trouble translating: Mommy, mommy, maaaaaaaaaawmeeeeeeeee. I feel weird and have to, like, lie here like this on the rug in the middle of the living room, aimless and foggy. I don’t know what’s going on. Is the floor quicksand? Is it, like, holding me down or something? Am I, like, stuck here forever?

That was the day we gave her one-quarter tablet of trazodone before a visit to the veterinarian to make sure she hadn’t cracked her tooth on a toy that’s not supposed to be capable of cracking a dog’s tooth.

The most intriguing part of all this is that she acts like me. These aren’t generic communications. She tilts her head the way I do. She puts her paw on my chest the way I put my hand on Jon’s chest when he’s rushing up to me too fast and I need to whoa-nelly his overly enthusiastic approach. She mopes the way I mope and lets joy flood her body the way it floods mine. She even dances like me.

Lexi’s asleep now on the flokati rug in the living room that we call her Floofer, not to be confused with my electrophysiologist, who I call Dr. Flvoolr because that’s what I called him right when I came out of anesthesia the other day. (Dr. Flvoolr is not his actual name, but it’s sort of close. I got three of the seven letters right.) Lest you think we’ve relegated Lexi to the floor, that Floofer is on top of a fluffy dog bed which, in turn, is on top of our moderately uncomfortable mid-century-style sofa. It’s nearly a princess and the pea situation, Lexi’s Floofer setup.

My hands are warmer now, but they still aren’t serving me well. My ears are ringing. The keyboard still sounds like someone rummaging around inside a drawer full of Legos. The lamplight interrogating my desk is as taxing as the first general income tax ever imposed in our country, which occurred during World War II, when the number of Americans required to pay federal taxes rose from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million by 1945.4

(All that taxation and a gal couldn’t even get her hands on a stick of butter. I know, I know. It was a war. A big one. I get it.)

I want to go back to sleep like Lexi has, but now I’m staring the day right in the eyes. It’s staring back. I tried turning my head slightly the way Lexi would as a calming signal. The day isn’t averting its gaze. I’m trapped here among the wakeful, at least for now. Time to putter around the house, grab some breakfast, and catch up on the news. Kyrsten Sinema! Britney Griner! Elon Musk! President Biden and Title 42! Fourteen more books designated as “pornographic” by the Washington County School District in Utah—including several by poet and novelist Margaret Atwood! There’s never not news these wide-eyed days. My new favorite pastime is reading the news before my husband or my friend José has, then being the one to break it to them, especially when the news is salient, good, strange, or all three somehow—the perfect news trifecta.

Below, I’ve included a poem I started writing in 1995 about margarine when I was taking Robert Stewart’s poetry class at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It’s not the best poem, but I like it and it’s relevant, so there it is. It’s my one-thousandth version of the poem and is the best shape I could whip it into. I may not have whipped it like butter, but I like to think I at least whipped it good.

—

Margarine During War

Women keep settling
(oleo, factory jobs)
though they pine for sex
the way they long
for butter on their lips.

After war, they dab
eye shadow and rouge for men
whose war-whores
didn’t teach them to kiss.

But the women
hoist skirts, drop stockings,
for soon the bread they’d break
would be kissed with butter
(real butter).

—

Sources

  1. Yglesias, M. (2013) Guns vs. Butter, Slate Magazine. Slate. Available at: https://slate.com/business/2013/07/butter-rationing-guns-vs-butter-in-world-war-ii.html (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
  2. Vaisey-Genser, M. (2003) “Margarine, Types and Properties,” in B. Caballero (ed.) Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition. Second. Elsevier Science Ltd.
  3. Magazine, S. (2011) Food Dye Origins: When Margarine Was Pink, Smithsonian.com. Smithsonian Institution. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/food-dye-origins-when-margarine-was-pink-175950936/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).
  4. Tassava, C.J. (no date) The American Economy During World War II, EHnet. EHnet. Available at: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-american-economy-during-world-war-ii/ (Accessed: December 9, 2022).

Origami

I grew up eating okra, which my mother breaded and fried. I never knew until I moved to Kansas City and bought a bag of frozen okra that it was hairy on the outside and slimy on the inside. I didn’t know the seeds were soft and moved within the mouth in an unsettling manner, avoiding the tongue and slipping down the throat. Okra and I parted ways after our tryst in the frozen food section of the Piggly Wiggly at 51st and Main, but I see it sometimes in gumbo and imagine what we might have become if we had stayed together all these years.

I feel like I’m in a car driving down a dark road, just two headlights between me and the black world.

I read a poem today that was so good I had to stop reading poems. It wasn’t about okra. It was about family. It was one of those poems that makes me cry and pace and ultimately climb the stairs to the main bedroom, at which point I consider the unmade bed and its implicit invitation to ride out the rest of my day there in the disturbing drift of silence and synthetic down.

Now I’m sitting at the computer wondering what comes after silence. I looked to the moon for an answer, but it seems to have vacated the sky. I don’t trust this level of darkness.

My husband will be home soon enough to invade my senses in the best or worst of ways. My tongue is already burning. My arms tingle. I don’t know if my body will accept or reject the presence of another human being in its vicinity.

There are not enough light bulbs to illuminate this room. I feel like I’m in a car driving down a night road, only two headlights between me and the black world. But I am not moving. I just keep staring at the same two monitors and, behind them, the same set of bookshelves—one shelf sports a thumb piano, the other a rusted monkey with articulated arms and legs.

Maybe I want poems to be pop-up books or choose-your-own-adventure verses. Maybe I want them to be origami. You would buy them flat, and the poem would be revealed as you folded the paper into the proper form.

I wonder if I could sauté okra in water and if I could learn to like it that way, if I could ever eat it without thinking of my mother. I wonder if my husband could lasso the sun and place it on my desk like a lamp. If not, maybe he could take me to the lighting section at IKEA. I could stand under all those fixtures and pretend to be Cinderella at the ball. Someday I will make my own light, like the stonefish or the false moray eel. I will be the bright thing in the shadows.

My CPU warms my feet. The heat makes me think something is curled up next to me, a small being in need of comfort.

From Personal Letters Written Between Ages 14 and 19

I’m no poet.

I love being by myself when it rains. It’s the only time it feels right to be alone.

This part of the day isn’t bad. I like it.

I can hardly picture your face anymore.

I hate people.

I’m talking like a soap opera star again.

Everything comes naturally to you and you don’t have to work at things very hard. Then there’s me.

I’m already putting decorations up and singing Christmas carols.

I feel so lonely but it’s not because I’m alone.

Last night I had a dream that my dad was alive. I didn’t like it. The thing is, I never see him in my dreams. There’s just some reference to “dad” or it is understood that he’s alive.

Today was a strange day. I’m not sure if I liked it.

I like you more than Spam. I feel like you said that to me once.

Today we broke up. It was terrible.

I’m cuter than my senior pictures make me look.

I’m really not a good writer. It’s like that poem about the thought flowing and the words lagging behind. I think about my idea or emotion, but the words don’t convey the intensity of my thoughts.


I had a dream that you were a space man. We got married and had a half-space baby. You also couldn’t breathe oxygen or eat soft brownies.

Question: Am I completely—or mostly—self-concerned? Do I only care about that which affects my life? Do I only like people because they give me something?

I hope the ’90s are better than the ’80s. I have a feeling they will be—people are becoming more accepting and more socially conscious. That makes me happy.

When we see each other, can we play Yahtzee?

The ever-present question: Are you still in love with me?

I’m not spastically paranoid of parties anymore.

I’m scared that this whole weird thing will repeat itself.

My dead bird’s name was Parker. He was named after Charlie Parker, the sax player, whose nickname was Bird.

We’ve really messed up the environment—who’d ever think we’d have 60+ degree weather here in Kansas City in February.

Well, I don’t like the whole music “scene.” Everybody criticizes everyone else and only picks out the bad aspects of other people’s music.