Notabilia

Vials

I may be wrong about this, but here are five sediment samples from two different sites near where I live.

From left to right, the first three are samples I collected years ago near the Toquerville mine. I believe they are: 1. volcanic basalt and alluvial gravel wash, 2. quaternary eolian quartz sand, and 3. mineralized sandstone tailings.

The last two samples on the right are what I collected yesterday. They appear to be Moenkopi that’s been chemically altered by runoff or chemical exposure and unoxidized Meonkopi unearthed during construction.

Images: Small glass vials of each sample with cork stoppers sitting in an Oliva cigar box. The colors include lavender, coral, burnt orange, tan, and maroon.

Sampling and Exploring

I rallied and got out of bed. What I mean is: I’m stubborn and internally driven even when externally constrained, in this case by a lung infection, so I got up and went out in search of Moenkopi samples even though I should have stayed in bed to rest and recover.

We did find two new colors of Moenkopi, neither of which is naturally occurring. One is maroon. The other is lavender. The maroon appears to be a function of the blasting required to build an adjacent highway, which swiftly exposed a buried Moenkopi bed that would otherwise have oxidized in the sun, turning it orange-red. The lavender appears to be the result of exposure to chemicals or runoff that’s bleached the Moenkopi. So human activity, including construction and contamination, have affected both of these areas.

The first three photos are of the Red Cliffs Recreation Area in Leeds, Utah, which is situated at the convergence of the Mojave Desert, Colorado Plateau, and Great Basin physiographic regions. The photos show a mix of plants found in each of these regions, with Navajo Sandstone cliffs in the background.

The last four photos are of what’s left of a historic pioneer home in the ghost town of Harrisburg, Utah.

Both Leeds and Harrisburg are about fifteen minutes from our home.

People ask me why I don’t apply for poetry residencies. This is why. I live in Greater Zion. This land is so beautiful, every day feels like a residency.

Images: Six photos as described in the paragraphs above.

Other Rhythms

I’m wearing colluvial sediment from the 90-million-year-old Iron Springs Formation in the wildlands behind my Utah home around my neck as an amulet. Yes, I’m still talking about soil and its components, in this case sandstone that is older than us and will outlive us. We need to start thinking in its rhythms rather than our own.

This is part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project. This sand protects me from the contaminated soils I grew up with, the ones that hold abuses, murders, exploitations, and a history of extractions, injections, disposals, and burials. I mean materials. I mean people. I mean culture itself.

This sand lets me look at that soil, a little at a time. My life is short. This suffering is long. It’s under our nails even if we can’t see it and has been in Oklahoma for nearly five hundred years.

Image: A silver globe memory locket filled with colluvial sediment from the Iron Springs Formation. The locket sits on a mesquite desk that’s out of focus in the background. Faint reflections are visible in the glass: points of light and a window that looks out on the laccolith near our home to the west.

Other(ed) Ancestors

As part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project, I also want to collect soil from every asylum in the United States built in the 1800s, which marks the Kirkbride Era of mass institutionalization of people living with mental-health issues, cognitive disabilities, and physical disabilities.

These sites aren’t my literal ancestors, but I feel connected to them in spirit for many reasons. This aspect of the project would also include collecting soil from the psychiatric hospital in my hometown where my mother worked as a psychiatric nurse and was treated as a psychiatric patient. That hospital opened in 1895 as Oklahoma Sanitarium, with the words “Norman Institute for the Violently Mentally Insane” welded to its front gates facing Main Street.

Dirt(y) Reads

These are four of the books about soil that I’m reading as part of my dif/Fused Ancestry project. I’ll share more books as I add them to my reading list. Shown: 1. The cover of Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong, by Claire Ratinon. 2. Dirt Church: Answering the Call to Rewild Spirit, by Charity Muse. 3. Soil & Spirit: Seeds of Purpose, Nature’s Insight & the Deep Work of Transformational Change, by Ian C. Williams. 4. Soil and Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life, by poet and farmer Scott Chaskey.

We Gather for This Soil

I got my great-grandfather’s soil today with my life partner and one of my very best friends, Jose Faus. We couldn’t get as close to the site as I would have liked, but we made due.

The collection process was more comical than profoundly emotional. It’s already becoming a memory I’ll cherish for that very reason. Between Jon and Jose, I know two of the best men in the world. Who else would let me drag them around Oklahoma like this to gather soil?

Images: 1. Jose and me together at the rental house. 2. The secondary marker for the battle where my great-grandfather was injured, pictured with a cat who came to greet us.

Contaminated

Many of the soils I collect for dif/Fused Ancestry will be contaminated in one way or another. That’s an environmental issue I need to incorporate into the project. The grounds at and around Central State Griffin Memorial, the psychiatric hospital where my mother worked as a nurse and was treated as a patient, contain asbestos, lead, and other contaminants.

The soils from Lake Texoma’s banks near the Buncombe Creek boat ramp contain contaminants such as petroleum hydrocarbons and physical impurities such as plastic and metal from fishing line and lures. The same goes for the soils along the highways I traveled with my father.

I have to be careful collecting these soils and working with them. I might get samples tested if I can afford it. I want to see which are the most contaminated and if there’s a correlation between environmental, political, social, and personal abuses. I’ve hypothesized that rich lands like those found in Oklahoma lead to abuses of the land, the culture, the people, and all living beings who live in and on those lands.

As Daniela Naomi Molnar said in her keynote speech at Tulsa LitFest, environmental, political, and social violence tend to occur in the same place. Where you find one, you find them all. It’s clear to me that the shift occurred when stewardship of the land was lost and ownership was imposed, when nature was commodified and a colonial mindset took hold, one that persists to this day. Places lost in this equation, especially the most fertile ones and, in the case of Oklahoma, those that are oil-bearing. But every living thing in those places lost, too—including our living soils.

Vases as Vessels

I found a ceramic artist named Amy Sanders de Melo. She’s a Colombian-American artist, educator, and arts advocate based in Tulsa. Her practice explores themes of disability, identity, and healing through tactile storytelling. She has ongoing vision and hearing loss and incorporates Braille into her work to represent the liminal space between disability and perceived ability.

I want to talk to her about having urns made for my dif/Fused Ancestry project. The idea is that, once all the different soils for a person’s ancestors have been transmuted into art, a pinch of each would be placed in a single receptacle that looks like an urn. This urn would be a tangible representation of the integration of soils and ancestors by the living family member.

Update: I swear, you ask Tulsa for something, and you shall receive. The entire state of Oklahoma may be like that. I never would have guessed I’d be able to source something like this for my project with such ease—and have what I imagined in my hands seventeen hours after imagining it. The talent in here is incredible. The resources are incredible. The community is incredible. I found the miniature vases shown below by Amy Sanders de Melo at a local store. I can’t wait to find out if I can commission her to make similar vases for dif/Fused Ancestry.

Image: A set of five one-of-a-kind custom-made 1″ x 1″ porcelain vases, each with celadon (gray and blue) hues and glaze. Reduction gas-fired.


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.

No Manifesto

It’s haunting to read the “No Manifesto” poem from Chicago Review ten years after it was published. It came out thirteen days before I left poetry because I experienced some of the very issues this poem addresses. It’s situated in a time and place, or rather places, but is also timeless in that too many of the lines could be written today and still be applicable. What a mess we’ve made of poetry. I want better for it, for us. I wanted better for myself.

This is actually the first time I’ve seen the poem and this issue of Chicago Review, which includes a forum on “Sexism and Sexual Assault in Literary Communities.” The “No Manifesto” poem begins on page 221 of the linked document. The poem is 13 pages and 271 lines long.

We’ve been fighting this fight for a really long time. I can’t even see who’s been fighting alongside me. What I see is who didn’t, who hasn’t. When my loneliness leaks into the fissures left by poets and their complicity, it feels like the time I poured salt on a gash in my hand under the magnolia tree in my backyard on a sunny, blank day. I was a kid then. I didn’t know what pain was but wanted to. I’m an adult now and have no need for this pain that won’t stop seeping.