Poetry

Don’t Mess with These Dactyls

Poetry is my weapon. Baby, you don’t wanna mess with these dactyls.

Image: an outline of a left hand with the thumb pointing up, the bottom three fingers folded back, and the index finger pointing out. A long red line (representing a stressed syllable) is above the finger’s bottom bone (proximal phalanx), as well as two red curved lines (representing unstressed syllables) above the middle and upper bones (middle and distal phalanges). Image fromWikipedia and used in accordance with its Creative Commons Universal license.

Cunt Norton, Dodie Bellamy

Why am I scarfing down a whole thing of chocolate hummus all at once? Because I’m reading Cunt Norton, by Dodie Bellamy. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction by Ariane Reines:

This book will make your mouth water.

It will make you want to live, whatever that means. It might even make you want to write.

If bliss could become a book, I mean if a book could become bliss, then this is that book.

I mean that this book is the greatest fuck poem in the English language, and it isn’t even a poem.

Shakespeare is commended to his or their proper androgyny in this book. In this book, Ginsberg is better and gayer than Ginsberg. This book is so happy, it is so beyond gay.

Gender is nothing compared to this book.

If you hear me screaming yes yes yes with my volume maxed out, trust me: I’m just reading this book.

(Personally, I think it is a poem.)

Bloatano

I lost my phone for a while today and had the exact same feeling of being untethered that I experienced when my mother died. Unfortunately, this played out in front of my therapist, so he no longer has some image of me as a moderately reasonable or quasi pulled-together person.

I wrote a poem. It’s not about my phone, but I do have a poem about my phone because I love it. I mean her. I mean Aluminium. That’s her name. She and I have bonded over the fact that we both contain lithium. She has a little case with a cover on it that’s kind of like the leather pocketbooks my mother’s cigarette company used to give its customers for free. I love her. I also love my mother, who died on December 20, 2004. Oh, that’s what’s happening. That anniversary’s coming up in two days, hence all the big emotions directed at Aluminium.

This Calibri T-shirt is getting tighter as the night wears on. It feels like a corset and not in a good way. Bloatano has entered the building. I mean my body. I mean I’m bloated, but Bloatano sounds better, like the monster that GI distress is. The internet says I’m the first person ever to use the word Bloatano, so that’s kind of a big deal, which means I’m kind of a big deal. Bloatano also affects my ego from time to time, clearly.

I blocked three people today. It was super. My image of the medieval badge gave me the courage I needed in the precise moment I needed it. I can’t wait to hold all those little phalluses in my hand when the actual badge arrives. If phalluses really ward off evil, I’ll have ample protection.

A Pound of Honey

There are black vultures in parts of Oklahoma. Tell me that’s not a reason to move back there.

Your near rain is my far rain. You, there. Me, here. Native sparrows gather in the wildlands behind my house as winter surrounds yours. They say what you won’t, what you can only feel. Cold, they say. Seed. Wind, they say. Wind.

Something happened a couple of days ago that has me so shaken I woke in tears this morning. It’s related to poetry, to poets. Of course it is. For my health, for my life, for my future, I need to limit who I’m intacting with, where I’m publishing my work, and where I’m spending my time in poetry and as a poet. I support kind, generous, compassionate poets and the journals and presses they run. I will continue to support those poets, journals, and presses. But all the rest? It doesn’t have a place in my life. I’ve seen enough. I choose a different approach to writing, a different community, a different way of being in the world.

Watching a baby goat take a shower is how I am.

For only $69.99, you can send a bag of mystery bones to someone you love. So there’s that.

I’m spending Thanksgiving with my loved ones: the life partner, our dog, and Bo Burnham.

Despite everything, I’m thankful for everything.

My poems are like webs I weave under every bridge, every cliff, here in canyon country. They’re not just for me. They’re for everyone who lives here and needs something to catch the light when they look down, when they find themselves leaning forward.

Ironically, I really need a paperweight right now.

In a stunning turn of events, I don’t like handblown glass paperweights as much as I thought I did.

I dreamed I was made of cotton and kept pulling parts of myself from myself until there was no me left.

Marbles are so emotional. One member of the marble-identification group shared a note a woman wrote about the marbles she played with when she was a child in the early 1900s. Her name was Lulu. She kept her marbles and note in a face-powder box. Another person found a coin purse at an estate sale with three wheat pennies and a single marble inside. The poster writes: This was somebody’s treasure.

I dreamed I married my husband’s brothers, even the dead one, and was also an evil clown is how I am.

I just joined a marble-identification group on Facebook is how I am.

The life partner woke me up eating a pickle on the other side of the house is how I am.

I don’t have a lot of words right now. It took me twelve hours to get out of bed and onto the sofa today and another two to make it to my desk. Now, I’m headed back to the sofa and then back to bed. It is very hard to be outside of language. It means I’m outside of hope. It’s going to take some time to come to terms with that feeling, if that’s even possible.

I don’t know who Facebook thinks I am, but it’s trying to send me a vacuum-packed cow brain in the mail. Also, a pig heart in its pericardium. A sheep-organ set. A turkey gizzard. Petrfied snapping turtle feet. A cat in a box, a skinned cat, an economy cat, a pregnant cat, a small cat, and a cat skull. A cut-open dogfish shark. A sea squirt. Half a sheep’s head.

I just misread something as Mr. Bananajeans, and now I need to find an animal I can call Mr. Bananajeans.

The life partner saw the two-person steam sauna I put in our Amazon cart and removed it is how I am.

In my despair, I put a two-person steam sauna in my Amazon cart is how I am.

Lines from my dream: Alive to the moment, / unaffected by the heat, / penetrated by the Midwestern sun / pocked with chicken-laden pastures, / I wait for a rapture that never comes.

I’m a little bit grumpy. The life partner and I are having a funeral tonight for the part of me that can no longer live safely in the world, but he keeps saying mixed weenies over and over because, hours ago, that’s what he thought I was saying when I actually said McSweeney’s.

Grammarly says I wrote 122,765 words last week. Really? Where are they?

I live in poetry. I survive in prose.

Maybe I cast light on poetry’s shadow. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Come to terms with that shadow and with what you are in response to it. That’s the work that must be done before understanding and integration can occur at the individual and collective levels. Don’t blame me for the shadow. I didn’t create it. I am not it. You’ve conflated me with a system, with you.

I dreamed my ex told me he couldn’t choose me because all choice is limitation and restricts freedom. I’ll take you for now, he said. But I don’t choose you and never will. He said this as I cleaned the dirt from his boots off his favorite ottoman.

Ten years is nothing to eternity.

I don’t think I’m ever going to heal. I don’t know if I’m even going to survive.

My love is in my feet today so it can hit the ground as I walk.

My neighbor blows all the dust down the street and back into the wildlands.

As hard as it is at times to live with empathy, I wouldn’t want to live without it.

During the election coverage, I rubbed my boobs on the TV.

While you sleep, bees will honey your lips the way they did when Plato was an infant. Then you will kiss me sweet, love me sweet. I will die sweet on your vine. Oh, sugar. Oh, conjecture turned confection. Do not tell me why you are bad for me. Waggle. Buzz. Make my whole body vibrate. There, there, little love, little bee. Feed me.

              Two million flowers
              make a pound of honey
              a riot of blossoms

If those who are being harmed refuse all collective language to describe those who are being harmed, those who harm will continue to harm. Collective language leads to being seen collectively. Being seen collectively leads to acting collectively. Acting collectively leads to change.

              Sand at the foot
              of the mountain forgets
              it was ever part mountain

Dissolving and Emerging

My severe hypothyroidism is taking a toll. For the past two weeks, gobs of hair have been falling out every day. I’ve been in bed since Friday. I need to have blood work done to see if the new dose of thyroid-replacement medication is improving things at all, but I didn’t have the energy to call the lab to schedule an appointment because the required opening up the cabinet where I put the lab paperwork, pulling it out of a stack of papers, finding the phone number, dialing the phone, and talking to someone. Too much. Also too much: doing my immunoglobulin infusions, the ones that keep me alive; preparing for the support group I’m facilitating that starts this week; hydrating; exercising; bathing; eating.

In this hypothyroid state, which has been creeping up on me since last fall, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about poetry and what I’m doing as a poet. A hypothyroid state isn’t the best one to be in when having these thoughts, but anyone who’s been hypothyroid knows these are the kinds of thoughts one has when hypothyroid.

Here’s my conclusion. Poetry is, at its worst, a discriminatory and harmful system. I’ve experienced discrimination and harm firsthand. But the system being what it is doesn’t make it one I can walk away from. I’m a poet. Being a poet isn’t something I chose or can unchoose. It’s a way of being.

When I was close to death in 2022, writing an imitation poem after Richard Siken is what brought me back to life and what allowed me to continue living. There was no question for me then that I was bound to poetry, to being a poet. It doesn’t matter that it was a Richard Siken poem. It could have been any poem, imitation or otherwise. I time-traveled in that poem. I found my way into and through time itself, not because I’m special or any given poet is special. What’s special is poems: who we are in them, who we aren’t, what we see, what’s beyond seeing. That dissolving when we need to dissolve. That emerging when we need to emerge. That liminal space between dissolving and emerging where we can live more expansively.

I came back to poetry. I can’t leave it again. I think my presence makes poetry better, not worse. I’ve written about what happened to me in poetry and beyond. I see issues at the systemic level and call attention to them. Because I’m older, I have a longer memory than a lot of poets do, which gives me insights others may not have. I make choices about where to send my work and who to associate with accordingly, which is necessary when poems enter the world of poetry, that less-than-optimal system that can and does do damage.

I’m neither a sycophant nor the poetry police. I call things like I see them. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about the unexamined biases that exist in poetry or the ways in which they may be contributing to those biases or at least not helping alleviate them. I do think we should all pay more attention to the institutions and organizations we support, the people we defend, and how we talk about those who are exploited and otherwise victimized within the system. But I know I can’t change anyone or the system as a whole. I can only control how I navigate it and who I am within it.

I suspect things would be different if poets didn’t have jobs to worry about or tenure or getting published or securing money for their projects or any of the other pressures that keep the system humming along without much change over the past several decades. I’m not fettered by any of that. I just read and write poetry.

I still remember Carolyn Kizer telling a group of poets that another famous poet tried to rape her. It was at a dinner before a reading she was giving. I also remember how the other poets at the table responded, which was to react in a flustered way and quickly change the subject. That was nearly thirty years ago, when I was just starting to write poetry. But what happened to her occurred decades earlier.

Poetry has had systemic issues that affect individual poets for a long time. These issues didn’t start yesterday, and they won’t end tomorrow. That’s why I’m not going to stop writing poetry or talking about what I’ve experienced and seen in the poetry community. Carolyn Kizer was talking to me that day in 1997. She was warning me. I heard her. I try to hear everyone who speaks.

Assertions

I came across a thread today from ten years ago. It’s about the poet who sexually assaulted me. I’d never seen the thread before or the assertions it contains. I want to be very clear about something: I never retracted or changed my story. The essay that was slated to run in VIDA did not run because another poet divulged the name of the poet who sexually assaulted me to one of the publication’s editors, and that compromised me as well as VIDA. The piece did not name or otherwise identify the poet in question, which was a requirement for the essays in that series.

I have since published that essay and made it publicly available. It took me ten years to do so after what happened. I’ll link to it in the comments.

The thread I saw sickens me even now, a decade later. I don’t have words to describe how atrocious it is. It reminds me why I left poetry in the first place. It wasn’t just because of the sexual assault. It was because of how poets, in particular women poets, responded to the situation.

The poetry community terrifies and horrifies me.

The Fog

Writing used to be my way of working through things in order to discover beauty, complexity, and meaning, as well as what escapes meaning, to feel those textures and colors the body and mind together send to the surface like koi in a pond waiting to be fed. All those little mouths mouthing at once. All those fat bodies and watery fins. So much movement but not without pattern, like music.

Writing used to be my music, its notes distributed like lilypads the bodymind somehow reads through touch, for that’s what language is. Something we touch, not something we see. Something we touch and hear.

I worked hard to learn how to write despite my dyslexia. To write, to read, to understand. I wanted into that world because of what poems could do.

              The fog comes
              on little cat feet.

If fog could be a cat, I could be anything in language, not what I was in my home. I didn’t have to be that child or a child at all. I could be something that made sense or was so far beyond sense that sense wouldn’t matter anymore. I wanted to do that with language, to unlock its magic. It took decades, but I did. I think I did.

I’ve come to identify with being a poet and writer, with sitting down at my desk and writing every day. I told people poetry was everywhere, always, like a faucet you can just open up and there it is.

I don’t feel like that anymore. I open the tap and there’s nothing. People are cruel. I’ve encountered more cruelty in the past three years, which is when I started writing again, than in the other twenty years of writing combined, with the exception of some awful things that went down in the poetry community in 2015. I’ve been personally threatened, accused of appropriating the term CPTSD (as if my trauma isn’t real), attacked both for not really being neuroatypical (based on how I appear) and for using the neurotype framework, told nobody should listen to me because I have bipolar, that I’m morally unclean, that my writing is doing harm, and more.

That’s on top of the more general comments people have made in response to my writing: things like everyone who has a mental-health label should be round up and forcibly removed from Utah or queer people are evil and satanic.

               It sits looking
              over harbor and city

These comments are like gargoyles draining the life from my writing and from me as a person. They go well beyond discourse. They’re attacks. They’re erasures. They’re discriminatory. They’re scary.

They’re what passes for engagement these days. We’re all seeing comments like this day in and day out, especially on social media. Some of us are participating in it in our own ways. Most if not all of us are negatively affected by it. Even outlets that are designed to give us a voice can end up sending us to slaughter with every piece of ours they publish. For civil discourse? For freedom of speech? Or for clicks, shares, page views, and increased reach? If an outlet wants to keep you angry at those who also trying to speak to the larger issues in our culture, our country, and our communities rather than catalyzing you to also speak and act in response to those larger issues in your own way, ask yourself what that outlet’s motives are and what effect the infighting it generates has on anyone’s ability to advocate for anything—or even to survive what’s become increasingly difficult to survive.

How is a writer who, for years, wrote for some of the largest medical organizations and research universities in the country, as well as an esteemed consortium comprised of the top medical and research centers, in this position? Who’s routinely had work in competitive literary journals and with well-regarded indy presses? Some of this is coming from social media and website comment threads and is in response to my essays and opinion pieces. Some of it’s happening with friends on Facebook, namely people who read my work and then project things onto me so that, when I am not what they think I am or what they want me to be to them, they can and sometimes do become irate, belittling me and my poetry.

This is how things are now. And they’re going to get worse. But I don’t have to keep saying OK to it. I’ve already started saying none of this is OK. Now, I’m grieving on many levels—what poetry and writing can and can’t be, what kinds of audiences it can and can’t have, what the writing community and our communities in general are and aren’t—and I’m waiting for the faucet to flow again. That may be the only faith I have left in me. I believe I can find my way back to poetry, and poetry can find its way back to me. I have to believe this to survive.

              on silent haunches
              and then moves on.

May the fog that obscures poetry move on. May the fog that keeps us from seeing each other move on. May the fog that blankets our entire country move on. Let it move on. Let it move on.

—

I appreciate my friends on Facebook who feel their way through the world using language and take the time to communicate thoughtfully. You are the antithesis to much of what passes for communication these days.

The poem used in this essay is “The Fog,” by Carl Sandburg. It is in the public domain.

Death Is Not a Jinn

I dreamed the poetry community was a psychosis-inducing haunted mansion that all the poets had to live in together. My room had a closet with a secret panel. Behind the panel was information about a poet who’d died in the 1800s. Behind that panel was another panel with warnings about not ever opening the second panel ever no matter what. The second panel popped open on its own. Behind it was the corpse of the poet laid out in an open casket. It was Emily Dickinson in her white dress. Behind the casket was a tunnel that led straight down to hell. I bumped the casket. Dickinson’s corpse slid down the tunnel. I almost followed but braced myself against the tunnel’s walls. Once I was back in my room, I sat on the bed and vowed to tell none of the other poets what had happened. The panel covering the tunnel had no latch. I waited for whatever was going to come through to come through as fear crawled up my spine. That fear was the devil. Downstairs, the other poets laughed and drank and carried on, unaware.

              Death is not a jinn.
              It’s a hollow limb snapped off
              the tree, a portal.

Ribbety

A standard poodle seems to be driving the Yaris in front of me.

I thought American Sentences would lead to real poems, but no.

Saw a guy walking down State Street in Hurricane dressed like a chicken.

Wrong-way crash. I drag my lifeboat to the scene. There are no survivors.

My lifeboat believes
in water, what it can do,
not what it doesn’t.

I brought my lifeboat to the wrong ocean. The water spat it at me.

I’m stuck. The ship is sinking. I brought a lifeboat, but it’s the wrong one.

I turn the lights on in my house clockwise so time doesn’t go backwards.

My mind is a wild turkey scaling a basalt ridge without its flock.

To avoid writing poems, I’m rejuvenating my throw pillows.

I washed all my walls today because who can write poems with dirty walls?

Me: I only get seventeen syllables? Screw that. I’m outta here.

Jon turned on the heat, so now I have to sing Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On.”

Dreams:

Walked down a long peer and saw you’d turned into a drug lord. I said hi.

I decided to marry you because I liked your dogs. They were small.

I dreamed the best American Sentence but forgot it when I woke.

It went, like, something something something something something something something.

It’s strange how little I have to say when I have finite syllables.

Feces-covered toilet plunger left in hotel hallway. Good morning.

Tomorrow, we see the doctor but today we bird at Utah Lake.

I was with people in my dreams last night and cannot remember them.

Something good, a party maybe, or something bad. I can’t remember.

Whatever it was I left it, then went back to it. The dream, I mean.

I like my body right now, enough, the functionality of it.

When we get back home, I’ll write real poems, not just these bullshit sentences.

Back is filler in that last sentence, which is why it’s total bullshit.

American Sentences can make me say things weird or not at all.

I’ll get some good ones out of this. I just know it. Me of big, fat faith.

Not everything fits into poems. Not everything fits in the world.

I sort of like that last American Sentence, but I don’t trust it.

I guess that’s the deal. Do I trust myself in language and in the world?

Good morning, we scare each other, on the other side of fear is love.

Butter, my rubber chicken, got a plastic cat dressed as a chicken.

Butter is also plastic, not rubber, but I haven’t told her yet.

So many tall, beautiful people here you could put them all on cakes.

My sleep score last night was dude what do you even think you were doing.

I forgot to pack shoes: I came in slippers and must live in slippers.

Gotta hit the road for a medical vacay these days in Utah.

File under Make American Healthcare Inaccessible Again.

At least we’ve put some miles between us and the Utah measles outbreak.

And I got this rubber chicken who loves me more than politicians.

I found my boots: Now, I have my boots, slippers, and a rubber chicken.

I named the rubber chicken Butter and held her as I slept. She squeaks.

Butter is filling me with microplastics, I’m sure, but also love.

Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic” wakes me from sleep in the hotel.

How the song found me in Provo, I’ll never know: some kind of magic.

Make America Sacred Again spray-painted on a pink trailer.

In Provo, Utah, with nothing but slippers and a rubber chicken.

Telling someone you feel emotionally unsafe around them because of their language and behavior isn’t a dangerous thing to say in general or to a white man in this day and age. If someone tells you that’s the case, they aren’t listening to you. They aren’t hearing you. They are reacting in a way that’s most likely in keeping with the things that made you feel emotionally unsafe around them in the first place.

I’ve been spelling tripartite tripartate and pronouncing it tripartate for more than thirty years is how I am.

I can do whatever I want in a poem, more so than in the world.

I have outgrown my underwear is how I am.

I’m looking at Bill Knott’s poetry archive and thinking what’s the point we’re all going to die is how I am.

When we fail to recognize sanism and ableism in all its forms, we fail to protect ourselves and each other.

I can’t keep attempting to raise consciousness in my local community, online, and in poetry circles to the point of having medical episodes and mental-health destabilization so others can keep catching up and catching up and catching up … but never actually do. I’m tired. Literally sick and tired.

Give us ribbety or give us death. — Sign at No Kings Protest

Ren Wilding is an astounding poet. Reading their work makes me feel like someone’s cracked my chest open and inserted a better heart.

Him: If someone does something wrong in poetry, you need to name them publicly to warn others.

Also Him: I’m afraid you’re going to say something about me that hurts my writing career.

Me: I’m going to have a nice day.

My Intestines: Not so fast.

A group of frogs can be called an army, a chorus, or a colony. I call a group of frogs a democracy.

I used to want to be the cylindrical container that shot through the pneumatic tube at the bank. I also wanted to be the money inside the container. Anything to not be human.

I made a bunch of big decisions, I’m in the bed, and the life partner is bringing me no-bake cookies, ice cream, and caramel corn is how I am. My therapist said this is OK. I’m not so sure.

I stole the last Zevia in the house from the life partner is how I am.

I’d rather be too soft for this world than too hard.

I’m eating caramel corn while lying in bed with my dog on me is how I am.

We can be born after we’re born, and it doesn’t need to happen in a religious framework.

The Harvest Moon Supermoon and the Waning Gibbous Moon are stealing my dreams. I need those dreams. They’re for me, not for various and sundry moons.

Half of what you’ve done has already been done before and by half I mean all.

The life partner has informed me that he’s no longer angry with me. We just woke up. We haven’t even interacted today.

Your work matters, what you do in the world matters, and you matter. Thank you all for what you create, what you share, and for your kindness.  

The white-crowned sparrows have arrived for the winter, which means joy has taken up residence in this desert.

I just thought about baby animals, and I’m suddenly very happy.

When I see nothing but darkness, teach me to see the dark. When I hear nothing but darkness, teach me to hear the dark. When I feel nothing but darkness, teach me to feel the dark. When I realize I am darkness, teach me to love the dark that I am. The darkness of my body. The darkness of my mind. The darkness I came from and will return to. The darkness that is all that is.

I would really love to be in a room where I feel wanted, welcome, like I don’t have to hide essential parts of myself, where I don’t have to listen to things that are painful and othering, and where I can speak in full voice without shame and trepidation.

Poets who see folks with psychotic disorders as terrible people can fuck all the way off. Poets who stand up and teach that kind of shit can fuck off even more.

When you think you’re the destination, but you’re just the obstacle.

I love a good fight on cuneiform tablets.

The only thing worse than having wet hair is having wet hair in a new place.

Your cracks are how the universe enters you.

I just googled what is a sand time thing called is how I am.