Poetry

On and Off the Page

What my last post is leading me to is the understanding that I matter, meaning my voice matters, my perspective matters, my experiences matter, and my identity matters. That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. Reading Andrea Gibson all day yesterday led me here, to a place where I can say That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. In my case, those are easy words to say but hard ones to believe.

What’s also true is that I have a new intersection to consider, one that will guide me as I continue to share my poetry. I want to find publishers who like my work and also want to support my being in poetry. I want my voice, perspective, experiences, and identity to matter to those publishers, not just the work that stems from those things. This is especially important as I try to find homes for my manuscripts.

Right now, I feel that level of support from several publishers, including Chiron Review, Meat for Tea (both the review and the press), Moon in the Rye Press, The Nomad, ONE ART, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Each feels like it’s saying why I write what I write matters, not just what I write. Given what I’ve come through in poetry and in life, that’s important to me.

I don’t want to publish with folks who dislike me or just tolerate me. Once they know a little bit about who I am, I want them to feel like it’s important to include me in poetry, on and off the page.

Hi, I’m Dana

Hi, I’m Dana. You may wonder how I got myself into this situation. Not really. That’s just a silly introduction. Speaking of which, consider this my introduction post.

For starters, I’m trans, specifically nonbinary, also known as enby. I’m queer, specifically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That’s been shifting over the course of my life, but I’ve mostly landed on asexual with hints of bambisexuality.

I’m female-bodied and am treated like a female—at least in terms of what we’ve collectively decided female-bodied and female mean—including the very not good ways those perceived to be female are treated. In college, I largely wore tuxedos I found at thrift stores, and I had short, blond, young Mary Stuart Masterson hair. That’s the only period in which I was routinely mistaken for a boy, a little English schoolboy to be precise.

What you don’t know is that I’m in drag all the time, and I like it. The man in me likes it a lot but would also like a beard and a man bun and to be totally ripped, which is how I came to marry the man I wanted to be, who eventually lost his hair, so no man bun, but who has a beard that makes him a total snacc and who also has nice guns. I mean whatever those arm muscles are, of course. We are gun-free people. Biceps. I think that’s what I mean.

I live with complex trauma. I’ve experienced abuse and violence on too many occasions for me to count, in part because I have dyscalculia, as you’ll learn below.

I live with bipolar. I’ve known the world through the lens of psychosis, though only for a tiny fraction of my days, thus far, on Earth. That lens has taught me a great deal about terror and its origins but also about love and its origins. Extreme states are extreme but not without meaning. We are meaning-making creatures, after all. We do what we can with what we’re given.

I was given words, which is a tremendous thing. I took them, actually. They weren’t given to me. You’re about to learn about my dyslexia. What that means is language was a fight, and I fought for it. That’s why I won’t give it up again, not even when poets and writers and the systems they inhabit behave badly.

I have learning disabilities, including dyslexia and dyscalculia. (I told you I was about to talk about them.) My spatial reasoning skills are top-notch. I’ve been tested. But my body in space is another matter entirely. I knock about is what I do. I’m dizzy a lot. I fall, literally. I get up.

I just read dizzy as fizzy because of my dyslexia. That’s funny. The idea of being fizzy is a hoot.

When I was younger, I could do calculus but cannot count well at all ever, which is how I once ended up in trouble with the IRS because of how I subtracted something I should have added. They were very prickly about it. I’m not an institutionalist, but I didn’t like being treated like I was trying to rip off an institution, either. My father was a crook. I’m sensitive about being accused of similar behavior.

I’m neurodivergent in other ways and not about to give up that label because some folks in the communities I inhabit don’t like it. I’ve started using a Hannah Gadsby voice as I type this, just to illustrate one of the many ways in which my neurodiversity makes itself known, even if only to me. This introduction is a lot funnier in that voice. I like the idea of Gadsby being here with me right now. It’s been a hard night. Let’s get Andrea Gibson in here, too. There. Do you feel that? They’re the keto bread to my plant-based, thinly sliced protein, but not in a Bambi way, just in a support-system sandwich way. Nom nom nom.

Most of my name is not what I was born with. My other names are my dead names. My legal name serves me better, represents me better. I may not be able to vote because I changed my name and not because I got married to the man I wanted to be. He’s a good life partner after more than three decades of trying. I’m a good life partner, too. I’m serious. I’m not even sure I want to be him anymore. These days, I’m busy being, and becoming, me.

I forgot to tell you about all my medical issues, including rare diseases that pedal wave inside me like various and sundry nudibranches. Just imagine them like that, not like what some of them actually are, which is life-threatening.

Oh, and I’m a flutist, essayist, poet, birder, and weaver who loves the world and all living beings, which is why I’m so damn vocal about everything. I’m bound to frustrate you, confuse you, or piss you off at some point if you don’t beat me to the punch. Some of those frictions will be superficial. Others may cause deeper wounds.

That’s it. Me in a nutshell. My story or my personal brand or whatever. This is the poet you’re supporting if you support me. I think I’m worth supporting, so give it a go.

‘It Just Looks Like a Window: Essays on Television,’ by Nadia Arioli

Sometimes, you think wanting to be the cylindrical carrier in a pneumatic tube system—maybe like the ones at Security National Bank or Anthony’s in your hometown—makes you strange and unrelatable. But then one day, you’re reading an essay whose author says what they desire, above all else, is to be a pneumatic tube. And you think, wow. And you think, yeah. And you think, suddenly, this is a world I may actually belong in.

The author of that essay is Nadia Arioli. The collection it appears in is It Just Looks Like a Window: Essays on Television, from Kristy Bowen’s Dancing Girl Press. It’s really good, really really good.

It would be good even without the pneumatic tube, but it’s even better with it because now you know someone has thought about being a pneumatic tube the way you’ve thought about being a cylindrical carrier in such a tube, and you feel a little less stupidly alone and also grateful to spend time in these essays which, to borrow a word from Arioli, are “liminous” (not to be confused with luminous): each piece a pass-through place, each paragraph a doorway full of light.

—

Images: 1. The front cover of It Just Looks Like a Window: Essays on Television. 2. Interior pages from the chapbook. 3. The chapbook with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass. 4. The dried pomegranate.

Institutions

Because Knott’s early life took place in various institutions, and because their confines would have seemed insurmountable, it shouldn’t be surprising that he viewed the poetry world with suspicion and contempt. After all, institutions were his only experience of organizing the chaotic world, and those institutions did not treat him well. — Sandra Simonds

I’ve been thinking about Bill Knott again. I feel this. I really do. Institutions have not treated me well, either, whether familial, social, political, religious, educational, or governmental. Read Simonds’s essay on Bill Knott on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

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.

‘Exploding Head,’ by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

These poems have a feel for me, a texture. Take the opening lines of “MRA Machine”:

Strapped inside this bright rocket, you are a spirit ready to be launched toward the light.

Do you feel that? In the pacing, in the sound? There’s fear, but there’s also something soothing about the language because of its music.

In Exploding Head, Hoffman’s prose poems feel like the warp of the subject matter coming together with the weft of the language she uses—language that, in her words, both opens up and clamps down hard. Reading the work is, for me, like running my hand across the face of newly woven fabric, nubbins and knots and all. I’m talking about poems that drape, that shoosh or scritch, that become something sensual, that conceal and reveal. I’m talking about a poet who can make a poem into a garment woven from different types of yarn that readers can step into and then back out again, both ourselves and not ourselves—the you in the poem an internal conversation in second person but also us if we allow ourselves that moment of extension into and beyond, which I willingly and gladly do. What is poetry if not a way to experience the world through a consciousness and creative expression that is not our own?

These poems sley the reed, thread the heddles, and follow the fell line as they take shape on the page as blocks of memory, experience, imagination, and disquiet.

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Images: 1. The front cover of Exploding Head, by Cynthia Marie Hoffman. 2. Two interior pages from the collection. 3. Another image of the front cover of the collection, along with a dried pomegranate, a horse sculpture, and an hourglass.

Naming Names

I’ve been thinking a great deal about a comment left on Facebook in response to my last post that merits deep consideration and a detailed response. This is my first attempt at such a response. The comment was about one of the essays I shared in which several poets and writers respond to an essay about assault and harassment in the literary world. It’s about naming names, specifically this comment by Roxane Gay:

I’d name names, but these aren’t my stories. It’s not my place. That’s what I tell myself while also knowing that when we keep these men’s secrets, we allow their predatory behavior to thrive. They won’t stop until they are held accountable.

I think it’s important to note that abuses of institutional power are ultimately an institutional issue. Institutions bear responsibility for doing more than negating complaints and concerns when they’re raised or making decisions that inadequately address these situations—and often behind closed doors.

I’ve never written about this before, but many years ago, I approached the institution the poet who sexually assaulted me worked for. I was told that because I wasn’t one of his students and because the assault didn’t happen on his campus, I couldn’t even make a complaint. But it did happen en route to a college campus, one where he was representing his school and one where he’d written a letter of recommendation for me for the MFA program he was dropping me off at. And I may not have been his student, but he was working with me as a mentor. He also, I realized in retrospect, engaged in grooming behavior several months earlier at the first and last AWP I ever attended.

Most of these abuses in the literary community occur in conjunction with a school, a school-supported event, a literary organization, or some other entity in which the poets in question are serving in formal and informal roles. Those institutions need to do better. Universities and colleges need to do better. Associations need to do better. Conferences need to do better. Publishers need to do better. Journals need to do better. And so forth.

Until complaints are taken seriously and appropriate action is taken, nothing will change and those who have these experiences will continue to feel invalidation, fear, shame, and guilt on top of the trauma from the experience itself. Some may stop writing entirely, as I did for seven years. Some may experience such fundamental shifts in their bodies and minds that they never feel like themselves again, not even years later.

Gay says she doesn’t name names because the stories aren’t hers to tell. I understand that and believe every survivor of these kinds of experiences has the right to discuss, or not discuss, what happened to them in whatever detail and whatever way makes sense for them. If we all rely on those affected to be the only ones naming names, though, we’re shifting responsibility not only for what happened—and the trauma of what happened—to those who often have little to no power and are often survivors of other abuses, but also for the naming and the responsibility and added vulnerability (and possibly targeting) that comes with that.

Speaking at all is terrifying. Carrying the twin burdens of having been abused and also having to publicly name the person who abused is heaping a whole lot on survivors of a system they didn’t create, one that has harmed them and that will most likely not change in any significant way—no matter what they say (other than to expunge those who speak).

And the fact is, many of us have named names. We’ve told the institutions that abusers are affiliated with exactly what happened. And they’ve looked the other way, protected their own, and allowed such abuses to continue.

Experts in the Field

It’s not that bad, they say. It happened a long time ago, they say. He was drunk, they say. One of these men is the publisher of a well-regarded imprint. Another is a poet. Another is a magazine editor. Another is a small press writer. And another. And another. It’s time to start naming these men. I’d name names, but these aren’t my stories. It’s not my place. That’s what I tell myself while also knowing that when we keep these men’s secrets, we allow their predatory behavior to thrive. They won’t stop until they are held accountable. — Roxane Gay

This is just one response that’s part of “Roxane Gay, Aimee Bender, and More on Assault and Harassment in the Literary World,” a collective essay published by Literary Hub in response to Bonnie Nadzam’s essay “Experts in the Field,” which ran in Tin House on February 6, 2017. Other responses are from Ramona Ausubel, Sally Ball, Aimee Bender, Kristi Coulter, Porochista Khakpour, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Anna March, Aspen Matis, Elissa Schapell, and Sarah Vap.

I don’t know how I just came across both of these essays today, more than a decade after they were written. It’s probably because I left poetry two years before each piece was published as a result of my own experiences with being harassed, assaulted, and otherwise harmed from 1995, when I first started writing poetry, forward. My departure in 2015 was meant to be permanent. I had no intention of writing again. That changed seven years later, in 2022, after a cascade of serious health issues left me close to death. Suddenly, poetry was the only thing that could help me make sense of my past, my present, and whatever my future held. I vowed never to leave it again.

I’m at a different but not-so-different juncture now, after dealing with the poetry community again over the past four years. What I’m experiencing and witnessing isn’t as bad as the assault that caused me to leave poetry in 2015, but I realize the potential for assault is still there, even if I know how to identify grooming tactics and other red flags earlier. That doesn’t mean the space is safer, only that I know how to stay safer in the space. Many of the infractions I’ve detailed recently have occurred since I returned to poetry.

What I’m having a hard time with is the fact that Nadzam’s essay and the responses to it could have been written today, not more than a decade ago. Expand them so they don’t conform to the gender binary but instead focus on abuses of institutional power committed against those who have less or no power, and you would be describing the poetry community as it is structured now, from those who engage in abuses to those who are somehow complicit in those abuses to those who are abused and don’t even have the closure of giving voice to what happened to them. (I’m not saying these expanded definitions are new. I’m saying the male-female framework in the original essays carries certain biases and isn’t inclusive of everyone who’s abused. In my case, for example, I’m nonbinary, so not female and not a woman. Still, the way I am seen has made me vulnerable, perhaps more so because I don’t fit the gender-binary framework.)

I’ve been surprised recently when male poets have reached out to me to express their shock over some of the experiences I’ve shared. I say male because men are the only ones who reach out to me in this way, with both an absence of similar experiences and without any knowledge that such issues exist. One praised me for not writing about a recent incident and seemed to think my writing about it would be an attempt to embarrass the poet involved rather than to tell the truth about what happened and hold someone accountable who may have been engaging in this same behavior with other poets for years, or even decades, with impunity.

Given all the ways in which poets have made abuses in poetry known for many years now, it’s hard to believe there are poets out there who have no idea any of this is going on, who haven’t even heard whispers about this or that over the years. And given the call from poets like Roxane Gay to hold poets and writers accountable for their actions, I have a hard time with anyone suggesting I remain silent on any matter, especially one like this, that already cost me a good chunk of my life and has forever changed me as a person.

My Dead

People love the rubber until the rubber meets the road.

I’m buying jade cicadas for all my dead is how I am.

My dead, carry me home. My dead, carry me home. Through fire, make me warm. Under water, make me fluid. Across earth, make me solid. From air, breathe your dead breath into me. Carry me home, my dead. Carry me home, my dead. I will carry you, too.

A physician who arrived on the scene after ICE agents shot Alex Pretti said the officers were not performing CPR. Instead, they appeared to be counting Pretti’s bullet wounds. (Sources: MedPage Today, Daily Kos)

I’m carrying my dead.

Birds need water as much as they need seed. Love needs action as much as it needs language.

The first murder was nearly half a million years ago, which shows violence has been in our nature since our ancestral humans. The blows were directed at the face so the killer could see who they were killing as they were doing the killing. Does it surprise me that the agent who fired the last five shots did so while Pretti was lying unresponsive and face up? Not at all. He wanted to see who he was killing as he was killing him, to see who he was destroying as he destroyed him. This is an old story. Hate is as old as love. But compassion had already evolved in our ancestors as sustained and long-term, as a way of showing commitment to others and surviving as a group. I believe our capacities for love and compassion are greater than our capacity for hate. I believe they can help us survive, even when that means surviving each other.

I’m so sad that I know this sadness cannot be entirely my own.

Wael Tarabishi

A man in the Oklahoma birding group just called a northern mockingbird his northern mockingfriend.

Holding in pee when I’m ten steps from the bathroom is how I am.

I think Utahns should bring back the whistling and whittling brigade, but only to get ICE out of the state.

I think I like poets about as much as I like librarians. I say that as a poet who almost studied library science and who’s been around a bunch of poets and worked in libraries alongside a bunch of librarians. I like what poets and librarians do. I like what they stand for. I just don’t expect much from either group when it counts. Look, words. Look, data. You know?

Weavers and birders on the other hand? Fuck yeah. All the fuck yeahs. Take umbrage with this post if you must. Take my disappointment, frustration, and annoyance, too, while you’re at it.

Of course I don’t mean any of this. I mean the weavers and birders part. They’re the folks I turn to when even caramel corn isn’t enough to see me through.

Who’s keeping me alive right now? Oklahoma birders, that’s who. They don’t just post photos of birds. They tell stories, like this one:

This roadrunner got under the hood of my Cutlass and rode all the way from Don and Loel’s house in Tuttle to my home in Moore, Oklahoma, and lived in our neighborhood for almost a year before disappearing.

That is the shit, my friends. A gem of a story in only thirty-eight words.

These typos in a post by Blue Ridge Wildlife Center are perfect: If you believe that loons can take off from land, is lie. Liar told you that. From now on forever, I am going to say Is lie. Liar told you that whenever the situation warrants it.

You know how you get a weird answer from a Magic 8 Ball, so you just jiggle it? I sometimes find myself wanting to jiggle people a little into a different mindset or behavior. Not violently. Just so their hollow icosahedron floating in its cobalt alcohol solution will land on a better face.

I’m eating a whole thing of caramel popcorn with my tongue so I can keep typing is how I am.

Carolyn Kizer didn’t shut up, either.

I know folks don’t mean to. That’s part of the problem.

Thank you for coming to my fuck you.

I dreamed I was at a rave but didn’t want to be, so I went outside and picked up dog poop from people’s lawns.

Hugging my weighted therapy dragon is how I am.

They all killed him. Every agent who harassed him, restrained him, kicked him. Maybe one of them shot. Maybe more than one. But they all killed him. They are all the shooter.

GestapICE.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti

Hundreds of words that translate to one: dismissal.

From a member of the Oklahoma Ornithological Society: Folks, we have a native songbird killing event starting tomorrow for many of the states in the United States. This is supposed to go for over a week in my area (Oklahoma). If you have nesting boxes up for bluebirds and other cavity nesters, consider adding a handful of clean, dry pine needles or straw for insulation. Make a bowl with your fist pushing the needles or straw up the sides. Also, do whatever you can to feed these native songbirds and offer fresh water. I use an old frypan with a small heater in it on my back deck rail and change it twice per day. I also have a larger birdbath in the yard that also has a heater in it. Good luck to everyone. Stay safe.

I keep misreading bandanas as bananas and wondering why I need to stock up on bananas to stay warm in style all winter long.

I dreamed I doubled as a fire extinguisher.

I mentioned assless chaps one time in a comment on a friend’s post, and now Facebook is showing me all these ads for assless chaps is how I am.

For me, the pronoun they works on many levels. One complaint about using they in the singular is that it’s grammatically incorrect. But is it? The mind is plural and decentralized. We may be one, but “I” may not even be a thing other than an understanding between us, a kind of “you there, me here” shorthand, a fiction that appears to simplify living. They is a better pronoun for me than he or she any day. It does more than help me escape the waist trainer of gender essentialism. It helps me remember that my mind is not one and never was and never will be.

When we lived in Seattle, everyone thought my life partner was Moby, especially at the health-food store. I was like THAT’S MY MOBY GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY MOBY.

Nobody owns language or its rhythms. It’s what we make it, all of us, not what power wants to make it.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve prayed to God for my daily zero-sugar Cherry Coca-Cola.

I’m dipping turkey bacon in chocolate hummus is how I am.

Please can I just be plastinated now please please pretty please.

Can you guess what I’m doing based on what I’m wearing: a tank top, a tennis skirt, kneepads, a headlamp, slippery socks, my reading glasses, earplugs.

The other day, the life partner and I were watching television before bed when the remote control slid off the sofa and landed with a thud on the area rug. We were both silent as we tried to figure out what happened. Then the life partner said, in all seriousness, Detachable penis.

We heal together. We heal in community.

The purple gallinule found in Massachusetts who wasn’t named at the wildlife rescue where she was taken so the staff wouldn’t get attached to her? Her name is Tandy. I’m naming her Tandy.

I just misread a headline as Reducing Puppet Size May Help with Night Driving. I was like of course the puppets should be smaller so they don’t block the view, especially when it’s dark out. Pupil. The actual word was pupil.

Bewildering Cage is, as of this very moment, the title of the manuscript I’m working on. It fits with the body theme, the asylum/psychiatric hospital theme, with the gender identity/sexuality theme, and nature of existence theme. Thanks to Centa Therese for commenting on the Terrance Hayes poem that contains the phrase “bewildering a cage,” which I misread as “a bewildering cage,” so thanks, also, to my dyslexia. Massive thanks to Ren Wilding for reminding me we are galaxies. The galaxy itself may be a bewildering cage, but we can move around, and dance, in it. We just can. And we can talk like dolphins.

(Now I have the song “Here Comes the Rain Again” in my head, but with the lyrics changed to Talk to me / Like dolphins do / Walk with me / Like dolphins do. EEEEEEEEEEEE EEEE EEEEEEE.)

The Wasting (2016- )

Just trying to name this period in U.S. history. I think this works because it captures the wasting away of culture and the literal wasting of people in the streets.

From a Facebook ad for a dog carrier: Safety buckle prevents jump-out panic. We all need that buckle, Facebook. Every one of us has jump-out panic right now.

I am ill-equipped to hear this much talk about golf this early in the morning or ever really which is why I try not to leave the house if I can help it is how I am.

I’m doing the Safety Dance today. Ivan Doroschuk of Men in Hats wrote the song after being kicked out of a club for pogo dancing. It’s a protest against bouncers prohibiting the dance style. Often interpreted as anti-nuclear, Doroschuk says the song is more broadly anti-establishment.

I just gave myself an asthma attack by laughing too hard after doing an impression of a dolphin singing “My Sharona” is how I am.

People who are making comments like, Bring back the chokehold, can fuck all the way off.

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a lightning strike against tyranny. — Dana Henry Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a silver sound in the dark. — Ren Wilding

I organized my closet for five hours yesterday is how I am.

A birder in Oklahoma called scaled quail cottontops, and it’s the first time I’ve smiled in days.

A woman killed her six-year-old son and herself here in Utah yesterday in Canyonlands. No more. No more death. No more murder. No more horror. No more. No more. No more. No more. No more.

Her dog was in the back seat.

Today is one of those days in the desert when the wind sounds like a warning.

Poets are alive in their lines.

It’s hard in this desert rain to not feel the heavens have been slain.

We need to be together now, as poets, as creatives, as thinkers, as human beings. Whoever you turned to yesterday, whoever turned to you, may you all look back and realize that you helped each other go on. There is healing in being together during difficult times, unthinkable times. I was with two poets yesterday who made today possible by making yesterday less impossible. May Renée Nicole Good rest in peace. May we live in peace.

Listening to songs I first heard when everyone I knew and loved was still alive.

I dreamed poetry was outlawed in the United States.

There was a mass shooting in Salt Lake City last night outside an LDS church at a funeral. Two dead. Three hospitalized in critical condition. Three more injured.

Renee Nicole Good

Sometimes just by giving it language, you discover something within you that’s been waiting to be heard for a long time.

To be spared is to be pared, part of you left but part removed. To be spared means to pare, to reduce what happened to its essence and to find your own essence despite what happened. Injured but not killed. Damaged but not broken. Burned but not torched. You are what is left over, what you can afford to be, what you still have to give others. In Old English, spare means not enough. Were you not enough to be worth destroying or not enough after being destroyed? In Latin, pare means prepare. Do you feel prepared now that you’ve been skinned?

My weekly stats report from Grammarly: Grammarly analyzed 801,077 words. You were more productive than 99% of Grammarly users. If only some of those words were any good.

Writing makes the unspeakable speakable, survivable. I walk this line, this lettered terrain, until I find myself, for only then can you find me. Only then can I find you. Here we are in Ma time, in what’s happened and what could happen. The pause, the upbeat, the architecture of connecting and letting go. I’m waiting, bated, inked blood in my heart and on my tongue, reduced to vowels, then to a single sound. You know the one. That first utterance, O.

I’m about to buy my dog a treat-dispensing toy piano is how I am.

Could not sleep. Watched the news. What the fuck. I mean fuck. I mean fuck. What the fuck.

Meanwhile, in Utah: An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

This body doesn’t know which gender it is, so it’s using all of them.

(Adapted from John Gallaher’s Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. Every time I read the word genre, I think it’s gender.)

I dreamed I accidentally dated the devil and thought he’d ruined my life, but then I yelled at him in front of everyone in a Walmart parking lot. He dove inside a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass and never came out again ever. So that’s where he is if you need to make a deal with him or whatever.


Carolyn Kizer

Let’s just call her what she was: a siren, a soothsayer, a mythmaker, a chorus, a riot. I met her. She took a sliver of me. I am but a sliver of her. You will never remove that sliver.

Image: A photo of Carolyn Kizer that ran in Poetry Northwest.