Pyrrhuloxia

Humane Bug Trapper

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, birders are calling owls “lil darlings,” and I’m here for it.

Happy New Year. Thank you all for making this one survivable.

I have to use binoculars to see the spines of the books on my high bookshelves is how I am.

I dreamed I asked someone to sign my copy of their chapbook. They were like, How do you spell your first name, Darling? Without thinking and without an ounce of humor or irony, I replied, S-A-D.

I know having a waterbed filled with zero sugar Cherry Coke that I can sleep on and drink from is impractical, but it’s what I want.

I’m stressing myself out in that way that I only am capable of stressing myself out is how I am.

Listening to Modeselektor on repeat is how I am.

Writing letters to my dead mother is how I am.

Facebook thinks I’m a library and is trying to furnish me.

Speaking the truth is not without consequences.

String art weirds me out.

More and more, I like less and less. 

Oh. It’s December 20. My mother died twenty-one years ago today.

I don’t think of myself as sans serif. I think of myself as serif-free.

I bought a replica of a medieval carnival badge called “Good Harvest.” Badges like this one supposedly provided protection and ensured prosperity. The one I ordered depicts a person driving a wheelbarrow full of phalluses along a road that’s a giant phallus with legs. That’s quite the harvest. During the Middle Ages, phalluses were believed to drive out evil and confer good luck. Badges like this one were popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Google “medieval carnival badge” if you want to see an assortment of designs. There’s one that’s a vulva with legs walking around with a rosary in one hand and a phallic pilgrim’s staff in the other. That might be my favorite.

I really can’t see very well these days. I’ve needed glasses for years but have gotten around it by memorizing the eye chart right before the ophthalmologist comes in for my appointment. Today, I thought I was going to watch a program called “The Smurftown Tunes.” It was actually “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Not at all what I was expecting.

This new font, Sans Gender, is hard-coded to replace more than one hundred needlessly gendered terms with inclusive terms. This font is so the boss of me. I don’t know if the font would allow me to say that, but it’s true. And something has to be the boss of me. Why not a font?

I see the poet who threatened me last year has a new collection out with a press that purports to be a safe space. Congratulations all around: to the poet, the press, and the community that makes it all happen.

CNN: Quit putting Hans Nichols on your program. He’s using the term “schizophrenic” right now to describe inconsistent behavior. That’s sanist and unacceptable.

The gash in my fitted sheet created by my rough heels has grown so long that one of my calves is now stuck in it. I could free myself, but that would require a teensy bit of physical and emotional effort. I think I’m just going to stay like this all day. My heels win. The gash wins. I’m going to nap like a cruel President.

The chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma in my hometown was a consultant for MKUltra. My friend told me this today. I’m super weirded out about it. My mother may have known him. He also killed an elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a large dose of LSD.

There are pyrrhuloxias in Oklahoma. Hot damn.

The Nazis used the font Fraktur and its variations for their propaganda, including Mein Kampf, but banned it in 1941 for being “judenlettter,” which translates to “Jewish letters,” meaning it was linked to Jewish printers and writers, so an edict was issued to replace the font with Roman styles, which were required for all Nazi communications throughout Europe.

Now, the ousted font is one that’s accessible to people with disabilities. And its replacement is a Roman style. This is significant. This is eerie. This is history repeating itself.

It’s good to know fascism has a font. I’m still on the font thing.

Literary journals and presses that require all submissions to be set in Times New Roman may want to rethink that requirement. It’s not an accessible font for those with reading issues and learning disabilities. And now it carries an ugly political connotation to boot.

Dear Leader, I found a readable font family called Sans Gender that works for me as a dyslexic nonbinary individual, and yes I am buying it. And no, you can’t stop me. Take your Times New Roman and be on your way.

Keep your hate font away from me.

Well, I know what font I won’t be using moving forward.

Walan the wombat has stopped having panic attacks, has started doing zoomies, and is now shaking his head back and forth, which is a sign he feels happy and secure. He’s also been playing with other baby wombats. I’ll tag you on his latest video if you want to see it. And no. I’m not crying. Not even a little.

I am going to Thomas Merton myself into hermitage until I no longer say and do all the wrong things.

Yesterday in Utah, a skier had to be rescued from a crevasse, and a hiker had to be rescued from quicksand. This is why I say inside.

Hacking my gut microbiota with apple cider vinegar is how I am.

Dear New York Times: Cookies are delicious, but “cookie” is not a season. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Department of Injustice

Watching a video of a nudibranch pooping is how I am.

Apparently, the FDA is practicing evidenceless-based science now.

In the Oklahoma birding group, someone posts a photo of a dead white-throated sparrow they’ve found at their campsite, hoping to get an ID. Someone IDs the bird. Someone posts a quote from the Bible: Not even the sparrow falls to the ground without God’s notice and care. Someone posts a painting they created based on that Bible verse, an unassuming sparrow looking up into a shaft of light. A funeral of sorts is held for the sparrow. A space opens up in the group for mourning and love. This is deep birding, not the run-of-the-mill look at my beautiful bird photography skills found in other birding groups.

Sometimes, all I can say about a poem is that it exists.

I just misread a headline as “Hummus: A Monstrous History,” and everything I thought I knew about hummus flashed before my eyes before being supplanted with a darkness I could only imagine and barely fathom. But no worries. It was just humans in that headline. Not hummus. We’re all good. Enjoy your hummus, monsters.

The rock fracture at Yosemite National Park is actively occurring. Meanwhile, I am passively occurring. We all have our way, Yosemite.

As an aside, look at this glorious language. Geologists dispatched to the area of the fracture said they could hear it cracking like a frozen lake that wasn’t consolidated. That description must absolutely be used in a poem.

TFW you wake up in the morning and suddenly remember you shared one of your poems on Facebook the night before.

I’m totally involved in the life of a sick baby wombat named Walan is how I am.

I’m buying a humane catch-and-release bug trapper is how I am.


Morning Prayer September 16, 2024

Trees don’t move in the wind. They’re moved by the wind, the way we all react to unseen forces, unseen faces, unseen lives, and unseen lies. But I digress. This isn’t about deleting and inserting letters to stumble on real or imagined connections. It’s about how, wherever I’m standing, I want to be standing somewhere else. A foot over, a mile, a state, a bioregion.

There, where I saw my first Blackburnian warbler. There, where I learned the name scissor-tailed flycatcher. There, the mud. There, the sand. There, the untidy rows of cows. There, tidy rows of roses a girl could hide in if it weren’t for the thorns.

I’m trying to stand still for ten minutes every morning while I watch the sun rise and listen to birds. Yesterday, a western screech owl. Today, a pyrrhuloxia, as in red or tawny, not as in pile of wood for burning the dead.

I’m trying not to think about how the northern cardinal should be the one named pyrrhuloxia, not the pyrrhuloxia, or about how that must mean the person who named the pyrrhuloxia had never seen a cardinal, or about how the person who named the pyrrhuloxia must have felt the first time they saw a cardinal after having named the pyrrhuloxia pyrrhuloxia.

I’m trying not to think, which is always the biggest impediment to not thinking. I just want to stand for ten minutes with my feet planted, my body unstirred, like palo verde trees on a calm morning after hard rain. I want to be here, with these birds and these trees and these cactuses in this desert. I want to feel safe enough to remain still for ten minutes. I’ve seen cottontail rabbits do as much, though their mouths were working incessantly because they move their jaws up to one hundred twenty times per minute when they chew. That’s twice my average resting heart rate but nowhere near the four thousand times a hummingbird’s wings beat per minute.

I’m trying not to think about facts and comparisons. This more than that. That less than this. Living beings are not just math, so I’m trying not to tilt my head and scan for rabbits or add up my heartbeats as they batter my chest or make a futile attempt to count the wingbeats of the Costa’s hummingbird who’s zipping past me.

I’m trying not to worry about Valley Fever and global warming and poisonous toads and communities in crisis and birds falling from the sky from avian influenza and assassination attempts and wildlife without habitat and unseen lies and unseen lives and unseen faces and unseen forces and my father and my family and my childhood. That’s what lies in stillness. All of that and more.

So I count. I compare. I slot things into more than that, less than this. I learn facts. I look around. I take in. I fill my head with details. And I move. I have a head full of analysis, a body full of terror, and the trauma to justify both.

Those last three things on my list are the crux of the matter: my father and my family and my childhood. They’re the real, lived dangers that tie me to the rest of the dangers in the world, the rest of the heartbreaks in the world, the rest of the injustices in the world. The broken wing. The dry lake. The toxic dust. The highway. The swimming pool. The bedroom.

My father didn’t have any guns. He’d had enough of them in Korea. We had an empty gun case built into a wall at our lake house. I wanted to fill it with flowers. He wouldn’t let me. It had to be empty, a sign for anyone who saw it that he meant them no harm.

My father was the weapon. He ultimately turned himself on himself but not until he destroyed everyone else. I mean us. I mean his family. I say his as if we belonged to him. Belonged as in were owned by, not as in were members of. He owned us all. Kin from the Old English cynn, which sounds like sin. To kin, to sin, to skin, again. Buckskin and doeskin and firing pins and deadly sins. No win, no wins, no whining, no whinneys.

I stood still for five minutes this morning. Five minutes in which I didn’t keep vigil, in which I watched the sun rise and listened to the birds. It’s not ten yet. I’ll keep trying for ten.

May we all be free from suffering for ten minutes today.

Good morning.