My friend never lost her way with nature. Months before her death, Stellar’s jays landed on her arms when she was still well enough to stand in her backyard. I wouldn’t have believed it, but I saw the photos her husband took. I don’t mean those AI fabrications everyone’s sharing. I mean real arms and real birds and real sky and real ground. This is what grounded her. When she learned that a study showed bees play, she called me to say, Of course they do. By that time, she wasn’t going outside anymore. She was closer to death and to the dead than she was to the living. I’m not sure what that made me. I landed on her arms. I ate from her hands. I tried not to fly away, ever, but I was still alive and so I had to.
Relationships
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.
Neck Tattoos with Queer Messaging
The life partner sneaked off and got some pizza yesterday from this place when he was supposed to be going to the gym. It was some kind of partner alone time with pizza thing that I wasn’t allowed to participate in. I guess he felt guilty, so he brought me some pizza, which was small and cold and covered in onions and not at all keto, and I ate it because of course I did.
Within hours, I was dizzy and felt super weird, so I ate a whole thing of chocolate hummus right before bed because I thought it might help, which as it turns out is ten servings, not five like I thought, but whatever, and then I went to sleep and had disturbung dreams that I did in a disturbing way, which only happens when I’m stressed. I was flying around on my back refusing gravity, sort of superhero-like, but my foe was just some Costco employee who didn’t like neck tattoos with queer messaging.
I woke up and then started back in on the dream before I felt like I was even asleep again. I do not like it when that happens. I woke up again and checked my fitness watch only to see that it wasn’t pairing with my phone. I tried to pair it because I am governed by these technologies, and the phone decided to pair with my walking pad, which started beeping and flashing its lights unsettlingly like a digital presence being birthed into something that approximates being.
All of this of course woke my dog up, who then needed to potty outside, and so here I am, bloated, dizzy, and suddenly playing with my Magic 8 Ball at 2 a.m. and not liking what it’s telling me about poetry while simultaneously watching the news and not liking what it’s telling me about the world.
In the dream, I could fly horizontally really fast in the lavender Converse high tops I had in the 90s, but when I got to the woman from Costco, I would stop suddenly and hover midair, my feet inches from the woman’s face, and I would be mad that something was keeping me from crashing into her feet first. Now, I have to sit with that part of me, a dream part but still a part, and I also have to sit with the fear that my dog has cognitive decline because the walking pad may have woken her up tonight, but she’s been waking up in the middle of the night like this a lot lately. Right now, she’s pawing at me and wanting to play. I love her so much, more than those lavender high tops, and more than flying in dreams without the violent impulse behind the flying, and more than my smart tech that’s got me doing its bidding in the middle of the night, and maybe even more than the moon and the bats and the creek and the laccolith put together.
I mean, I love my dog and don’t know why she’s never in my dreams. It’s always some stand-in, like my childhood dog or a dog I don’t know who’s supposed to be her but isn’t. I want to be able to visit her in dreams every single night so we’re always together now and for the rest of my life.
I shouldn’t have had that pizza. Or that chocolate hummus. I am puffy and emotional, beyond the degree to which I am typically these things. It is dark. Even the walking pad has gone back to sleep. Something appears to be on fire on the news. The Magic 8 Ball says Outlook Not So Good. That should be on all the faces of its floaty thing these days. Outlook Not So Good. Outlook Not So Good. Outlook Not So Good. That floaty thing is an icosahedron, so I should technically say Outlook Not So Good twenty times, but I’ll spare you. Five times is already four times too many.
P.S. I also sat in the pizza somehow. A little of it. Messed up my workout jeans. But I took my shirt off, drank some milk, and listened to Kid Rock, which made everything OK.
Whateverality
I just called my partner my husband, and he was like I’m your partner not your husband, and I was like you’ve never taken issue with the word husband before, and he was like I am now and besides, he said, if I bring my husband into this, there’s going to be trouble, and I was like, you have a husband, and he was like, me as a husband not a husband I have, and I was like can we pretend like you have a husband and if so what’s he look like and is he into asexualish married nonbinary folks who sometimes lean into bambisexuality, and suddenly my partner was gone and I was sitting alone in the living room on the champagne-colored velvet sofa just as the sun was starting to rise and warm the creek and the horses and the laccolith, and I thought maybe I need a new word for my sexua-whateverthefuck this is.
Fun-House
The life partner and I are having an ongoing fight interspersed with listening to music in separate rooms. What happened, you ask? He tried to handle a medical bill three months after I first began asking him to do so. He insisted it wasn’t urgent and was feisty in a bad way every time I brought it up.
As a result, a couple of weeks ago, I almost got put into collections by the hospital and had to pay the bill in full before I could be seen by my immunologist.
But that’s not what the fight’s about because my window of tolerance for the life partner is larger than he could ever imagine.
The fight is about the fact that he caught a wild anxiety this morning, which happens from time to time, and called the insurance company to figure out why the claim had been rejected. He got in way over his head and couldn’t even identify the correct claim, which made the conversation with the representative go south fast.
He burst, I tell you burst, into my room in a panic with his phone in his hand and a tiny confused voice on the other end of the call, demanding that I help him immediately, which I did by taking over the entire situation and cutting him out of the conversation.
He’s trying to defend the indefensible. That’s what the fight is about. I hate it when our home becomes a series of fun-house mirrors reflecting anxiety and defensiveness, especially on a day when something good is actually happening in my life.
(I’m not sure the two phenomena are mutually exclusive. Any success I have seems to spike his anxiety and, somehow, his need to prove his worth through acting defensively toward me. Other things spike his anxiety, too, like The Rumproast in Chief, which means he’s been anxious about certain issues for a while now.)
What am I listening to? The Crystal Method, of course. I owe this band a debt of gratitude for getting my rear in gear where writing is concerned.
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.
Unfathomable
I remember when 1 million seemed unfathomable—the number of zeros strung along after the 1, as well as what they signified, impossible for me to envision.
I remember people telling me things were supposed to be awkward during what they called my awkward years. I’m not so sure I ever grew out of my awkward years, although I am no longer gangly and my teeth managed to grow in straight.
I used to run away from everything by climbing up a tree or running along an overgrown path to one of many hiding places. It’s not so easy these days to run away.
As soon as I think I’m good at something, someone comes along and reminds me I am not, then tells me the reminding is for my own good.
They tell me I know what I want to say when I write, but that I don’t know how to say it. They tell me my writing is uneven, slightly wrecked. Of course that’s the case, since my writing reflects my life. How could it be any more together than I am? And what’s better: writing that is even and predictable, or writing with a pulse—albeit sometimes weak and irregular—writing that moves under its own control and in ways you, and I, could never anticipate?
For a time after my mother’s death I forgot how little I like people. I thought it was her I disliked and that her death had freed me from that feeling. Turns out it had not.
I went to the grocery store yesterday to have a cheese sandwich. I looked around as I ate it. I had no idea what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Not one person in that store made any sense to me.
We are all wasting our lives in so many and varied ways.
Writing is just another way to waste time, but at least it allows me to keep a record of how I’ve wasted it. I will always know that yesterday I had a cheese sandwich and took a nap. I will always know the sadness I feel right now, even if one day I manage to move through and beyond it to something else—something that at this moment feels unfathomable and that I can’t yet see clearly.
Dana Henry Martin 