Seattle

Five Things That Have Happened to Me as a Female-Bodied Poet

  1. 2009. A prominent poet in Seattle agreed to work with me on my poetry. Before the appointment, he googled (from his IP address) the words “married” and “naked” in combination with my name. He then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. But he didn’t stop there. He created a fake blog username and trolled me on my site (again, from his IP address) for months, trashing everything I wrote, including my poems. He later told folks associated with a book publisher in the area to ignore and disregard me.

  2. 2015. In front of a large group of poets, a prominent Kansas City poet screamed that I wanted to take him behind a dumpster and fuck him. This occurred after months of what I thought was meaningful friendship and seemed to be spurred, at least in part, by the fact that I was close friends with a more prominent Kansas City poet. The outburst occurred in front of that poet. Eight years later, he would tell me that I’m the one who harmed him because I’m a reminder of who he was at that time, and he doesn’t want to think about being that person.

  3. 2023. A talented poet who’s part of a tight network of poets outside Kansas City interacted with me for months as he was healing from a serious health issue. I was going to be in the area, and he asked if we could meet. I planned to give him the rare Japanese printing press I’d recently purchased so he and his friends could use it to make chapbooks. Before I left for the trip, he sent me a postcard with a poem of his on the back about how he never gets the girl, then he blocked me on Facebook. I still don’t understand what the hell happened there, but I know it’s bullshit.

  4. 2024. A Seattle poet I’ve known since 2009 decided to attack and threaten me yesterday after fifteen years of friendship and poetry camaraderie. We both lived in Seattle for years and spent time together in person on numerous occasions. Yesterday, he told me (and many others) that I’m cheating on my husband with him. That is not the case. I’ve posted screenshots of his accusations and the conversation he’s referring to because he threatened to out me publicly. For what, praytell? There’s nothing to out other than his unacceptable behavior.

  5. 2009. A poet who was my mentor sexually assaulted me en route to my MFA program in 2009. I’ve discussed that situation at length, including in a fifty-thousand-word essay on my website that was published for more than five years. I managed to stay in poetry until 2015—through my fear and my shame and my lost faith in poets and poetry—then I left for seven years.

I returned to poetry in 2022 with one vow: to never let anyone silence me again, threaten me again, terrify me again, or defame me again. This is a hard commitment to make, but I’m doing it. My responses will be swift when abuses occur, like the one that happened yesterday.

May nothing like any of the above happen again. May poets live up to what they are attempting to do in and through poetry. May poets who are women, female-bodied, queer, and otherwise marginalized find safety in poetry and among poets. May poets stand up for each other when it matters rather than adding ha-ha emoticons to posts in which poets are harassing and threatening other poets. May we find ourselves. May all these things come to pass.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Yesterday Jon and I stood on a pier at Juanita Beach Park for a long, long time, waiting for the beavers to return to their den. We’d seen one of them bobbing along the far edge of the water, its wet furry head above, then below, then above, then below the surface. With only the head intermittently in sight, I had to imagine the rest of the creature, its chunky body and short legs, I supposed, paddling awkwardly beneath.

Sometimes the head would come up under a lily pad, which would become an impromptu hat for a foot or two before the plant’s tether would pull the leaf away and the wet furry head would again be revealed.

This is how night should come, I thought.

Jon asked if I was ready to leave yet. He becomes impatient with nature just as nature is about to reveal something to or about him. He likes to move briskly through landscapes because that keeps him in his safe, usual thoughts. Stopping poses a risk because that is when nature can change a person.

But stopping is important. We need to allow ourselves to let nature have a say in how we think about and move through the world. Just ask William Stafford, who urges us to let your whole self drift down like a breath and learn / its way down through the trees … Stand here till all that / you were can wander away and come back slowly, / carrying a strange new flavor into your life.

The beaver was nowhere in sight but we located a mother duck with six ducklings beneath her. She looked like an upside-down Easter basket with all its goodies underneath. She had found a nice spot to camp out for the night and was drifting in and out of sleep, opening her eyes whenever the grass moved, a small bird came near, or a firecracker was set off. I wondered then to what degree wildlife across the United States collectively worries on the Fourth of July. It must sound like the end of the world. Or hunting season.

Jon asked several more times if I was ready. “You ready yet, Bud? Ready now?”

This is how night should come, I thought again. It should come slowly over the trees, above the grasses. It should settle on the water just like this. It should guide the beavers gently and slowly through the water until they find themselves at the worn pathway leading to their den, where they pull themselves onto the mud and wriggle across decaying, tamped foliage, making the final turn into their home and out of our sight.

Yes, it should come just like this.

Last night is the first time in weeks I have not felt anxious and panicky as soon as the sun goes down. Since my test results, I have been so worried about what the diagnosis will be, what comes next and how my life could be severely altered or truncated. As soon as the light begins to fade, my heart rate and blood pressure have begun to rise. I have spent every night in a body that hums with fear. Fear has become its own composition with no end, no rests, no shifts in pitch or volume. Just its continual drone, its dissonant multi-tonal vibration.

But last night, night seemed natural. I was not afraid. I did not kick and scream my way into sleep or try to fight my way out of it once I was there. Last night I was a beaver. I was grass. I was water. I was that whole gloppy corner of the world taking up the darkness and whispering, Yes, yes.

On Hearing Cicadas in the Hail

We’re having another winter storm in Seattle. All day, I’ve watched the wind manhandle the trees in my neighborhood. Our power has flickered repeatedly, as if it’s flirting with the notion of going out entirely. Now hail is clinking (make that clanking, since the hail is getting larger) against our home’s gutters and windows. I just moved my car to the bottom of our hill, which means I should at least have a shot at making it to the GRE testing center tomorrow morning, when the weather is supposed to be even worse than it is now.

When I got out of my car after safely nestling it on a side street at the foot of the hill, I noticed a familiar sound. At first, I thought it was cicadas, but there aren’t any cicadas here. Even if there were, they wouldn’t be out this time of year. Still, the momentary misimpression of hearing them stirred something in me—a longing for the Midwest, for late-night walks down quaint, flat streets, the bark of the oaks and elms and maples and magnolias covered with them. The surround-sound of them above us, beside us, near and far. Every morning, the rattling was gone. Then at dusk, they’d start up with their modulated drone, vibrating their tymbals and turning their bodies into diminutive chambers of sound.

But I digress. The sound, as I was saying, wasn’t cicadas. It was the hail. I’m not sure how hail created that kind of din, but it did. While I walked back up the hill to my house, shielded from the hail by my umbrella, I felt happy as I thought about the joy of plucking abandoned cicada exoskeletons from branches and tree trunks, something I relished as a child in Oklahoma and as an adult in Kansas City. (Aaah, the wonder of their split-open backs, banded abdomens and finely haired bodies. Their alien eyes. Their hunched posture. Their clawed and crooked front arms. And oooh, how lithe they must be to crawl out of such a thin casing without destroying it. And wow, the thought of them rising up out of themselves—soft-bodied with pale-gold wings and red eyes and black bands on top of their heads—and wafting on the breeze like miniature German flags.)

But I also felt sad about moving so far away from them, both in terms of distance and, increasingly, time. As more time passes, I will forget about cicadas (and all the other details of my old Midwestern life), recalling them less often and with less specificity than I do now. One day, I will hear hail that sounds just like those ugly little racket-makers, and I won’t even make the connection.

But that’s what we do, right? Move forward. It’s the only choice we have.

So, with every step I took toward what is now my home, I exhaled. The tiny droplets of water and ice I breathed out into the cold night hung under the arc of my umbrella until I stepped forward, leaving even my last breath behind.