St. George

Salt Pyramid

In Hurricane, Utah, two dozen or so children and their parents were playing music and cheering drivers on from the side of the road. They were waving homemade signs that said things like “You Matter,” “You Are Loved,” and “Keep Going.” We drove past them twice on our way to run an errand. I cried twice, that I did.

I love my new phone Aluminium so much that I have a special stuffed dragon whose only job is to cradle her all day. Was she in that cradle just now? No. Did I knock her over and make her fall on my keyboard screen first? Yes. Is she OK? Too soon to tell. She may be scratched. Her protective cover flap wasn’t pulled over her darling face. How do I feel about myself right now? Not super, dude.

I wrapped my king-sized chenille blanket around my waist and am wearing it like a sarong is how I am.

Sentence from my dream: Like gods in Greek myths, we are gilded, guilted, and gutted.

You’d think I’d put all my dopamine to better use, but no. I make fiddly spreadsheets.

I’m doing a deep dive into facts and fictions about the Osage orange is how I am.

A list of my bad habits:

1. All of them.

Had a wild night. Didn’t take my mascara off until 10:12 p.m.

I got stars on my ceiling, baby. I got a nebula. Come over and be one with everything.

I wrote this in 2008 when everything hit the fan. Well, not everything, clearly. There’s a lot more on that fan now, and more is hitting it every day:

“If you have made the choice to be a poet, you have made the choice to enter into a certain way of being alive. Don’t forget that. If we forget that, we are lost.”

I put my hoodie on backwards and had the life partner zipper me to my office chair until I got my chapbook No Sea Here finalized and off to Moon in the Rye Press.

It worked. The file has been finalized.

And I’m still zippered in. I kind of like it. Am I in a dominance and submission relationship with poetry? Of course I am.

The new fire alarms the life partner installed because the old fire alarms kept going off In the middle of the night just went off in the middle of the night. I fell over trying to get my jeans on so I could assess the situation. My left foot got caught up on the hole in the knee, and down I went. Lexi is in wild-animal panic mode. The life partner is basically sleepwalking around the house in a daze, still wearing only his boxer briefs.

I just read a poem about birds by Lisa Bickmore to two birders and their pet bird. Don’t tell me poems can’t be part of our daily lives.

The life partner is outside with two birders and an actual bird who are applying bird-safe film to our windows. Huge thanks to Great Salt Lake Audubon for helping us get this film up before the winter birds arrive.

For those of us who enjoy a broader than average* spectrum in terms of mood, energy, and intellect—which can be both a gift and, at times, a difficulty—you’ll be happy to know the fall equinox is tomorrow. That means day lengths will level out, so we will no longer be in freefall day after day where light levels are concerned. You did it. We did it. Now let’s rock fall bigitme.

—

* Whatever average is. That depends on who’s making that assessment and according to what criteria.

𐎼𐎤 𐎠𐎱𐎤 𐎥𐎨𐎱𐎤
𐎼𐎤 𐎡𐎸𐎱𐎭
𐎼𐎨𐏂𐎧𐎮𐎸𐏂 𐎠𐎨𐎱

I’m trying to figure out cuneiform syllabograms in case we need to learn a secret language, but I don’t think any of this is right. It’s supposed to read:

we are fire
we burn
without air

Fall hard? Get up harder.

The life partner to me just now: Will you smell my thumb and tell me if it smells like peanut butter?

My heels are so rough I tore a big gash in my fitted sheet while I was sleeping. Again.

I wake with my underwear somehow so much the victim of overnight shifting that it’s 100% not where it’s designed to be and 100% where it’s not designed to be.

I may be the Utahn Utahns don’t want, but I’m still a Utahn. The past few days have proven that to me. I’m saying things like “my community” and meaning it.

From MedPage Today: Doc Has Sex Mid-Surgery.

This country has jumped the shark.

I was told this morning that I’m borrowing the label of sanism. Howso? I live with trauma and bipolar. I’m not appropriating anything. How can anyone have read my poetry and my writing, including my writing here, for the past two years, as this man did, and not understand that I have mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experience?

A male poet just messaged me to insist their sanist behavior isn’t sanist. It was a vitriolic message based on my posts yesterday about the forms sanism takes. This is an accomplished poet many of you read with, admire, and engage with daily.

Social media was 4channed years ago. Our culture in general is more 4chan than most of us realize. Our politics are def 4chan.

This week, I’ve been told I should be euthanized. I’ve been told I’m spreading hatred. I’ve been told I’m the problem (in reference to the shooting). I’ve been told I seek easy answers. I’ve been told I want to stay in my comfort zone. I’ve been told I’m responsible for Southern Utah’s culture, including its flaws and limitations.

We say we don’t know anything about 4chan culture, but so many of us are 4chan to a T. Like the boys and young men the 4chan subculture targets, we’ve made a hard turn away from compassion and toward a nihilism that has no end other than destruction—of each other and the world.

I’ll never believe my life has no purpose and love has no meaning, so 4chan me all you want. You won’t turn me.

To every thing there is a hot take, and a time for every hot take under Heaven. But once you have actual information, the time for your hot takes is over.

Intelligence in part means seeking out and synthesizing new information rather than clinging doggedly to what’s outdated.

What you left inside me: nail clippings, cigarette butts, used condoms, whiskey, anything that oozed from you and your friends.

When I die, preserve my mouth so science can thaw it one day and remember what it sounded like when people fought, when they screamed.

Print me out some new lungs so I can scream better, scream harder, scream longer.

Brian Kilmeade, are you sorry? Are you really, really sorry? Why do I have a hard time believing those words just slipped from your lips and that you know the first thing about what it means to be compassionate?

I’m commiserating with the screeching white-tailed antelope ground squirrel is how I am.

Men, which I mean conceptually, stop trying to roll your word-stones into my mouth. It’s a Sisyphean task, and I won’t gag on your “wisdom.”

I’m listening to The Crystal Method’s album Tweekend is how I am.

The things you don’t know about are often things you don’t know about because you can afford to not know about them. Ask someone who’s affected by the things you don’t know about. Odds are, they know about those things because they can’t afford not to know about those things. Your erasures and omissions are another form of othering, one that enables discrimination.

I rolled a ketogenic pizza up like a burrito and am eating the whole thing is how I am.

Poets: Be aware of intrinsic sanism in the spaces you create when you bring poets together to share work, to create, to teach, and to learn. Try to identify sanism the way you are able to identify other forms of discrimination. Try to create spaces that welcome everyone, even those with mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experiences.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said during a segment about those affected by the July 24 executive order, which affects those who are unhoused, who have mental-health diagnostic labels, and who have substance-abuse issues: Or involuntary lethal injection or something. Just kill them.

It gets worse: Joseph Massey wrote a poem eulogizing Charlie Kirk.

I’m listening to Depeche Mode’s “Clean” on repeat is how I am.

An unexpected Duran Duran song is like a drink of cold water straight from a hose in this dumpster-fire country.

You know who tells you the news before law enforcement and news outlets? Dictators. That’s who.

I dreamed poetry was a pile of salt the size of a pyramid, and I was forced to eat all of it.

Folks who discard you when you speak your truth? Duck ’em. Of course I don’t mean duck. That’s a typo. But come to think of it, also duck ’em.

I’m watching a bat drink tomato juice is how I am.

I love that moment when someone sees me as safe and code switches while interacting with me.

I dreamed a poet was making me do pull-ups in a doorway and yelling, You need strong arms to write strong poems.

Hate speech is never free.

My seer stones tell me there’s going to be a lot of unfriending and blocking on Facebook over the next few days.

The Venezuelan boat turned around. It turned around and we shot it. And here’s a face cream. And here’s an AI that’s made to be you and that can fix you by being you even more than you are you. And here’s a fob you can use to secretly record everyone. And here’s a deal for seniors. And here are some fitness classes. And here’s a thing for stripping the leaves off rosemary. And we shot the boat. And we hit it. And it sank. After it turned around. We shot it better than ourselves, better than we are at shooting. We are AI made to strip the world. We are recording you. Seniors are a deal now more than ever. We make them wear our faces. Our fitness depends on them. Leave secretly or we will hit you, cream you. After you turn around, keep turning. You’re out of thyme.

At least my brother gave me a unisex first name. And my family says it the way that’s typically associated with the masculine pronunciation, “DAY-nuh,” as opposed to the feminine pronunciation, “DAH-nuh.”

Why did my brother name me? There’s a long story behind that. Of course there is. In my family, there’s a long story behind everything. Our stories are like arm fat just waiting to be squeezed out from behind a tightened tourniquet and into the light of day.

Your memory keeps my body on its knees.

It’s only 80 degrees here in the desert this morning WHERE IS MY PARKA

It’s like everyone’s trying to get through the gate even though there’s no fence.

Why didn’t anyone tell me there are more than six stress patterns in poetry? That’s all I’ve been working with for years. I didn’t even know about the existence of the amphibrach, antibacchius, bacchius, cretic, molossus, and trilbrach. Who here knew about any or all of those?

I mean verse is right there in the word for all that is. It’s not the uniprose, for crying out loud.

I just saw a horrifying ad here on Facebook for an AI twin. It’s supposed to be a copy of your mind and train you to know yourself more deeply than you know yourself—by being you. Get me out of this skibidi timeline.

It just occurred to me that establishment poetry is a function of institutionalism. Institutionalists created it. Institutionalists perpetuate it. Institutionalists seek it out, dream about it, crave it, feel incomplete without it. It’s like a government in that way. Or a religion.

People are yelling at Mitt Romney in a Salt Lake Tribune post here on Facebook, and I’m all ready to go defend my man.

My doctor’s medical assistant sang me “The Name Game” song using my name today. So yeah. I’m going back there.

I found a fascinating thesis about Communism, poetry, and the Oklahoma Writers’ Project from 1935–1938.

Corn moon has everyone acting happy in St. George, Utah.

Corn moon had me nightmaring about poets in the wee hours. I was doubled over from physical and existential pain on the floor of a library in Cedar City, Utah. Poets were kicking me as they walked by. A librarian finally opened a nearby elevator and rolled me into it so I’d be out of the way as the poets continued having their important discussions about poetry.

Trans people are people.

I see the poetry establishment as a nucleus. As cells age, the nucleus of each cell accumulates abnormal molecules that are toxic to the cells themselves. So yes. The poetry establishment—the core of poetry so many aspire to, which is part real and part myth—is a nucleus, and an old one at that.

He’s a comics scholar and one-time critical theorist who’s into graphic medicine and knows which way the toilet paper roll goes? Oh yeah, baby.

/me bites lip

I love the folks over at Bluesky.

This afternoon, I was listening to my favorite Bo Burnham song, “All Eyes on Me,” when the life partner interrupted me to tell me that—wait for it—I need to remember to change out the new fire alarms in 2035.

I’ll be dead by then, he said. You’re going to have to remember to do this.

And this is what I mean when I say ours is a household informed by various and sundry anxieties.

I’m watching an American mink open up Easter eggs filled with treats. This will carry me through the night and into tomorrow.

Through me, my mother is half alive. Through my mother, I am half dead.

I just misread COVID vaccine as mood swing is how I am.

In rooms full of men, my body becomes something other than my own.

Every word I write makes the world both more and less accessible.

Bless the birds who are migrating thousands of miles to their winter lands.

What light is left in this world.

We are ghosts haunting our present with our past.

Moving Mountains

Utah Senator Dan McCay, who shepherded the bill banning pride flags in Utah’s schools and government buildings through the State Senate, took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to attack the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what he wrote:

“Bye Felicia. Sundance promotes porn. Sundance promotes alternative lifestyles. Sundance promotes anti-LDS themes.”

Sundance is considering leaving Utah, where it’s been held since its creation in 1978. The ban on pride flags could ensure Sundance’s departure from the state.

This is how Utah’s lawmakers are behaving these days, just a couple of years after cloaking their homophobia and transphobia in purported support for federal protections for same-sex marriage. They wanted to be seen as the good guys back then. Not anymore. What’s infected our government at the highest levels has infected Utah lawmakers and many of those who live in the state.

Almost three years ago, I contacted every LGBTQ+ organization and group in Utah to address the hatred and outright bigotry several Southern Utah lawmakers in places like St. George and Leeds were espousing through far-right groups with militia ties. The only organization that responded—the largest one in the state—told me they had decided not to address the issues with our lawmakers. They thought everything would blow over and wouldn’t amount to anything. They perceived themselves as the leaders of Utah’s queer community. As such, they were encouraging everyone else who was queer to stay quiet, too. Like me. I was told not to talk about what was happening.

I told them they were wrong. I’m from Oklahoma and have lived through this. I lived through the AIDS epidemic, the Reagan years, and more. I lived in Kansas and know the Koch brothers and their playbook, which was being carried out in Washington County, Utah, where I lived and across the country in rural areas with a couple of tweaks: guns and violence and, in the case of Southern Utah, with a post-Mormon hatred that was unbounded. I said what was happening in Southern Utah was going to spread to the rest of the state—and quickly. They didn’t believe me. They were Salt Lake City-centric and didn’t see the power lawmakers in Southern Utah had or understand what they were capable of.

I told them anti-trans legislation was going to hit them like a tsunami, and they had a responsibility to address what was happening before it was too late. Weeks later, they flew the director of the organization down to Ivins, a town just outside St. George. People with power and influence in the queer community were invited to a mansion to discuss what to do, how to move forward. It was a private event. Members of the queer community at large were not invited or even told it was happening. Stay quiet was pretty much what they came up with at that meeting. Several people who attended also discussed the past of one of the alt-right group leaders, which involved extremely inappropriate behavior with her female students. (She’d been a high-school teacher in the area at one point.) The group wasn’t talking about that publicly, either.

In a matter of months, nine anti-trans pieces of legislation were signed into Utah law by Utah’s Governor. More laws have been passed since then. Queer organizations have been hobbled and/or gutted. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has enacted more hateful and harmful policies that target queer members and their families. Queer folks are being threatened, disowned, harmed in myriad ways, erased, and more—more than ever. And now lawmakers are telling everyone in the state what they really think, what they thought all along but didn’t feel they could say.

I’m not a seer. I didn’t see into the future. I’ve just seen all of this before. I’ve lived through it, survived it, and been shaped by it as someone who’s nonbinary and queer. I didn’t stay quiet like the queer organization told me to. I wrote two letters that The Salt Lake Tribune published, one of which discussed a column by Pat Buchanan that ran in The Daily Oklahoman on Oct. 17, 1990. It was titled “Homosexuals Mainstreaming Satanism.” I compared that piece to what was currently happening at meetings and rallies in the St. George area. I also pitched stories to local reporters and provided background material and comments on several stores. This only served to drive a bigger wedge between me and the queer community who didn’t seem to want me or my voice to exist. Ironic? Yes. It’s ironic.

Even with everything unfolding the way I said it would, only worse than I could have imagined, I’m still not welcome in Utah’s queer circles. Last fall, I attended a Zoom meeting for members of NAMI Utah to discuss changes within the organization. That meeting was comprised primarily of queer participants. They recognized my name from the pieces that ran in the Trib, and they thought I was there to glean information about the organization and report on it in The Salt Lake Tribune. I wasn’t. I attended the meeting because I’m in training to become a peer specialist here in Arizona through NAMI, because I’m a mental-health advocate who stays informed about issues that affect mental-health care in my communities, and because I live with mental-health issues and am as deserving of support as anyone else in Utah who lives with mental health issues.

The folks in the NAMI group also believed I was a journalist because they apparently don’t understand the distinction between editorial content and letters to the editor. I’m a poet and writer who’s worked as a medical writer and health advocate. I have a degree in journalism but am not working as a journalist. I certainly wouldn’t “inflitrate” a NAMI meeting. (Please.) Or use my full name in my Zoom profile if I was trying to be sneaky.

The group moderator contacted me individually after the meeting through email to admonish me for being unethical, to insinuate I was there to undermine the organization, and to ask what I planned to do with what I learned during the meeting. It was a stunningly inappropriate communication that was never properly addressed by NAMI Utah’s interim director. She passed it off to a lower-level volunteer as opposed to addressing the infraction herself as the organization’s leader. Here were my concerns, in short: You can’t use an email list your organization maintains to gather information about a member and reach out to them to ask probing accusatory questions. Doing so is discriminatory, borders on bullying and intimidation, and jeopardizes the well-being of a fellow NAMI member who’s seeking inclusion and support.

This is where I’m at in Utah. I’m an advocate whose advocacy is unwelcome and unwanted in both the queer and mental-health communities. The fear that permeates Southern Utah and drives folks to paranoia and conspiracy theories is embedded in the state as a whole, even in the very communities many Utah lawmakers want to eradicate. Queer folks and folks with mental-health issues need to learn how to stand up for themselves and each other, how to bring in and welcome outside voices and perspectives, and how to be true advocates and allies who don’t end up doing more harm than good in their respective organizations. Rolling over, fear, othering bordering on shunning, and baseless accusations aren’t going to get us anywhere, nor is silencing queer voices in the name of queer solidarity. We need to start moving mountains more than one spoonful at a time. And we certainly don’t need to be creating more and larger mountains.

Utah has work to do. We have work to do. We need to show up. My voice isn’t going anywhere, as much as I’ve been asked to remove it from the state, even by some folks in Southern Utah’s poetry community who’ve called my work inappropriate, graphic, and pornographic (just like the Sundance Film Festival, apparently). Hell, I’ve been called a pedophile several times by my neighbors up in South Jordan and later in Toquerville, where I still live part of the year. (One of Utahns’ big go-tos is calling anyone they don’t like a “pedophile,” which is sad given all the actual acts of pedophilia in the state.)

I’ve heard it all at this point. I’m surviving it all on my own, outside of any Utah-based communities focused on support and advocacy. I hope Utah can come back from what’s happening right now. I do. I feel for folks who are being crushed by all of this. But when a bulldozer’s coming, you have to warn others and get out of the way until you can dismantle that bulldozer. You’ll get nowhere if you pretend it’s not coming or throw others from your community in its path or tell them you don’t need their help. Communities who are harmed cannot harm others within their communities. That’s just a reframing of the very paradigm that caused those communities harm in the first place.

Wildness

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter. I want another d or n. Something. Maybe a second i or one of those slashes right through the middle that allows the word to be at once one thing and two things. Wild|ness. That still doesn’t look right.

I had a thing to say about poetry, a quip or an aphorism that I came up with while I was making the bed. Then I saw my husband’s blood on a white pillowcase and lost my train of thought. He cut himself working on the house and didn’t think he needed a bandage. He needed a bandage. Because he had no bandage, the pillow became his bandage.

There’s something about the blood-red of blood on the bright white of white that makes the non-brain parts of my body react. To what, I don’t know. I saw a beaten woman bleed all over her white eyelet skirt at substitute teacher training last year in St. George, Utah. But this goes back further than that.

There are also, of course, the white floral handkerchiefs women used to carry that had crimson berries sewn onto them to disguise the blood they were coughing up because they had TB. But that’s not it, either.

It’s something from my childhood, something I saw or experienced. Blood drowning white cloth. White cloth destroyed by blood. Frantically trying to get bloodstains out of white fabric.

My mother knew how to do that. She removed nearly all traces of what happened to her, what she survived. She had a wildness that couldn’t be beaten or shaken or ripped out of her. I mean another word there, not ripped—a word I can’t say here on Facebook. Remove the i and one p. Add an a. Yeah, that word. By my uncle and later by my father.

Wildness is one of those words that looks like it’s missing a letter.

Trauma is one of those words that looks like it’s packed with bodies.

Mother is one of those words that looks like it can be anything at all. Moth. Ether. Mote. Other. Tome. Moot. Mere. Mete. Hoe. Tooth. Hoot. Root. Home.

But most of all: There, there. There, there.

And the blood washes down the drain like always.

Anti-Trans Is Anti-Humanity

Last fall, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Salt Lake Tribune in response to several Southern Utah politicians speaking at a meeting in which LGBTQ+ folks were repeatedly called evil and satanic. Members of the community left numerous disturbing comments in response to that letter. Seventy percent of the comments were deleted by The Tribune‘s staff because they were threatening or otherwise violated the publication’s comment guidelines. I saw some of those comments before they were deleted. I’ve been terrified ever since.

Similar comments were left on stories in other publications that discussed LGBTQ+ rights, including stories I was quoted in or otherwise participated in. Those comments were also deleted, but that doesn’t change the mindset of those in our community who have the feelings they have and who threaten, defame, harass, dehumanize, and discriminate against those in the LGBTQ+ community for no reason other than the fact that we are LGBTQ+.

These community members are taking their cues from the politicians who have turned their attention to the trans community because being anti-trans is a good political strategy. It gets people whipped up in ways that catalyze people to act, often without thinking, from shadowy places that all humans possess but that don’t need to govern our lives, determine our values, inform our beliefs, or control our behaviors.

What I mean is, fear, disgust, and loathing are all being conjured but not so we can explore those feelings and work through them to gain a better understanding of their origins. Instead, they’re being exploited, and words and actions that stem from these feelings are spreading like wildfire across parched land.

Who’s being destroyed? Not just trans folks. Not just the entire LGBTQ+ community. It’s everyone. Everyone who’s been discriminated against. Everyone who doesn’t have equality. Everyone who’s made gains and is now losing ground.

And everyone who’s harming others.

When our common ground is burned, our shared humanity singed beyond recognition, we all end up having nothing.

Anti-trans legislation will most likely be one of the top agenda items for conservative politicians in 2024. We’re already seeing a wave of anti-trans legislation and anti-trans language and attitudes across the United States, as well as here in Utah. Bills and emergency rules are getting more expansive, more disturbing, and more life-threatening.

At the same time, people are making statements that are more violent, caustic, and harmful than ever.

Earlier this month, a community member in St. George, Utah, stood up and told city officials that it’s not harassment and discrimination against LGBTQ+ folks which is causing us to die by suicide because we’re all mentally ill anyway. The implication is that we can be treated however by whomever because we’re broken, defective, and disposable.

Last month, a local politician who spoke at the meeting I mentioned above shared a cartoon on social media depicting the LGBTQ+ community as being a Trojan Horse full of pedophiles. That’s not about “protecting” children, which is the line these politicians use when they propose anti-trans legislation. It’s literally an elected official characterizing every person who’s LGBTQ+ as a pedophile.

At an event last week, a fellow volunteer approached me and said that “we” are supposed to be boycotting Bud Light because the company has a transgender spokesperson. We? We who? What we? That’s not a we that includes me. That’s not a we that will ever include me. And that’s not a space where I’m welcome or safe.

Where am I welcome or safe these days? Where are any LGBTQ+ folks welcome and safe? We’re running out of spaces that are inclusive.

I was recently told that the solution is for me to conform, adapt, tolerate, or otherwise learn to live compatibly with the very same people in this community who are attacking the LGBTQ+ community, who have attacked me, and who are making it impossible for LGBTQ+ folks to feel and be safe here. I don’t know what the solution is, but that’s not it.