Trauma

dif/Fused Ancestry in Ardmore, Oklahoma

For my dif/Fused Ancestry project, I’m mapping sites where I want to collect soil samples for my father. One of those is the Masonic Temple in Ardmore, Oklahoma. I won’t go into why that is an especially painful site for me. If you want more detail, read the section after the break below. I’ll just say that I need soil from that location.

When I looked up the temple today, I saw that it was torn down in 1990. I didn’t know that. Why not? Because time tends to stand still once we leave a place and never return. What happened in that building can never happen again because it’s pretty much a vacant lot now. There’s some fencing and what looks like construction materials being stored there. There are also big murals on the wall that joined the temple with the adjacent building. One of the murals is a variation on Rosie the Riveter.

We change places, and places change again and again. What was is no longer. In this case, seeing the empty lot, even just on Google Maps, is helping me release the past. I’m sure that feeling will be even more powerful when I collect soil from the site.

This is something I hadn’t anticipated about dif/Fused Ancestry, that it would be an experiential and visceral way of realizing time has passed, things have changed, places don’t have to be what they were forever, and we don’t have to be the same forever, either, because of those places. What better way to get that message through to the body than by digging in the soil and transforming it into art.

—

Ardmore is the epicenter of sex and child sex trafficking in Oklahoma. A few years ago, the Department of Homeland Security had a presence in the area. They taught local residents how to identify trafficking and report it. In 2022, there was a huge bust at Lake Texoma, where my father and his best friend had properties adjacent to one another. Men, including powerful men, were caught in a trafficking case that involved a “party” at two hotels.

Oklahoma has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in the country. I didn’t know that until I started researching the Lake Texoma bust. The crossroads area, where several highways intersect, is especially vulnerable, as are towns with transient populations, like colleges and military bases. My hometown had both at one point and the highway leading south from it fed into the crossroads. My father opened a business in my hometown called The Crossroads. Probably just a coincidence. After he died, I asked my mother why he liked that name. She said he liked it because the crossroads is where you summon the devil.

I have no evidence that my father was involved in any kind of trafficking beyond the ways in which he did so covertly with me. But it has been going on for decades. And it was facilitated by the availability of CB radios, which my father and his best friend both had. And he did have me talking to truckers on the highways down that way when I was in grade school. (They’d ask for me by my CB handle, Rainbow Unicorn.) And he did spend a lot of time down there alone with his buddies.

Since that bust in 2022, I’ve wondered if the temple was involved in trafficking in some way. Several lodges across the country have been caught up in such activities. I don’t think I’ll ever know. He may just have been involved in other criminal activity down there. He was always hustling. His whole life was a hustle until he got hustled by his own brother and died.

Images: 1. A photo of the Masonic Temple before it was torn down (credit: Mark Hilton). 2. A Google Maps screenshot showing the lot now, along with the murals on the brick wall of the adjacent building. There’s a butterfly you can take selfies in front of, a variation on Rosie the Riveter, and an image of an athlete titled “Ardmore Strongman.”

Post Oaks of Oklahoma

I met Scott LaMascus last night in Oklahoma City at McBride Center Writers, the generative workshop he and Aaron Pogue lead at Oklahoma Christian University. It was swell. I mean, my heart is swollen, and not in a cardiomegaly way but rather in a love way from that Big Oklahoma Love I’ve missed so much.

Everyone at the workshop was incredible, not only in terms of what they wrote but also in how they received other group members’ work. Selfishly, I want this for myself and for others in the area where I currently live, Southern Utah. But I can’t do something like what Scott does. His fluency with both poetry and people is remarkable. His care and kindness, coupled with his attunement to poetry and the craft of writing poems, is singular.

On the drive there from Tulsa, I almost rear-ended a semi because it almost rear-ended a gnarly, gloppy tar truck that decided to stop in the middle of the highway. I was like, Of course this would happen in the city where my father grew up! That horrible little tar truck is as monstrous as he was!

On my way back, I kid you not, Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome came on the radio—yes, in Oklahoma that really happened—just as a barred owl woke for the night, emerged from a tree by the side of the highway right in front of my car, then glided over the other lane and disappeared into the green belt.

Pines of Rome is one of my favorite classical works. I listened to it all the time in high school, volume cranked the way my mother liked it so she could hear it from the dining room where she spent most of her time.

My mother was in that music last night. She was in that owl. She was the response to the tar truck and to my fear and to my anger at my father for wrecking everything.

I’m telling you facts now, so listen. You are in that music. You are in that owl. Everything moves toward holiness, toward magic and mystery, which are synonyms for miracle and love. Even places desecrated by people and their actions, by people like my father, want to heal, have no choice but to move in the direction of healing, because healing never leaves people or places or this Earth or this universe. It never leaves, even when it seems like it’s gone.

I had new tires on the car. The brakes had been serviced. I didn’t hit the semi, and the semi didn’t hit the tar truck. I also didn’t hit the owl. Last night, Respighi’s composition about pine trees in Rome was an ecstatic work about the Post Oaks of Oklahoma and what moves through them, especially in the spirited night, where all is and will be and always has been both amuletic and talismanic.

Also, on the drive home, I identified the issue with my manuscript Thoracopagus, the one I decided is missing that Graviton quality it needs. My realization was that the thoracopagus doesn’t represent the connection between me and my mother, which is how it’s framed now. It’s me and me. I’m the thoracopagus coming to terms with being of my mother but also of my father. In Crude, I turn my father into Hades and, later, into the devil. I can’t just leave him in that state. I have to keep haunting him the way he haunts me until he’s not me and I no longer feel like a monster or like I’m evil — two beliefs that have been tucked away in my mind my whole life.

I’m going to need all the amulets and talismans I can get to write about that, meaning every emanation of my mother and her family that inhabits this red earth.

The Good News

Things are shit in the world, but they’re looking up here in Toquerville, Utah. Check out all the good news:

  1. The sheriff who was nasty to me when I was traumatized and manic resigned.

  2. The bookstore in Hurricane where part of my mania played out in 2023 is under new ownership, so I feel like I can go in there again.

  3. The neighbor who wrapped his house, his car, and himself in American flags has moved.

  4. Only one truck rolled coal at me when I was out today.

  5. I saw two dozen baby goats by the side of the road.

  6. The pond at my neighbor’s house has been repaired and filled.

  7. The feral peacocks have returned to the pond.

Like Him

Like father, like daughter is the most terrifying thing anyone could say to me. I was raised as a daughter. I was raised as his. Whenever someone catches me doing something he would do, or when I see those similarities myself, I feel like the floor of my life is dropping out from beneath me and I have to hope I’ll keep spinning until there’s a floor to stand on again. I used to say my biggest fear wasn’t death, it was living with my father for eternity. Even worse would be living as him for eternity. Even a second is too long to move through the world the way he did.

By Dirt, by Blood, by Oil

I could have called my family by its dirt. I could have called it by its blood. But it’s oil I settled on, the oil that extracted something from us as a family and as Oklahomans even as we came for it this way and that.

How oil turned to paper money then burned. How it burned us in the process.

I could have called my family by its horses. I could have called us by our broken land, our busted hope, our anger, our crimes, our laughter, our deaths, our abuses, our bruises, our fires—I mean real ones we set, places we took a match to when they stopped being to our liking. That includes our own bodies.

But it was always oil, my family, even before it knew it was oil.

Image: My great-grandfather and my grandfather on my mother’s side along with their horses. Either Altus or Headrick, Oklahoma, date unknown, probably 1920s.

Killer Tomato

Colton Moser, Mosa’ati Moa, Timothy Jones

I feel like y’all’s y’alls should be a thing, like, I’m talking about y’all and y’all’s y’alls.

I got on my smart scale for the first time in just over two months, and it was like A lot of the numbers here are totally different than they were the last time you were on the scale or something to that effect. And then a big message popped up that said IS THIS THE SAME PERSON WHO USUALLY USES THIS SCALE?

For the love of …. not smart, scale. Not a smart thing to say at all. FFS, yes it’s me. It’s my weight and my visceral fat number and my subcu-you fuck all the way off, scale. It’s mine mine mine all mine.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam

My condition is not your insult. So first, let’s stop using the psychiatric as a metaphor for the awful. Politicians, celebrities, those who have platform need to stop doing this and explain why they are not using mental illness as a way of putting someone down. — Susanne Paola Antonetta

We all need to stop doing this, and we all need to explain why we’ve stopped. — Dana Henry Martin

I feel like someone’s nailed tack strip to my brain is how I am.

The Imam of the Utah Islamic Center was targeted in a shooting Monday in Sandy, Utah. This country is swimming in the fetid waters of hatred. Hate speech turns into action turns into violence turns us into something other than, less than, human. I love Utah. What I hate is that this happened here.

Woke up. Read something sanist. Read something ableist. Read something racist. Read something islamaphobic. Read something transphobic. I’m not making a random list. This is what I read on Facebook when I woke up. I’m not talking about the news. I’m talking about what some folks here are writing in their posts and comments. My body has flipped inside out to protect itself. If you see a blobby many-organed thing coming at you, it’s me, Inside-Out Dana.

In my dream, someone keeps calling Dee Jay Tee a killer tomato, and I’m here for it.

I just read penpal as penile is how I am.

A floating piece of lint just scared me is how I am.

You died. I changed my hair.

Somehow, and I don’t know how, I ended up working out in jeans today is how I am.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kid Rock make me want to swear off milk, throw out my jeans, and adopt a sedentary lifestyle.

Feeling well-seen by certain folks in poetry means everything to me. I’d call you out by name, but I don’t want to make things weird.

You can’t block the dead on Facebook.

American robins, flushed from cottonwoods flanking the creek, have settled in my honey locust. They are singing. They don’t know how not to.

I had to get out all seven of my essential oil sniffers at once is how I am.

They were out of regular headaches, so I had to pick up a cluster ice-pick headache instead. Who knew this product was even on the market? 0/10. Do not recommend.

I am fucking feral rn is how I am.

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.

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.

One Life

Years ago, Tyrone Williams wrote that the poet who harmed me (and others) suffered two “deaths”—a social death and a cultural death. If Williams were still alive, I’d tell him what I suffered: one life I can’t even stop living, one life that feels like an emotional and physical battle every day, one life where I’ve lost trust in everyone, one life that just won’t end.

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.