The Others

The last lines of Linda Gregg’s poem “The Girl I Call Alma” read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scar me,
              not you.

But the first edition of the book, which I have, has a typo. Those lines read:

              Tell me we are one
              and that it’s the others who scare me,
              not you.

For years, I thought the poem with the typo was the correct version. It resonates with me because of my trauma history. Being scared. Being scared. And wanting the person who’s scaring me not to be the person who’s scaring me. Father, mother, like the parents in Sharon Olds’ poem “Satan Says.” Like that. And more. And others. And this always-fear like the fear Hannah Gadsby talks about, only it’s not just a fear of rooms full of men. It’s people. People do such harm. They are terrifying. Maybe Jon’s right. Maybe I shouldn’t write poetry because poetry puts me in the world, and that’s hard for him because it’s hard for me. And he doesn’t like it. And I’m not scared of him, at least there’s that. But I’d rather face my fears than hide from the world even if the latter makes him happier or “us” happier, as he says.

Scare. Scar. I’d rather be scared than scarred. Both work. Both versions of the poem work. I’m probably scared and scarred. At least I no longer think I’m a monster or the devil, both of which I was pretty certain of a couple of years ago. Because I am of my father. Of him. Of that. I was always his. And he was a monster, a devil.

The Closet

My teacher says the penis just finds its way into the vagina, knows where to go, doesn’t need any help getting up in there. She says it goes right in the way her husband’s does. She’s pregnant, so we’re pretty sure she’s telling us girls the truth. We’re fifth graders. This is our sex-education class in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1981 at McKinley Elementary School.

We are fifth-grade girls being told the penis just finds its way into the vagina while the boys are in the other classroom with the nice teacher being told who knows what. They will squirm a lot when they come back, the boys, which will be unsettling given what we are just now learning about their penises.

Most of us barely know what a vagina is or how it’s different from the part we pee out of or the vulva as a whole or that there’s a magical subcomponent to the vulva called the clitoris. She doesn’t tell us about the clitoris. She leans back onto one of the little desks at the front of the room, probably one of the reject left-handed ones like the one I beg to use since I’m left-handed but that’s always denied to me because our teacher, Ms. Malecki, is not the nice teacher. She’s no Mrs. Brown, that’s for sure.

Ms. Malecki once left me in the coat closet as a punishment for the entire day. I wasn’t allowed to come out to use the restroom or eat lunch or play on the Big Toy outside. She turned off the lights and left at the end of the school day with me still in the coat closet. I waited at least an hour before coming out. She’d threatened me several times in front of the whole class for occasionally whimpering from the closet. The paddle. I’ll tell your mother. I’ll tell the principal, all of that. The principal was related to James Garner, so of course I didn’t want him involved. It would make me uncool forever, and I was already well on my way to being uncool forever without celebrity-adjacent involvement.

I was understandably terrified of Ms. Malecki. Now, I was terrified of her husband’s penis and penises in general, things that seemed like they acted on their own and without authorization and without thought and without consequences the way DOGE will in a future I can’t imagine, one that’s completely out of alignment with the pledge of allegiance we all take every morning unless we’re one of the kids who have to wait out in the hall because their parents don’t want them saying the pledge or singing the national anthem. The scariest thing in my world thanks to Ms. Malecki was the fear that one or more penises would be up inside me all of a sudden while I was hyperventilating on the monkey bars or trying to grab an extra cookie in the lunch line.

Ms. Malecki’s still perched on the little reject desk, which makes her stomach tilt upward. Her exposed belly button gazes at the fluorescent lighting as we ask questions. How do you know if you’ve had an orgasm? You just know. What does the penis look like? You don’t want to know. Are penises going to get inside us as we walk around on the playground or sit in class next to boys? I hope not.

This is a story in which I don’t talk about the sexual abuse I was already experiencing without understanding what was happening. Because the penises stayed tethered for the most part. Because one of the men was a boy, an older boy who’d been held back in school, and I didn’t understand what child-on-child sexual abuse was, that it wasn’t play and wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened. (I mean, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening, and I begged for it to not happen, but I didn’t know what it was that was happening.) Because things didn’t get really bad until I hit puberty. Because that’s when the penises came out. But they didn’t just find their way into my vagina and mouth. They were forced in. They were forced entries. These were things nobody, not even Ms. Malecki, could have prepared me for or helped me understand. We failed to ask all the right questions. Will we be molested? Will we be raped? Will we be sexually assaulted? I imagine her answer would have been I hope not.

I lived in a closet for a long time. Too long. In so many ways, I lived in a closet not unlike the one in my fifth-grade classroom. Afraid to come out. Afraid to make a sound. Afraid that, even once the lights were turned off, the threat would still be there, waiting for me to make a move, to run.

Proof of Something

The dead have a way of killing the living, as do the living. That’s what I woke up thinking at 3:30 a.m. when my rodeo neighbors flew their helicopter over my house and the walls vibrated and the bed vibrated and I vibrated.

I’ve been dead and alive for months now, maybe years. Maybe since I learned about the sex trafficking in the communities my father moved in and moved me around in.

Maybe since I learned that [REDACTED]. They’re rotting aspens, my family, carved with graffiti and missing bark, their leaves falling dead to the ground. All dead. All hollowed long ago but still demanding their remaining branches reach the sky somehow. For what? A sun that heals? A sun like a dead god who will help them forget how they’ve lived, if you can call it living. What do you call all that fluttering in the air above rot?

Definitely since my brother-in-law began dying from early-onset colorectal cancer last fall. Definitely since then.

Then there’s the call of the living who are dying or think they’re dying, the living I love, the call I will answer whenever it comes, even if it comes in the dead of night like a helicopter tangling the desert sage as it passes over. Or in the form of my husband. Or in my neighbor in Tucson, whose eyelashes are gone from chemo, and more, and more.

I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. In Tucson and elsewhere, Indigenous people are being detained and told they aren’t citizens. And that’s just one atrocity that’s been happening over the past week. You can read about it in the news. I’m not the news and don’t want to be the news. I’m barely a person right now and am certainly in no shape to be reporting on anything.

Last week, I got the results of an extensive genetic test back. I’m not viable. That’s the bottom line. Yet here I am. I’m in the 99th percentile of fucked or fucked up on just about everything that matters. But genes aren’t everything. We know that. Whatever keeps me going isn’t my genetics. I’m in the 99th percentile for atherosclerosis, so yesterday I had the interventional cardiologist review the CCTA he ordered for me in 2022 when I was having heart issues. The test wasn’t done to determine how much soft or hard plaque I have in my arteries, but the cardiologist was able to pull it up and interpret the results. Jon and I stood in the exam room as he scrolled through the images from the test as if my interior was one of those flip books children make. Nothing. No plaque anywhere. My first thought was great. My second thought was why not me, why him. Him being my husband.

Risk doesn’t mean you have disease, the cardiologist says.

It’s good to know risk, but what we want to know is if you actually have disease or are on your way to having disease.

In this case, I’m high risk, no disease. Jon’s low risk, disease. Fuck risk factors. I mean, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. Just fuck maybe.

I had a dream two nights ago that took the form of a prose poem. Trump had dismantled the EPA and shut down all environmental cleanup sites, telling builders contamination won’t matter once the sites are developed.

It’ll be buried, Trump said. The waste will be buried. Just bury it. What’s buried can’t hurt anyone, almost as if he was talking about his own father, as if dead family can no longer do harm. I’m here to tell you they can. Look at my father in his grave, nothing now but bones caving in, obeying gravity like a falling apple only rotten all the way to the seed.

In the dream, I thought of Midvale, Utah, and the outrage locals felt in the 1990s when more than ten million cubic tons of toxic slag by the Jordan River were haphazardly covered in plastic with no lining underneath, vented, and later turned into commercial and residential developments. Folks in Utah wanted the EPA to do more, not less. They fought hard for more to be done but lost that battle. What would they fight for today? Less? Little? Nothing? Probably nothing. Just cover it up. Abolish the EPA. Who needs them. Who needs water and soil and air and viability for living beings.

In real life, not in the dream, we lived on that slagged land when we first moved to Utah, just down the street from Overstock, which was owned by the now-infamous Patrick Byrne, whose round concrete building with a peace sign on the roof was also on that land. Byrne got a deal on it, and he liked a deal. Jon worked for Overstock and for Byrne. This was right as he, Byrne, was transitioning from being a three-time cancer-surviving neuroatypical genius to whatever he is now. Maria Butina. Voting machines. Deep state. Trump as savior. Bars of gold and hunks of cheese stashed in Utah caves so he could feed and pay his employees in the event of an apocalypse. All of that. We’ve seen a man move from brilliance to chaos. We know what that looks like. We recognize it in others. I recognize the potential in myself. I certainly have the genes for it.

I’m afraid of myself. I feel like I’m full of slag, like my teeth and mind will loosen and fall out any day now. I don’t know how the Trump thing was a prose poem in my dream, but I know my mind was telling me to write. For me, writing is the way through, the only way through. Through to where, I don’t know. That’s the thing. What are we. Where do we start and where do we end. What is starting and ending, even? Some way to explain why we taper into fingers as slender as unlit candles that continually graze what is not us, or so we believe.

Almost as soon as the helicopter made the house rumble, it was quiet again. The house, I mean. Also the helicopter, which had landed on the neighbors’ helipad. But I was still quivering, my organs like china on a glass shelf in a display case nobody can open or illuminate other than a doctor who uses a mouse to drive through me one image at a time showing me how perfect I am, how goddamned perfect I am, despite everything. Proof of viability. Proof of life, at least for now. Proof of something.

You are also something. I can tell you that much. It’s all the news I can muster.

Hard News, Bad Choices

Several alarming news stories have run in The Salt Lake Tribune over the past several days. They all have ties to Utah and involve children. Each story is horrific on its own, but together, they’re overwhelming. I cried most of yesterday morning. It was too difficult to process this news, especially given what’s happened and appears to still be happening in [REDACTED], so I engaged in several forms of avoidance, including employing maladaptive coping skills that threw my metabolism off and undercut the work I’ve done following a ketogenic diet for mental health, doing intermittent fasting, exercising, getting the right nutrients, and maintaining healthy biomarkers.

I’m writing about this because I can see how something that’s upsetting can cause someone (in this case me) to do one thing that throws something off, which in turn throws something else off, which in turn throws something else off. Then maybe more bad decision-making gets thrown into the mix as things start to slip, and pretty soon a little movement in the ground turns into a mudslide that swallows an entire house, trees, retaining walls, and more.

Yes, the upsetting thing is upsetting, but the behaviors that follow and aggregate are what drive the mind and body into a state of disequilibrium that prevents a person (still me) from finding ways to sit with and work through what’s upsetting to whatever extend they (again, me) are able to.

Here’s what went down yesterday. Upset about the news stories, I developed a sudden craving for brownies. It was an all-encompassing desire. I went to Lin’s, where they sell Num Bars, which are ketogenic. They didn’t have them. (Turns out, the Utah-based company went out of business.) In my desperation, I got no-bake chocolate cookies instead. (This is when the whole ageism incident happened with the cashier, which added to my distress.)

I came home and ate the whole container of cookies, thereby consuming four times my typical amount of carbs, and none of those carbs were good ones. My body can’t tolerate carbs anywhere north of 50 net grams per day. (I have data from my cardiologist and endocrinologist that supports this assertion. It’s not just a thing I’m saying to be dramatic.)

The rest of the day, I made terrible choices or simply didn’t do what I should have done for my health. I failed to take my supplements. I didn’t drink water. I didn’t do my intermittent fast. I didn’t eat enough protein or, really, anything healthy for the rest of the day. I didn’t lift weights, something I do regularly for my metabolic health. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t meditate. I wasn’t mindful.

In short, one bad choice became more than one dozen bad choices.

Here’s the thing: I was terrified of having nightmares last night based on those news stories. I’ve already had several nightmares involving my family in the past couple of weeks, one of which was incredibly difficult to process. So I sabotaged my sleep before I even went to bed. I’m not surprised that I woke up at 3:46 a.m. this morning and had trouble falling asleep again or that my sleep was especially restless according to my Fitbit or that my sleep score was ten points lower than usual.

What I am surprised about is how difficult recovering is for me. I have a seven-day intervention I do when I need to really focus on my metabolic health. I told myself I’d start that intervention today. I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in bed most of the day. I just now made my way to my computer. My food choices today aren’t great but they aren’t stellar, either. My digestion is hosed, again, just after I got it back on track. I haven’t exercised. It was a struggle just to get dressed, to make the bed, and to make my way to the living room, where I stopped for a long while and watched reruns of “The Conners” as I mustered the strength to get to my computer. I haven’t bathed. My hair is weird. I didn’t even have it in me to put on lotion.

And it’s cold and the days are short, which makes getting on track that much harder.

This all illustrates how a single genuinely upsetting thing can lead to a systemic issue and why it’s so important that we recognize these kinds of patterns. I know I’ve been talking about me, but I’m not the only one who experiences this kind of domino effect under stress. Many of us do, perhaps most of us.

Right now, I’m trying to do things that will help my body recover. I’m starting with water. That seems doable. Then I have to process these stories about children without doing more harm to myself. I don’t know how to do that. Process the stories, I mean. How does one come to terms with the kinds of things discussed in this type of reporting, things happening here in Utah, across the country, and around the world? I want all living beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, but we’re often the cause, and children should never suffer the way too many of us make them suffer.

A Cascade of Bad Choices

Several alarming news stories have run in The Salt Lake Tribune over the past several days. They all have ties to Utah and involve children. I can’t be more specific without being censored by Facebook. Two of the stories are linked in my feed if people want to read them. There’s a paywall, but you can get an idea of the subject matter by reading the parts of the stories that are visible.

Each story is horrific on its own, but together, they’re overwhelming. I cried most of yesterday morning. It was too difficult to process this news, especially given what’s happened and appears to still be happening in my own family, so I engaged in several forms of avoidance, including employing maladaptive coping skills that threw my metabolism off and undercut the work I’ve done following a ketogenic diet for mental health, doing intermittent fasting, exercising, getting the right nutrients, and maintaining healthy biomarkers.

In short, one bad choice became more than one dozen bad choices.

And it’s cold and the days are short, which makes getting on track that much harder.

Realms Beautiful and Terrifying

Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Our water purifier started making a high-pitched noise a few minutes ago, a steady ewwww like a piece of industrial equipment humming in the distance, at once piercingly but almost inaudibly. I unplugged it, but the sound made me hyperfocused on my tinnitus, so now I’m just a body that screeches and won’t stop.

I took some sleep medicine, something I rarely do. As I wait for it to kick in, night thoughts do their dark work. I don’t ruminate about minor issues like some folks. My waking nightmares are about my father, my family, Oklahoma, me, the ways in which I’ve been purged, and the things I feel like I need to purge that find me at night when I’m closer to my personal unconscious and the collective unconscious than I am during the day.

I had an unthinkable thought that was immediately ushered by my circuitry to every central and distal part of my body. My feet. My hands. My tongue. My scalp. My shoulders. My gut.

What if, I thought. What if it’s true?

This particular thought is a hard one to put on a shelf until I can process it in the light of day. The “what if” feels less like a possibility than a haunting, a visitation declaring what the world is and who I am in it. I don’t like either. I hope I’m seeing an old lady that’s really an owl, like in one of those optical illusions.

The unconscious realms are beautiful and terrifying. I’d prefer a different ratio of beauty to terror right now. I’d rather experience both while asleep, not while sitting in bed awake, my warm dog pressed up against my calf doing what I can’t do: slumber. I feel her breath on my foot. I feel her chest rise and fall. I feel how soft and small and fragile she is. I feel how much I love her and how much I don’t want to be a monster in a monstrous world.

Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Terror is my second least favorite. Monster is my third least favorite. To be an awake, terrified monster inside of what is monstrous is nothing I’d wish on anyone.

Dead, I Wanted to Live

I dreamed I died. I saw my body lying on its side on a gurney. I was wearing a blue hospital gown. I was sort of in the fetal position, but my arms and legs were positioned unnaturally. I’d been turned and folded into myself after my death like someone trying to fit more garbage into a can.

I watched myself from above trying to figure out what happened. My mouth was partially closed around a laryngoscope. A tube had been inserted partway down my throat. Then I felt it: the heart attack that killed me. I remembered the shock, the pain, the flooding warmth like contrast dye used in CT scans, my belt-tightened chest, the last wild hoofbeats of my heart, then nothing.

The staff didn’t try to revive me. This one’s not worth saving, I heard one of them say. They rolled me into a side room that wasn’t monitored and left me there, where I was now watching over my corpse.

I don’t know how long I’d been dead, but the part of me that was disembodied began to feel cold. Everything went starry and black. Time wasn’t gone, but it was everything together all at once, not sequential. There was no past, present, or future. And it wasn’t a human time scale time. It was the universal time scale.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be cold forever, and I was pissed that the doctors and nurses let me die. I fought my way back to the hospital room where I was lying. The next step was to get back in my body the way I’d always done in lucid dreams when my consciousness became untethered. I laid down inside my corpse, but I wasn’t connecting with it. When I moved, it was just my disembodied self that moved, effortlessly and mass-free. Finally, with great concentration, I was able to move my arm. Nobody noticed because the room was empty. My heart began beating, but there where no monitors to alert the staff.

I was pretty fucked. I knew I didn’t have much time before I died again. I used all my inner strength to throw myself off the gurney and drag myself to the nurse’s station using my fingers. Boy, we’re they surprised. They immediately picked me up and fussed over me. “We did everything we could,” they told me as they dusted me off. I knew they hadn’t.

I knew then that I cared more about staying alive than anyone else cared about keeping me alive. Even when I was dead, I wanted to live, so I did.

I also knew I couldn’t tell the staff I remembered what they did. If a knowing look even momentarily hardened my face, they’d see it, and I’d never get out of the hospital alive. I had to pretend they tried to save me when they actually discarded me. I had to let devils be angels.

There was one hitch. I’d been dead long enough that I could no longer speak or write without every word being replaced with a different one. No matter how careful I was when I communicated, the wrong things came out of my mouth or appeared on the screen. That’s when I realized I should have stayed in All-Time rather than returning to Earth. Living is nothing if it’s gibberish, if every important word is replaced with a meaningless one, like vole when you mean love or oval when you mean love or leave when you mean love.

The House

The house has been doused with gasoline. (You’re welcome in it.) The floor of the house is littered with matches. (Take your shoes off.) The house has no fire alarms. (Have a seat.) The cops don’t respond to house fires in these parts. (Kick your feet up.) The house is on fire now. (Be a love and close the door to save the rest of us.) The house burned down. (We wrote you a loving obituary.)

The loving obituary: We adored them. For some reason, they always looked uncomfortable around us. We did everything we could to make them feel right at home. They died before their time. Sometimes, [insert adjective here] people aren’t meant for this world. We will always remember them fondly.

—

I wrote this July 12, 2023. It’s about how we treat people we want to exclude while they’re alive versus how we talk about them once they’ve died. I was thinking specifically about how queer folks and those living with trauma and/or mental health issues are treated—and the ways in which the very people who exclude those folks from their homes, lives, families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, communities, and societies take no responsibility for their eventual, often untimely, deaths. There wasn’t anything we could have done is a common refrain. Really? Nothing. Not one thing?

I was also thinking about how it felt for me to live as a queer non-Mormon person with trauma and mental health issues here in Southern Utah, where I was routinely excluded and reviled even in literary communities. The poets who run two separate chapters of the Utah State Poetry Society told me they’d close their chapters down if I ever attended them because my work was inappropriate. I was a member of the USPS at the time and had every right to attend any chapter meeting in the state. Their issue was with my gender and sexuality, not my writing, which they hadn’t read.

I’ve thought about this post a few times since the election, so I decided to share it again. We need to bring the way we talk about the dead and the way we treat the living into alignment.

How to Survive in My Father’s World

Write poems.
Hydrate. Eat. Sleep. Exercise. Meditate.
Love yourself. Love your body. Trust yourself. Trust your body.
Put yourself in the world and know that you belong there. The world is bigger than people with power.
Find the exits. Know the exit routes. Plan your exit. Then enter.
See clearly, even what you don’t want to see. Bear witness. Take notes. Synthesize. Learn. Speak. Sing. Recite. Remember.
Write more poems. Stronger this time, more sure-handed, until metal strikes against metal.
Pay attention but do not seek attention. Turn your attention into a Mobuis strip that moves inward, then outward, then inward again with no beginning and no end.
Read people’s bodies more than their words, unless they’re poets, then read their bodies and words together.
Call bullshit bullshit unless it’s meant to be bullshit, then let it be what it is without calling it out. We need a little bullshit, now more than ever.
Read poems. Learn to move in and out of their white space. Listen and respond, listen and respond. Breathe through the lines. Inhale poems, exhale poems.
Believe in poems and their power. Don’t give up on poems.
Write more poems. Softer this time. Less heavy-handed, until the weft of each poem is as strong as churro wool.
Fawn if needed for survival but only for survival. Try not to freeze or flee. Remove the “r” from fright and fight if that’s the only available option.
Be ready to run. If needed, run. But circle back. Never leave. Draw an arc around the threat from a safe distance. Make that arc smaller every day. Remember: You belong.
Know when you’re with someone who’s hostile. Know that anyone can be hostile.
Be hostile if needed. Be loving as much as possible.
If you don’t write poems, instead do whatever you love, whatever keeps you alive.
Write poems.

The Triad of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate

My mother and I closely fit the archetypes of Demeter and Persephone, which is why I write about both in my poetry. I’m more like Hecate now that I’m older, or at least I’m getting there. My mother began the process of becoming Hecate as well. But first, she had to protect me the way Demeter eventually did by saving me from what she was partially responsible for.

That happened in 1985 when she risked everything to keep one of my father’s friends away from me. I remember that day. She saw his golden-bronze El Camero pull into the drive and told me to run and hide in my bedroom closet, quick. So drunk she could barely stand, she screamed at him to leave, every word she uttered a plosive, a bomb in his face. “SHE’S. NOT. HERE. R—.”

Anything could have happened. He was larger than her, stronger than her, and hellbent on getting access to me. She had no help from anyone in the family or the community. It came down to the two of them. She blocked his path to me by standing between the kitchen peninsula and the dining room table, interposing herself bodily, or at least that’s how I imagined it. I could only hear them from where I was hiding.

Her ferocity was derived from her own trauma, which prepared her for this moment. Trauma is often generational and repeating. It may not be optimal to live with trauma on a daily basis, but when you’re mother sees a moment for what it is and responds accordingly, her embodied trauma can provide the means for freeing you and your body from further trauma.

After that day, the path was cleared for my mother to become Hecate. She didn’t quite get there for complicated reasons, but I saw enough of Hecate in her to know the route. She stacked the cairns for me. Now, the journey is mine to make.

My mother and I are the original triple goddess, as are many traumatized women in traumatized families and traumatized communities in this traumatized world.

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