My Dead

People love the rubber until the rubber meets the road.

I’m buying jade cicadas for all my dead is how I am.

My dead, carry me home. My dead, carry me home. Through fire, make me warm. Under water, make me fluid. Across earth, make me solid. From air, breathe your dead breath into me. Carry me home, my dead. Carry me home, my dead. I will carry you, too.

A physician who arrived on the scene after ICE agents shot Alex Pretti said the officers were not performing CPR. Instead, they appeared to be counting Pretti’s bullet wounds. (Sources: MedPage Today, Daily Kos)

I’m carrying my dead.

Birds need water as much as they need seed. Love needs action as much as it needs language.

The first murder was nearly half a million years ago, which shows violence has been in our nature since our ancestral humans. The blows were directed at the face so the killer could see who they were killing as they were doing the killing. Does it surprise me that the agent who fired the last five shots did so while Pretti was lying unresponsive and face up? Not at all. He wanted to see who he was killing as he was killing him, to see who he was destroying as he destroyed him. This is an old story. Hate is as old as love. But compassion had already evolved in our ancestors as sustained and long-term, as a way of showing commitment to others and surviving as a group. I believe our capacities for love and compassion are greater than our capacity for hate. I believe they can help us survive, even when that means surviving each other.

I’m so sad that I know this sadness cannot be entirely my own.

Wael Tarabishi

A man in the Oklahoma birding group just called a northern mockingbird his northern mockingfriend.

Holding in pee when I’m ten steps from the bathroom is how I am.

I think Utahns should bring back the whistling and whittling brigade, but only to get ICE out of the state.

I think I like poets about as much as I like librarians. I say that as a poet who almost studied library science and who’s been around a bunch of poets and worked in libraries alongside a bunch of librarians. I like what poets and librarians do. I like what they stand for. I just don’t expect much from either group when it counts. Look, words. Look, data. You know?

Weavers and birders on the other hand? Fuck yeah. All the fuck yeahs. Take umbrage with this post if you must. Take my disappointment, frustration, and annoyance, too, while you’re at it.

Of course I don’t mean any of this. I mean the weavers and birders part. They’re the folks I turn to when even caramel corn isn’t enough to see me through.

Who’s keeping me alive right now? Oklahoma birders, that’s who. They don’t just post photos of birds. They tell stories, like this one:

This roadrunner got under the hood of my Cutlass and rode all the way from Don and Loel’s house in Tuttle to my home in Moore, Oklahoma, and lived in our neighborhood for almost a year before disappearing.

That is the shit, my friends. A gem of a story in only thirty-eight words.

These typos in a post by Blue Ridge Wildlife Center are perfect: If you believe that loons can take off from land, is lie. Liar told you that. From now on forever, I am going to say Is lie. Liar told you that whenever the situation warrants it.

You know how you get a weird answer from a Magic 8 Ball, so you just jiggle it? I sometimes find myself wanting to jiggle people a little into a different mindset or behavior. Not violently. Just so their hollow icosahedron floating in its cobalt alcohol solution will land on a better face.

I’m eating a whole thing of caramel popcorn with my tongue so I can keep typing is how I am.

Carolyn Kizer didn’t shut up, either.

I know folks don’t mean to. That’s part of the problem.

Thank you for coming to my fuck you.

I dreamed I was at a rave but didn’t want to be, so I went outside and picked up dog poop from people’s lawns.

Hugging my weighted therapy dragon is how I am.

They all killed him. Every agent who harassed him, restrained him, kicked him. Maybe one of them shot. Maybe more than one. But they all killed him. They are all the shooter.

GestapICE.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti

Hundreds of words that translate to one: dismissal.

From a member of the Oklahoma Ornithological Society: Folks, we have a native songbird killing event starting tomorrow for many of the states in the United States. This is supposed to go for over a week in my area (Oklahoma). If you have nesting boxes up for bluebirds and other cavity nesters, consider adding a handful of clean, dry pine needles or straw for insulation. Make a bowl with your fist pushing the needles or straw up the sides. Also, do whatever you can to feed these native songbirds and offer fresh water. I use an old frypan with a small heater in it on my back deck rail and change it twice per day. I also have a larger birdbath in the yard that also has a heater in it. Good luck to everyone. Stay safe.

I keep misreading bandanas as bananas and wondering why I need to stock up on bananas to stay warm in style all winter long.

I dreamed I doubled as a fire extinguisher.

I mentioned assless chaps one time in a comment on a friend’s post, and now Facebook is showing me all these ads for assless chaps is how I am.

For me, the pronoun they works on many levels. One complaint about using they in the singular is that it’s grammatically incorrect. But is it? The mind is plural and decentralized. We may be one, but “I” may not even be a thing other than an understanding between us, a kind of “you there, me here” shorthand, a fiction that appears to simplify living. They is a better pronoun for me than he or she any day. It does more than help me escape the waist trainer of gender essentialism. It helps me remember that my mind is not one and never was and never will be.

When we lived in Seattle, everyone thought my life partner was Moby, especially at the health-food store. I was like THAT’S MY MOBY GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY MOBY.

Nobody owns language or its rhythms. It’s what we make it, all of us, not what power wants to make it.

I’m not ashamed to say I’ve prayed to God for my daily zero-sugar Cherry Coca-Cola.

I’m dipping turkey bacon in chocolate hummus is how I am.

Please can I just be plastinated now please please pretty please.

Can you guess what I’m doing based on what I’m wearing: a tank top, a tennis skirt, kneepads, a headlamp, slippery socks, my reading glasses, earplugs.

The other day, the life partner and I were watching television before bed when the remote control slid off the sofa and landed with a thud on the area rug. We were both silent as we tried to figure out what happened. Then the life partner said, in all seriousness, Detachable penis.

We heal together. We heal in community.

The purple gallinule found in Massachusetts who wasn’t named at the wildlife rescue where she was taken so the staff wouldn’t get attached to her? Her name is Tandy. I’m naming her Tandy.

I just misread a headline as Reducing Puppet Size May Help with Night Driving. I was like of course the puppets should be smaller so they don’t block the view, especially when it’s dark out. Pupil. The actual word was pupil.

Bewildering Cage is, as of this very moment, the title of the manuscript I’m working on. It fits with the body theme, the asylum/psychiatric hospital theme, with the gender identity/sexuality theme, and nature of existence theme. Thanks to Centa Therese for commenting on the Terrance Hayes poem that contains the phrase “bewildering a cage,” which I misread as “a bewildering cage,” so thanks, also, to my dyslexia. Massive thanks to Ren Wilding for reminding me we are galaxies. The galaxy itself may be a bewildering cage, but we can move around, and dance, in it. We just can. And we can talk like dolphins.

(Now I have the song “Here Comes the Rain Again” in my head, but with the lyrics changed to Talk to me / Like dolphins do / Walk with me / Like dolphins do. EEEEEEEEEEEE EEEE EEEEEEE.)

The Wasting (2016- )

Just trying to name this period in U.S. history. I think this works because it captures the wasting away of culture and the literal wasting of people in the streets.

From a Facebook ad for a dog carrier: Safety buckle prevents jump-out panic. We all need that buckle, Facebook. Every one of us has jump-out panic right now.

I am ill-equipped to hear this much talk about golf this early in the morning or ever really which is why I try not to leave the house if I can help it is how I am.

I’m doing the Safety Dance today. Ivan Doroschuk of Men in Hats wrote the song after being kicked out of a club for pogo dancing. It’s a protest against bouncers prohibiting the dance style. Often interpreted as anti-nuclear, Doroschuk says the song is more broadly anti-establishment.

I just gave myself an asthma attack by laughing too hard after doing an impression of a dolphin singing “My Sharona” is how I am.

People who are making comments like, Bring back the chokehold, can fuck all the way off.

Each success, no matter how small, in practice of what I love is a lightning strike against the dark. — Clare L. Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a lightning strike against tyranny. — Dana Henry Martin

Each action, no matter how small, in service to the world is a silver sound in the dark. — Ren Wilding

I organized my closet for five hours yesterday is how I am.

A birder in Oklahoma called scaled quail cottontops, and it’s the first time I’ve smiled in days.

A woman killed her six-year-old son and herself here in Utah yesterday in Canyonlands. No more. No more death. No more murder. No more horror. No more. No more. No more. No more. No more.

Her dog was in the back seat.

Today is one of those days in the desert when the wind sounds like a warning.

Poets are alive in their lines.

It’s hard in this desert rain to not feel the heavens have been slain.

We need to be together now, as poets, as creatives, as thinkers, as human beings. Whoever you turned to yesterday, whoever turned to you, may you all look back and realize that you helped each other go on. There is healing in being together during difficult times, unthinkable times. I was with two poets yesterday who made today possible by making yesterday less impossible. May Renée Nicole Good rest in peace. May we live in peace.

Listening to songs I first heard when everyone I knew and loved was still alive.

I dreamed poetry was outlawed in the United States.

There was a mass shooting in Salt Lake City last night outside an LDS church at a funeral. Two dead. Three hospitalized in critical condition. Three more injured.

Renee Nicole Good

Sometimes just by giving it language, you discover something within you that’s been waiting to be heard for a long time.

To be spared is to be pared, part of you left but part removed. To be spared means to pare, to reduce what happened to its essence and to find your own essence despite what happened. Injured but not killed. Damaged but not broken. Burned but not torched. You are what is left over, what you can afford to be, what you still have to give others. In Old English, spare means not enough. Were you not enough to be worth destroying or not enough after being destroyed? In Latin, pare means prepare. Do you feel prepared now that you’ve been skinned?

My weekly stats report from Grammarly: Grammarly analyzed 801,077 words. You were more productive than 99% of Grammarly users. If only some of those words were any good.

Writing makes the unspeakable speakable, survivable. I walk this line, this lettered terrain, until I find myself, for only then can you find me. Only then can I find you. Here we are in Ma time, in what’s happened and what could happen. The pause, the upbeat, the architecture of connecting and letting go. I’m waiting, bated, inked blood in my heart and on my tongue, reduced to vowels, then to a single sound. You know the one. That first utterance, O.

I’m about to buy my dog a treat-dispensing toy piano is how I am.

Could not sleep. Watched the news. What the fuck. I mean fuck. I mean fuck. What the fuck.

Meanwhile, in Utah: An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

This body doesn’t know which gender it is, so it’s using all of them.

(Adapted from John Gallaher’s Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. Every time I read the word genre, I think it’s gender.)

I dreamed I accidentally dated the devil and thought he’d ruined my life, but then I yelled at him in front of everyone in a Walmart parking lot. He dove inside a gold Oldsmobile Cutlass and never came out again ever. So that’s where he is if you need to make a deal with him or whatever.

Demons

Was I creating demons when I was at a poetry dinner party in Kansas City with Carolyn Kizer, and the entire group attempted to elide over her comments when she talked about another well-known poet attempting to rape her?

Was I creating demons when a member of my poetry class in Kansas City started stalking me, leaving flowers, torn-up copies of my poems, and letters about how bad and offensive my writing was on my windshield?

Was I creating demons when a poet and publisher in Kansas City screamed in front of a large group of poets, including my best friend, that I wanted to fuck him behind a dumpster?

Was I creating demons when a poet in Seattle who had agreed to work with me on my poetry googled (from his IP address) the words married and naked in combination with my name before we met? When he then canceled the appointment, told me I was childish for writing cut-up poems, and said I was wasting his time. When he also 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.

Was I creating demons when two other Southern Utah poets said my work was pornographic and I should find another state that would accept it, while refusing to let me join their two state poetry society chapters and telling me they’d stopped meeting when they hadn’t?

Was I creating demons when a poet who’d been following my work for months and said he wanted to publish some of my poems left a hostile, sanist comment on one of my microessays in which I was lamenting the fact that people are jumping from a bridge down the street? When he screamed that my writing was the last thing he needed in his life, as if he hadn’t followed me and chosen to read, and laud, my work up to that point. As if he didn’t have the power to stop reading what I wrote or unfriend me or mute me or any of a suite of well-adjusted options that were available to him. That poet later disappeared during a mental-health crisis. When I was asked to help, I skip-traced him to his brother’s house, and he was eventually found safe. Because that’s who I am. Not someone who creates demons or treats people like demons. I’m a person who helps people when they need help, no matter how they’ve treated me.

Was I creating demons when a poet asked to read one of my manuscripts, then replied that he was sorry he’d even asked to read it? When he then rewrote part of it the way he’d like to see it, infantilized me and my work, assumed the speaker was me, treated the work not as work but as the opportunity to intervene in my personal life and my past, and talked about me in extremely sexist ways. When I responded and he continued the attack and infantilization, using my own work against me by calling me a little fist of a girl, a line from one of my poems. When he continued to move between unwanted intimacy, flirtation, and attacks in successive emails, even after I asked him to stop communicating with me. Or when my life partner had to intervene to make him observe my boundary.

Was I creating demons when a poet I’d known for more than twenty years threatened me here on Facebook, publicly in front of the entire poetry community, saying I was committing both a transgression and a manipulation when I told him I loved him, platonically, as a friend, something my context made clear? Was I creating a demon when he did similar things to other women and female-bodied poets.

Was I creating demons when a poet messaged me about a gay Arab who had gotten ahold of a photo of him in bed without his shirt on and how upsetting that was for him and who then sent me that photo through DM so I could see what he was so upset about? Or when that same poet viciously attacked a woman who was experiencing psychosis and got a group of poets to gang up on and attack her, which could have put her life in danger. Or when he refused to take his public post about her down so she could get some help without being pushed further into a dangerous or life-threatening situation. Or when he later told me I was borrowing the term CPTSD and wielding the label sanism, implying I don’t live with the former like he does as a war veteran and therefore have no right to identify and address the latter. By the way, I helped that woman, too. I reached out to her directly and got her a welfare check. If I’d been in the same part of the county as her, I would have been there for her in person. That’s a lot better than telling her she’s a terrible person and getting at least a dozen other poets to do the same.

Was I creating a demon when my poetry mentor breached my trust seventeen years ago with his words and his body and his insistence and his intrusion? When he made me talk about the ways in which my father abused me and became aroused when I did so. While he had me pinned down with his body. While he talked real nice, real childlike. While he continued despite no and stop and no and no and no. That was not a demon. That was a man. And a poet. A beloved one at that. I didn’t create that man any more than I create demons.

More recently, was I creating demons when a poet told me my comment about mentors not taking advantage of their students, which stems from my own experience, didn’t need to be said because it was already implied in the statement that students shouldn’t sleep with their mentors? That, in other words, we should all just be following the programming we’ve been given, which is to place responsibility on victims for not being or becoming victims. Look at my paragraph above. What part of that looks like a mentor trying to sleep with me? What part of that could I have avoided under the circumstances? Was I creating demons when that poet interrupted me in front of a group of poets to make his assertion? How about when he turned my gender into a joke and literally wanted to tell it as a joke on his joke podcast. How about when he asked how my life partner felt about my having sex with whoever I wanted and continuing to ask me that inappropriate bullshit question even as I kept repeating the word asexual, emphasizing the first syllable in the hope he’d understand not only his error but the violation intrinsic in his question. Is that evidence of my demon-making. (Note to everyone: Just because someone uses language for their gender and sexuality doesn’t make it your right to ask personal questions about either, especially not when first meeting them.)

Was I creating a demon when a friend of the poet in the paragraph above, one who’d been supportive of me, my work, and everything I’ve discussed about poets and poetry—up until it involved someone he personally knows—sent me a message in response to my asking not to be invalidated in which he says I am marshaling evidence, finding demons, distracting from real communication, seeing a glitch as a serious issue—thereby invalidating my concern about that issue—calling me a wrecking ball, making it clear none of the poets in the group, my former friends, like me, not even the one who appears to like me, saying this very personal issue around my story of sexual assault should have been mediated in the group and as a group—as if my experience and my trauma should be on trial and the most painful parts of my life should be made freely available to the group? Then, when in order to drive the point home about what a terrible person he thinks I am, he says, I think you’re a great writer. That opinion is somehow impersonal and won’t change. Or when he ends by saying he knows his own mind and I am welcome in it anytime I welcome that.

And that was from a friend, a dear one, who in one paragraph tried to invalidate everything I’ve ever seen or experienced and to get me to see myself as nothing, as worthless, as a monster. He reminds me of my father. He reminds me of my father’s best friend. He reminds me of Ruthie’s father and her brothers. He reminds me of Shawn Green and Greg Kullich and Jack Ladd and Matt Rawlinson and my trigonometry teacher, Steven Knight. He reminds me of my nephew. And of my old friend Jared.

The life partner says I tend to be drawn to creative people, and they tend to be drawn to me. I need more boundaries around that, clearly: who gets access to me and when and where and how. In this case, I’m at a bit of a loss. I’d been close friends with this person for years, the one who reduced me to creating demons. It feels like another example of someone being with me all the way until I talk about someone they know personally. That happened around the assault seventeen years ago as well.

Ironically, the group I created where this rift occurred was supposed to be a safe space, a place for creativity to flourish, and a place for peer support around mental-health issues. That’s something I need in my life and know others need as well. Instead, my biomarkers have been negatively affected, I feel like I was attacked when being vulnerable, I feel like my story was submerged under the weight of those who don’t want to hear it, and I feel like this last email was designed to destabilize my mood and be health- and even life-threatening. One in five is the statistic for those living with bipolar, not even bipolar coupled with trauma. Knowing my past and what I’ve survived, I can’t reconcile how this poet, this friend, would choose to do the maximum amount of harm possible, including attacking my sanity, my motives, my perceptions, and my worth as a human being.

I’m at a loss. With regard to my relationships. With regard to poetry. With regard to this country. All I can do is honor my commitment to speak out and keep speaking out about issues and injustices at all levels. I am not on this Earth to remain silent. The moment I let someone silence me is the moment I stop living.

Humane Bug Trapper

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, birders are calling owls “lil darlings,” and I’m here for it.

Happy New Year. Thank you all for making this one survivable.

I have to use binoculars to see the spines of the books on my high bookshelves is how I am.

I dreamed I asked someone to sign my copy of their chapbook. They were like, How do you spell your first name, Darling? Without thinking and without an ounce of humor or irony, I replied, S-A-D.

I know having a waterbed filled with zero sugar Cherry Coke that I can sleep on and drink from is impractical, but it’s what I want.

I’m stressing myself out in that way that I only am capable of stressing myself out is how I am.

Listening to Modeselektor on repeat is how I am.

Writing letters to my dead mother is how I am.

Facebook thinks I’m a library and is trying to furnish me.

Speaking the truth is not without consequences.

String art weirds me out.

More and more, I like less and less.

Oh. It’s December 20. My mother died twenty-one years ago today.

I don’t think of myself as sans serif. I think of myself as serif-free.

I bought a replica of a medieval carnival badge called “Good Harvest.” Badges like this one supposedly provided protection and ensured prosperity. The one I ordered depicts a person driving a wheelbarrow full of phalluses along a road that’s a giant phallus with legs. That’s quite the harvest. During the Middle Ages, phalluses were believed to drive out evil and confer good luck. Badges like this one were popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Google “medieval carnival badge” if you want to see an assortment of designs. There’s one that’s a vulva with legs walking around with a rosary in one hand and a phallic pilgrim’s staff in the other. That might be my favorite.

I really can’t see very well these days. I’ve needed glasses for years but have gotten around it by memorizing the eye chart right before the ophthalmologist comes in for my appointment. Today, I thought I was going to watch a program called “The Smurftown Tunes.” It was actually “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. Not at all what I was expecting.

This new font, Sans Gender, is hard-coded to replace more than one hundred needlessly gendered terms with inclusive terms. This font is so the boss of me. I don’t know if the font would allow me to say that, but it’s true. And something has to be the boss of me. Why not a font?

I see the poet who threatened me last year has a new collection out with a press that purports to be a safe space. Congratulations all around: to the poet, the press, and the community that makes it all happen.

CNN: Quit putting Hans Nichols on your program. He’s using the term “schizophrenic” right now to describe inconsistent behavior. That’s sanist and unacceptable.

The gash in my fitted sheet created by my rough heels has grown so long that one of my calves is now stuck in it. I could free myself, but that would require a teensy bit of physical and emotional effort. I think I’m just going to stay like this all day. My heels win. The gash wins. I’m going to nap like a cruel President.

The chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma in my hometown was a consultant for MKUltra. My friend told me this today. I’m super weirded out about it. My mother may have known him. He also killed an elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo with a large dose of LSD.

There are pyrrhuloxias in Oklahoma. Hot damn.

The Nazis used the font Fraktur and its variations for their propaganda, including Mein Kampf, but banned it in 1941 for being “judenlettter,” which translates to “Jewish letters,” meaning it was linked to Jewish printers and writers, so an edict was issued to replace the font with Roman styles, which were required for all Nazi communications throughout Europe.

Now, the ousted font is one that’s accessible to people with disabilities. And its replacement is a Roman style. This is significant. This is eerie. This is history repeating itself.

It’s good to know fascism has a font. I’m still on the font thing.

Literary journals and presses that require all submissions to be set in Times New Roman may want to rethink that requirement. It’s not an accessible font for those with reading issues and learning disabilities. And now it carries an ugly political connotation to boot.

Dear Leader, I found a readable font family called Sans Gender that works for me as a dyslexic nonbinary individual, and yes I am buying it. And no, you can’t stop me. Take your Times New Roman and be on your way.

Keep your hate font away from me.

Well, I know what font I won’t be using moving forward.

Walan the wombat has stopped having panic attacks, has started doing zoomies, and is now shaking his head back and forth, which is a sign he feels happy and secure. He’s also been playing with other baby wombats. I’ll tag you on his latest video if you want to see it. And no. I’m not crying. Not even a little.

I am going to Thomas Merton myself into hermitage until I no longer say and do all the wrong things.

Yesterday in Utah, a skier had to be rescued from a crevasse, and a hiker had to be rescued from quicksand. This is why I say inside.

Hacking my gut microbiota with apple cider vinegar is how I am.

Dear New York Times: Cookies are delicious, but “cookie” is not a season. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Department of Injustice

Watching a video of a nudibranch pooping is how I am.

Apparently, the FDA is practicing evidenceless-based science now.

In the Oklahoma birding group, someone posts a photo of a dead white-throated sparrow they’ve found at their campsite, hoping to get an ID. Someone IDs the bird. Someone posts a quote from the Bible: Not even the sparrow falls to the ground without God’s notice and care. Someone posts a painting they created based on that Bible verse, an unassuming sparrow looking up into a shaft of light. A funeral of sorts is held for the sparrow. A space opens up in the group for mourning and love. This is deep birding, not the run-of-the-mill look at my beautiful bird photography skills found in other birding groups.

Sometimes, all I can say about a poem is that it exists.

I just misread a headline as “Hummus: A Monstrous History,” and everything I thought I knew about hummus flashed before my eyes before being supplanted with a darkness I could only imagine and barely fathom. But no worries. It was just humans in that headline. Not hummus. We’re all good. Enjoy your hummus, monsters.

The rock fracture at Yosemite National Park is actively occurring. Meanwhile, I am passively occurring. We all have our way, Yosemite.

As an aside, look at this glorious language. Geologists dispatched to the area of the fracture said they could hear it cracking like a frozen lake that wasn’t consolidated. That description must absolutely be used in a poem.

TFW you wake up in the morning and suddenly remember you shared one of your poems on Facebook the night before.

I’m totally involved in the life of a sick baby wombat named Walan is how I am.

I’m buying a humane catch-and-release bug trapper is how I am.

December 25, 2025

The laccolith shoulders this inelegant sky, nothing to write home about, as if this weren’t home now but that other place, the one I’m from, a town that’s rotting building by building, foundation by foundation, the fences, the red brick, the sweetgums and their dejected seeds. But mostly the psychiatric hospital, which the state left to vandals years ago.

Where I live now is less town than scrub, less scrub than sand, less sand than canyon. Plenty of room for a word to get lost, to go out on the air and never reach a listener but also never boomerang back to the speaker who stands, silent, beyond language, at least for a spell, isolated from everyone, including themselves.

That’s when the laccolith comes in handy, a kind of giant anchor for thought, for yearning. Headless under dark clouds, the color of night before night falls. A heavy future, a heavy past, a sense of always about it that makes humans seem like baubles, a bracelet of seals surrounding a whale in a faraway watery world before one slips into its mouth unnoticed.

What rises here rises in the distance, with its monzenite and spruce, big-eared bats and fir, bitter cherry, dollarjoint cactus, pygmy rabbits, sandweed, spleenwort. We’ve never been liberated from names or naming. In my ignorant past, I didn’t learn what to call things or what to call myself. Cardinal was red bird. Finch was sparrow. Father was father. I was daughter.

I read that if you think enough about a relative, your genes flip on and off to become more like theirs. Ten minutes a day for thirty days is all it takes. In case that’s true, who should I think of? I’ll take my chances with my mother, the way the white-tailed antelope ground squirrels take their chances with the feral cat when the neighbor’s trees are heavy with apricots in late summer. At least her genes helped me survive him.

Pistachios escaped cultivation in nearby mining towns and made their way up into the mountains. Birds, the first landscape architects, move them around the foothills, where they grow like bonsai. Humans spread from place to place, trying to find and lose ourselves. We look for footholds. We lock in. Even if we only grow a little, it’s something. A small life is better than none at all.

Horses and cows come and go here, the way they do where I’m from. My mother came and went, into and out of the hospital as a nurse and sometimes as a patient. Those buildings feel like her body rotting, returning to earth with no dignity. Her broken windows. The word PSYCHO spray-painted on her side. Her interior waterlogged and full of God knows what in the one-time hospital chapel that hasn’t shivered with song in decades.

Inger Christensen says there is war all the time. There is war. There is war. War in the cells. War in the genes. War in the heart. War in the mind. War in the family. War in the mother. War in the father. But there is also deerweed and spikemoss, manzanita and mat muhly. There is histone modification and methylation, expression and heritability. There is asbestos and lead, observation hatches and safety glass.

There is what happened and what passes for what happened, in memory, in polite company, in our palm lines, in our bloodlines. There is war all the time, even under new paint and old dirt.

A Pound of Honey

There are black vultures in parts of Oklahoma. Tell me that’s not a reason to move back there.

Your near rain is my far rain. You, there. Me, here. Native sparrows gather in the wildlands behind my house as winter surrounds yours. They say what you won’t, what you can only feel. Cold, they say. Seed. Wind, they say. Wind.

Something happened a couple of days ago that has me so shaken I woke in tears this morning. It’s related to poetry, to poets. Of course it is. For my health, for my life, for my future, I need to limit who I’m intacting with, where I’m publishing my work, and where I’m spending my time in poetry and as a poet. I support kind, generous, compassionate poets and the journals and presses they run. I will continue to support those poets, journals, and presses. But all the rest? It doesn’t have a place in my life. I’ve seen enough. I choose a different approach to writing, a different community, a different way of being in the world.

Watching a baby goat take a shower is how I am.

For only $69.99, you can send a bag of mystery bones to someone you love. So there’s that.

I’m spending Thanksgiving with my loved ones: the life partner, our dog, and Bo Burnham.

Despite everything, I’m thankful for everything.

My poems are like webs I weave under every bridge, every cliff, here in canyon country. They’re not just for me. They’re for everyone who lives here and needs something to catch the light when they look down, when they find themselves leaning forward.

Ironically, I really need a paperweight right now.

In a stunning turn of events, I don’t like handblown glass paperweights as much as I thought I did.

I dreamed I was made of cotton and kept pulling parts of myself from myself until there was no me left.

Marbles are so emotional. One member of the marble-identification group shared a note a woman wrote about the marbles she played with when she was a child in the early 1900s. Her name was Lulu. She kept her marbles and note in a face-powder box. Another person found a coin purse at an estate sale with three wheat pennies and a single marble inside. The poster writes: This was somebody’s treasure.

I dreamed I married my husband’s brothers, even the dead one, and was also an evil clown is how I am.

I just joined a marble-identification group on Facebook is how I am.

The life partner woke me up eating a pickle on the other side of the house is how I am.

I don’t have a lot of words right now. It took me twelve hours to get out of bed and onto the sofa today and another two to make it to my desk. Now, I’m headed back to the sofa and then back to bed. It is very hard to be outside of language. It means I’m outside of hope. It’s going to take some time to come to terms with that feeling, if that’s even possible.

I don’t know who Facebook thinks I am, but it’s trying to send me a vacuum-packed cow brain in the mail. Also, a pig heart in its pericardium. A sheep-organ set. A turkey gizzard. Petrfied snapping turtle feet. A cat in a box, a skinned cat, an economy cat, a pregnant cat, a small cat, and a cat skull. A cut-open dogfish shark. A sea squirt. Half a sheep’s head.

I just misread something as Mr. Bananajeans, and now I need to find an animal I can call Mr. Bananajeans.

The life partner saw the two-person steam sauna I put in our Amazon cart and removed it is how I am.

In my despair, I put a two-person steam sauna in my Amazon cart is how I am.

Lines from my dream: Alive to the moment, / unaffected by the heat, / penetrated by the Midwestern sun / pocked with chicken-laden pastures, / I wait for a rapture that never comes.

I’m a little bit grumpy. The life partner and I are having a funeral tonight for the part of me that can no longer live safely in the world, but he keeps saying mixed weenies over and over because, hours ago, that’s what he thought I was saying when I actually said McSweeney’s.

Grammarly says I wrote 122,765 words last week. Really? Where are they?

I live in poetry. I survive in prose.

Maybe I cast light on poetry’s shadow. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Come to terms with that shadow and with what you are in response to it. That’s the work that must be done before understanding and integration can occur at the individual and collective levels. Don’t blame me for the shadow. I didn’t create it. I am not it. You’ve conflated me with a system, with you.

I dreamed my ex told me he couldn’t choose me because all choice is limitation and restricts freedom. I’ll take you for now, he said. But I don’t choose you and never will. He said this as I cleaned the dirt from his boots off his favorite ottoman.

Ten years is nothing to eternity.

I don’t think I’m ever going to heal. I don’t know if I’m even going to survive.

My love is in my feet today so it can hit the ground as I walk.

My neighbor blows all the dust down the street and back into the wildlands.

As hard as it is at times to live with empathy, I wouldn’t want to live without it.

During the election coverage, I rubbed my boobs on the TV.

While you sleep, bees will honey your lips the way they did when Plato was an infant. Then you will kiss me sweet, love me sweet. I will die sweet on your vine. Oh, sugar. Oh, conjecture turned confection. Do not tell me why you are bad for me. Waggle. Buzz. Make my whole body vibrate. There, there, little love, little bee. Feed me.

              Two million flowers
              make a pound of honey
              a riot of blossoms

If those who are being harmed refuse all collective language to describe those who are being harmed, those who harm will continue to harm. Collective language leads to being seen collectively. Being seen collectively leads to acting collectively. Acting collectively leads to change.

              Sand at the foot
              of the mountain forgets
              it was ever part mountain

The Order

I want to talk about the concentration camp being built in Utah, where I live, that will warehouse people who are unhoused and force treatment on them for real or perceived mental-health issues and substance-use issues. I want to compare it to the Topaz concentration camp that was built here in 1942 and operated until 1945 under Executive Order 9066, whose name I know because I have to know it. To survive. To advocate. To resist. To not repeat the past even as we repeat the past because others don’t know the name Executive Order 9066 or what it did, what it made our country and its people: ugly, cruel, inhumane. Those who don’t (or don’t want to) know about EO 9066 also may not know that another EO made this new concentration camp in Utah possible, the one written July 24, 2025, whose official title I won’t mention because it doesn’t describe what the order does, what it enables. It would be better if it just had a number, not a misleading title. It would be better if it didn’t exist at all.

But I can’t talk about the concentration camp because my language isn’t welcome, especially among those who also have lived experience with mental-health issues. Those I most want to communicate with will attack me for using the diversity model to give context to what I’m conveying. Those of us with lived experience with mental health have different experiences and use varied frameworks for communicating our experiences. We are and should be polyvocal. Yet there’s a growing push for monovocality—for one way of speaking, for one way of perceiving and communicating human experiences. So I’m not talking, not the way I want to be or to the audience I want to talk to. At least I have this loose take on the haibun.

              The age of pastures
              is over. Detention is
              involuntary.

                            Your right to exist
                            on your own terms ends now.
                            You belong on outskirts.

              Get used to the word
              stern. Your life is a concrete
              slab if you’re lucky.

                            Say no and go to jail.
                            What is this if not jail
                            by another name?

              Like a rose. You think
              you’re like a rose when really
              you’re a line item

                            in a multi-million
                            dollar budget. You’re our
                            ticket, our future.

              Containing you is
              business. Here’s a pill.
              We’re sorry it’s come to this.

                            Swallow. Concentrate
                            means gather. We gather you
                            today for Holy

              Capital, for the bottom
              line. You’ve lost your right
              to leave, so don’t try.

Frictions

“Nothing about us without us.” That’s a guiding principle in the disability-rights movement. It applies to the mental-health justice and recovery movements as well because mental-health issues are often disabilities for those of us who live with them—sometimes because they are truly disabling and sometimes because our cultures disable us, our communities disable us, and those around us disable us because they don’t understand us (or try), don’t include us (or try), discriminate against us (often because of unexamined or dismissed bias), and subject us to their versions of who we are, which happens daily through language and actions and the way real and conceptual spaces are structured.

I bought a clicker, one of those old-fashioned ones that employees at the academic library where I worked in college used to track how many people came in each day. I’m going to use it for two weeks and track how many times I encounter instances of sanism, both in real life and on social media. I started doing something similar last week by making ticks on a piece of paper. But I like the idea of using a clicker in part because it’s an object I can hear and feel as I operate it, in part because it fits in my hand, and in part because it’s a bright color. I have the kind of sensory processing that appreciates those things. The clicker also feels more formal and official, and I can use it even when I don’t have a pen and paper with me, which makes it more practical. I may include notes about each instance, including the context, date, and time.

OK, I actually bought six clickers in an array of colors because they came in a set, but that’s beside the point. You may think that’s too many clickers. I don’t. I’m mildly tachycardic right now just thinking about their arrival. There’s a black one and a green one and a pink one and a red one and a white one and a yellow one. I’m actually trying to humanize myself in this paragraph and the last one because I made some big assertions in my opening paragraph, the kind that make people (in this case me) unlikable mostly because they fall under the information you didn’t ask for that I think you should know category but also because they may apply to you or those you know rather than some far-off “they” that we can all join in both hating and distancing ourselves from together.

“Nothing about us without us.” I take this principle seriously. It’s like no taxation without representation, only it’s like no characterization, no proclamations based on misinformation, no policy decisions, no representations in the arts and the media, no casual or formal conversations, no application of diagnostic labels especially when used in a pejorative manner, and no limited or completely erroneous lay insights without our representation. That means we are centralized, not marginalized. We are present, not absent. We are heard, not talked over, not silenced, not discounted. It means if we say there’s an issue, you listen. You don’t shift in your seat or put up a wall or fail to respond or shift blame to us.

I’m no longer entering rooms where there are frictions only I appear to see and concerns only I appear to discern, one thousand frictions that are invisible to those who are not queer or neuroatypical or living with trauma or serious mental-health issues. That doesn’t mean those frictions don’t exist. It just means they may not exist for you, and if that’s the case, I’m happy for you. I’m glad a room is just a room is just a room. But your inability to see what others see, feel, and experience in those rooms—your failure to cultivate literacy about the things those who are oppressed and marginalized have to see in order to survive every day—is part of why rooms continue to not be the same rooms for you that they are for others.

These rooms are exhausting. Click click click (click click). If in addition to instances of sanism, I count instances of trans erasure (click), ableism (click), neurotypical bias (click), discounting of women and those who are female-bodied (click), jokes about diversity (or the lack thereof) in a space (click), and more,* there will be no end to the clicking in too many rooms, even rooms full of poets.

It’s impossible to know which rooms will be full of frictions. I’m trying to figure out what clues I can look for ahead of time and to develop a matrix I can use so I know when to call any given room quits. I no longer believe I can change hearts and minds with my presence, my words, or my work. I feel like, more than ever, I’m in a box called “crazy” and that terrifies people, no matter how I live, what I accomplish, how I treat others, or how wonderful folks think I am before they learn I have a DSM diagnostic label or that I’m queer or that I’m neuroatypical in numerous ways. I’ve seen that semipermeable membrane more times than I can count: the one where inclusion becomes exclusion and being part of becomes being removed from.

I feel like my attempts to address frictions only lead to more frictions, many of them in the form of irritation, denial, resentment, and even fear and disgust. But I will do what I can until I realize I can’t do any more. Then I’ll leave before I accept my own erasure and even start erasing myself. I can’t abide that or any other form of complicity.

I’ve mainly seen this level of friction in Utah. At least in other places, my experience has been that I become more human when I talk, when I write, when I take part in things. Of course, I was largely in the closet about my bipolar until two years ago. That may be part of why people accepted me as a human being and not as an amalgam of their stereotypes, biases, and misunderstandings about bipolar. Who knows what those places are like now, in this new world that has us all doing the work of marginalizing and dehumanizing others on some level.

The rooms with poets are the ones I must approach with care above all the others because I need to believe in poets, even if that belief is misguided. I’m not ready to let go of that yet. I know better. I think I know better. I want to know better but, more than that, I want to be wrong. I want to believe in poets the way some people want to believe in God. It’s like that for me.

I also can’t help but see something else in those rooms, wherever they’re located: a kind of arts-driven traveling medicine show meets multilevel marketing network. It’s not quite either of those things, but it does feel like a system that created itself and now uses its existence as a way of validating itself, one that enriches the few and relies on the many, and one that’s unhinged from actual oversight or governance by the institutions many of these poets actually work or once worked for, which means those institutions will not act based on anything that happens, up to and including sexual assault, in or near those rooms. It’s hard not to see it like that, especially after some of my personal experiences in such rooms, which makes it even harder to find spaces that are safe and poets who are doing good work in those spaces.

—

* I’m just listing ones I’ve encountered recently.

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.

Updated Immunotypical Privilege List

In 2014, I wrote a piece titled “44 Signs of Immunotypical Privilege” shortly after my diagnosis with common variable immunodeficiency. It’s a compilation of my experiences and those articulated by others living with various forms of primary immunodeficiency. The Irish Primary Immunodeficiencies Association published it on their site and had plans to make it into a brochure, though I’m not sure the brochure ever materialized.

My piece was inspired by Peggy McIntosh’s famous essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” written in 1998. I later updated my piece when “COVID” and “monkeypox” became household names. It’s now titled “46 Signs of Immunotypical Privilege.”

I plan to write a new piece titled “44 Signs of Neurotypical Privilege in the Poetry Community.” It won’t make people feel comfortable. That’s not the point. The point is that it needs to be written, and it matters, and I can’t see how to not do so after what amounts to an executive extermination order against those with mental-health issues. Ask Brian Kilmeade. He sees that order for exactly what it hopes to be and understands exactly what it allows those who hate us through and through to say, including my fellow Utahns.

—

46 SIGNS OF IMMUNOTYPICAL PRIVILEGE

Every day, as an immunotypical person—

I can go out when COVID is circulating without being in a high-risk category that makes me much more likely to be hospitalized, die, or develop long COVID.
I can go out during flu season without worrying too much about how serious contracting the flu could be.
I can see the exponential rise in monkeypox cases and not worry that I might be especially vulnerable to the disease.
I know my immune system will respond to flu and COVID vaccines. I might even skip vaccination altogether without serious health consequences. Attenuated, live vaccines such as the one for monkeypox are safe for me because my immune system works properly.
I can read about measles resurgences without feeling alarmed. After all, the measles vaccine isn’t contraindicated for me, and I know my body has mounted an immune response to the disease.
I can touch door handles and other surfaces in public without much concern.
If I get a slight cough, I don’t have to worry about it turning into bronchitis or pneumonia.
My health status never goes from relatively normal to life-threatening in a matter of hours.
When I take antibiotics, they work quickly, and I only need one round.
I haven’t been on antibiotics dozens or even hundreds of times over the course of my life.
I’ve never been on prophylactic antibiotic therapy. I don’t even know what that is.
I don’t have to routinely take medicines such as prednisone that weaken my bones and put me at greater risk for osteopenia and osteoporosis.
I don’t have to wonder what comorbidity might be lurking just around the corner and if it will be a noninfectious condition, a malignancy, or an autoimmune disorder.
I’ve never heard the phrase “immune dysregulation” and don’t have to concern myself with what that might mean.
For me, boosting immunity means popping more vitamin C or Airborne. I have no idea what immunoglobulin is or why it’s essential to the human immune system.
When I attempt to eat out, I don’t have to think too much about how long items are left on buffet tables or how well food is washed and prepped by food handlers.
When I’m out in public, I don’t have to worry when people cough into their hands or without covering their mouths.
I can be sure that, when I go to classes, movies or restaurants, I’ll find a place to sit in which I’m free from issues that exacerbate my breathing problems, such as perfumes, fragrances, and cigarette smoke.
I know I won’t have to pass on social activities because they would put my health at risk.
I know family gatherings won’t pose a threat to my health, even if young, potentially unvaccinated, children are present.
If someone I love is in the hospital, I don’t have to think about when I can visit, how long I can stay, or other health considerations. I can fully focus on that person and their health needs.
I can attend school, have a full-time job, raise a family, and engage in recreational activities without also having to manage the many conditions that would affect me if my immune system didn’t function properly.
I can leave meetings, classes, and conversations and not feel excluded, fearful, attacked, isolated, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, stereotyped, or feared because of my immune system.
If I pick up a magazine or watch television, I’ll see images that represent me and my experience of my health.
I never have to speak on behalf of all those who are immunotypical. My thoughts about my immune system can be my own with no need for political alliance relative to my immune function.
My actual and potential contributions to society will not be challenged because of my immune system.
I can go for months without thinking about or being spoken to about my immunotypicality.
I’m not identified by my immunotypicality.
I won’t lose friends who can’t relate to what I’m going through, who think I’m exaggerating about my symptoms, or who just can’t deal with having a friend with my health status.
I know I won’t be discriminated against by employers who neither understand my condition nor have the desire to provide a reasonable accommodation, despite the legal requirement that they do so.
I don’t have to be afraid that, when I talk with others about my health, they will suggest unsolicited supplements, dietary approaches or exercise programs.
I won’t be told by friends, family, and even uninformed members of the medical community that my condition is really just a psychological problem such as anxiety or depression.
I know nobody looks at me and makes assumptions about why I appear to be ill (or well), or why I am too thin (or too heavy), or why I am not fit (or manage to stay fit despite my illness), or why I do (or do not) eat what I do (or do not) eat.
I don’t have to explain why I have a lingering cough, why I might sometimes need to wear a mask in public, or why situations and settings that are safe for others may not be safe for me.
Because I have never had to wear a mask in public, I have never been asked to leave a public place because the manager or owner of the establishment believes I am putting others at risk, when in fact the mask is to protect me from the pathogens others carry.
I don’t have primary immunodeficiency, so I never encounter people who make the assumption that, despite the condition being genetic, I somehow brought it on myself through my diet or lifestyle.
People aren’t embarrassed to be seen with me because of my health status.
When I talk about my health, I can be certain that friends, family, co-workers, and others won’t become uncomfortable and change the subject.
My partner doesn’t suffer from undue stress and hardship because they’re my primary or only caretaker.
Nobody tells me I should feel lucky to have primary immunodeficiency because it means I don’t have to work or accomplish anything during my lifetime.
My doctors have seen a lot of patients who are immunotypical. This means I’m not put in the position of having to educate them about my immunotypicality, since they’re already familiar with it.
When I present in a health crisis at the emergency room, I’m given prompt medical treatment, not told I’m merely having a panic attack.
I’ve never had the experience of being misdiagnosed over and over again throughout my life.
I don’t have old misdiagnoses in my medical record that can’t be removed without a great deal of time and effort on my part.
I don’t have to deal with the financial burden of expensive, ongoing medical care and therapy.
I don’t have to face insurance companies that must review coverage for my life-saving therapy before that treatment is approved; that sometimes make patients go off their therapy for months in order for those patients to prove they still have the condition; and that sometimes deny therapy because they don’t feel the patient is ill enough to warrant it, despite documentation to the contrary in the patient’s file.

Jacks

Two years ago today, I came out of my medication-induced blackout at the inpatient psychiatric unit and began working on an elaborate origami project that involved making the Sydney Opera House with a theater and stage inside it. I used paper placemats and pages from a colorful book for this purpose. I was given a copy of the Book of Mormon by the staff, but I didn’t use its pages in my project. It sat in my room idle as I worked.

I wrote and performed rap songs with another patient named H— to the delight of other manic patients on the unit. Those with severe depression were not moved by our artistry. We were good at the rapping, and our antics provided a counterpoint to the aimlessness, the hall-wandering, and the five-minute interfaces with the psychiatrist each day in which he blamed us for having depression or bipolar.

I used a deck of cards to map out human networks that are responsible for abusing and trafficking others. The kings and jacks were big players in those networks, and they were also stand-ins for my father and his best friend. The networks were very organized and knew how to hide other cards, and themselves, as needed. My father’s name was Jack. He was a jack of all trades, even ones that weren’t legal.

I wrote short poems and made notes about my stay using a tiny pen that only sporadically worked. Pencils, Intermountain. Give patients on B-Ward pencils.

In my chart, the staff noted that I was well-behaved and posed no threat to anyone. I did throw paper at one point, down a long hall, overcome suddenly by how dehumanizing psychiatric care is. Nobody noted that in my chart, but one tech did scream, If you do that again … without completing the threat.

I declare today, September 10, the Day of Origami and Rapping forevermore. Long live folded paper and battled song.

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