Wombat

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.


Heartbreaking Wombat Poem

I will describe the heartbreaking wombat poem I wanted to write last night when I was too tired to write because I’d been messing with poetry submissions for fifteen hours straight. (I actually submitted zero poems after all that effort.) The time for actually writing the heartbreaking wombat poem has passed. But here’s what I kind of think the poem would have done. Keep in mind, I never know what the poem will actually do until I start engaging with it for real.

—

The Poem Has Some Kind of Title

The poem opens with something about how a wombat can’t survive in the wild with only three legs.

The poem goes into detail about the kinds of things the wombat can no longer do because of the missing leg, making reference to an individual wombat who’s experiencing this situation. Evading predators. Foraging. Climbing.

(The poem’s not sure wombats climb. The poem will look that up.)

The poem starts to talk about the wombat in ways humans can relate to, especially those of us who are growing older.

The poem turns to humans explicitly and all the things we can’t do. The poem provides lists here because they can cover a lot of emotional territory. Accretion can be an effective technique in the poem and help the poem avoid sentimentality and other gobbledygook that mucks up poems and may muck this one up despite the poem’s efforts.

Here, the poem may take a turn toward the emotional things we can’t survive, not just the physical things. Traumas. Losses. Unimaginable suffering. The poem will provide some examples, perhaps those pulled from recent news or perhaps from the poem’s past.

The poem might move out from individual traumas to larger traumas by talking about groups of people who are like wombats, ones who’ve lost their lands and are being driven from their homes into the harsh reality that the world is no longer designed for them if it ever was. It’s for others, many of whom want them gone the way they want wombats gone.

The poem may bring up Marky Mark and the way he brutally beat two Venezuelan men when he was sixteen years old, namely how that’s not dissimilar from people attacking and harming wombats, though of course the comparison is problematic because humans aren’t wombats and Marky Mark does whatever he wants, and it’s funny how the history of celebrities always seems to be getting lost, as if it’s all being tucked inside the pouches of wombats never again to see the light of day.

It’s risky, but the poem might talk about the emotional lives of wombats, perhaps discussing how we can’t know the interior lives of nonhuman species, but we can make some educated guesses. And we really don’t know that much about our own interior lives, do we, and that doesn’t keep us from talking about ourselves and each other, so why not allow the stretch here. It’s a poem, after all, not a scientific lab that experiments on animals. (And thank goodness it’s not.)

Now the poem may list a bunch of stuff a wombat can’t do after certain types of emotional damage, like being attacked or run over or left in the road or being burned or losing habitat or whatever. The poem may feel this is an effective way to bring you into the animal’s life quickly, before you can stop reading.

The poem wants you to feel all of this, both for the wombat and for other humans, but its mechanism of action is to get you to feel. You must feel what the wombat feels so you can feel what you feel and then extend more compassion and understanding to those around you.

That’s what the poem wants.

The poem will end but not before it tells you the wombat died. Humans made the decision to euthanize the wombat once they realized the leg couldn’t be saved. The poem may offer a kind of prayer here for safe passage from this world, but the poem knows it’s better if there were safe passage within it.

The poem will leave. It will disappear into the margins because the poem always has safe passage into silence.