Writing

Dreams as Reality

What if waking is just what we do because we need to survive and sleeping (and similar states) are where we actually live? I’m serious about this. We may have started out as sleeping organisms and evolved into wakefulness for practical reasons: to evade predators, to mate, to eat seeds and spread them around so whole forests could shoot up around us.

What if wakefulness is a form of survival and reconnaissance, where we gather what we need, including sensory information, memories, and emotional experiences that we can distill when we’re not awake. How can we say sleeping isn’t the ultimate reality, or at least the richest one we have access to as human beings?

I’ve thought something like this for a long time. Hypotheses jostle in my head like sugar-plums, one of which is related to states like mania and is based on my lived experience. (I think extreme shifts in mood, energy, and intellect can cause or be caused by an entanglement of sleeping and waking states, especially in folks who already have more semi-permeable membranes between the two.)

Carl Jung was right about the importance of dreams and the states they allow us to enter, including those that both extend the self and extend beyond the self. The architecture of my life draws largely on my dreams: what I learn in them, what I understand through them, and how I become and become again through them. Of course, dreaming necessitates sleeping. The closest waking approximation would be deep meditation with periods of theta- and even delta-wave activity. Those are also important states. Unfortunately, they’re the equivalent of fly-over states for many of us in the United States, who are driven away from them because our culture forces us into the quasi-democratic late-stage capitalist framework turned fascist oligarchical business government regime that demands we be “on” all the time, hence we’re routinely shifted into gamma-wave riddled states of mind.

I’m in that state of mind right now, hence that last jam-packed, convoluted fifty-two-word sentence. My theta and delta waves are quaking in fear right now. They don’t know if I’ll ever come back to them. I will, you two. I will. Here’s my commitment to them and to myself: Today, I will collect what I need for the worlds I will inhabit in my dreams tonight. I mean, I’ll do this purposefully and consciously as part of a self-experiment in which I flip the script on what being awake and being asleep mean to me and what roles they play in my life. Then I will live in deep sleep and light sleep and REM sleep for eight hours or so before I wake to collect more for tomorrow night. Sleep, I’m out here doing what you need me to do. See you soon.

Midnight Dana

Bryan Johnson has a part of himself that he calls Nighttime Bryan. Nightime Bryan overeats, doesn’t sleep well, and makes decisions that aren’t in his best interest. Studies show that we all have a version of this within ourselves, and that this part usually comes forward in the middle of the night during a mid-night awakening. The typical scenario is that we wake up during the transition from deep sleep to REM sleep, which also happens to be when we’re vulnerable to things like worrying, ruminating, and catastrophizing, as well as seeing ourselves and the world through a clouded lens, one that tends to exaggerates our negative traits, minimize our sense of self-worth, anticipate the worst in every situation, and fail to recognize anything positive. I call this our Midnight Part. In myself, I call this part Midnight Dana.

Let me introduce you to Midnight Dana. She’s a little different from Nighttime Bryan in that she’s trying to help. (I actually think Nighttime Bryan is trying in his own way to help Bryan, or at least to call attention to a problem, but that’s not how Bryan Johnson characterizes Nighttime Bryan.) Midnight Dana remembers things. She doesn’t mean to. She just does. Her body remembers. She’s a time traveler who can go to any point in the past where she’s needed, and by that I mean where her memory is needed. She’s important and necessary, but witnessing her deep knowledge and attempting to communicate with her is not easy.

I woke up at 3:38 a.m. trundled from sleep into wakefulness by a disconcerting dream that involved countless rows of girls’ dorm-room beds extending into the distance behind Vince McMahon, the resident assistant, who was standing in the foreground in a light-gray plaid suit waiting for all the girls to arrive.

Midnight Dana did not like that dream. She immediately thought about the semi-private dorm room she’ll be staying in at the summer residency for Pacific University if I decide to enter that program. The thing that terrifies Midnight Dana about this situation is the shared bathroom. Bathrooms have never been safe spaces for Dana, and Midnight Dana remembers what’s happened in them. It’s as if every cell in her body knows, even the ones that have turned over countless times since those abuses occurred. Midnight Dana is part of the institutional memory of Dana Henry Martin. She lives in the decentralized array of awareness that resides within my body. She also interacts with the world around her, responding to inputs from my waking and sleeping worlds and experiences.

Still frothy with sleep, I receded and Midnight Dana came to the forefront. She laid in bed as the bathroom memories flashed like View-Master stereoscopes, but she was also running. Her heart rate was fast and erratic. She was sweating. She took quick, shallow breaths. Her head suddenly hurt like hell. Midnight Dana was in flight mode.

By 4 a.m., Midnight Dana had made a slew of decisions that started with not attending Pacific University and ended with not writing poetry anymore. Midnight Dana made a plan to do nothing but sit somewhere and listen to birds for the next thirty years or so.

Midnight Dana and I are in conversation this morning. We’re talking about ways she can feel safe at the residency and keep writing poetry. What does she need? How can I advocate for her? I want her to know I see her, hear her, and appreciate her. She’s trying to keep me safe and also keep me from walking into a situation that could be incredibly difficult and painful. She’s going to be there, too, if we go to Oregon. I need to meet her where she’s at and advocate for that part of myself so I don’t become a fear-driven organism whose only option is to run fast and hard and away.

This is the basis of the Internal Family Systems model. We all have parts, and we all need to listen to those parts and bring them into Self. Our Midnight Parts can be teachers if we let them. We can bring them into our awareness and into our hearts while ushering our whole selves to, or at least toward, safety.

Midnight Dana is both an exile and a firefighter. She’s been ignored, silenced, and shamed—even by me—and she looks for quick fixes that will allow her to avoid painful feelings. She makes sense developmentally given my past, namely my childhood. I want her to have that life of listening to birds. And I want her to have so much more than that, including poetry, which is where she sings alongside me.

Moving Mountains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twin Fawns, Treats, and Sitting Right in Rooms

I dated a man who didn’t like to be touched when he ate. Never, not by anybody. Not even me. I tried a few times. It didn’t go well. He only liked square rooms, nothing with an angled or curved wall or a cutout of any kind. Cubbies were for sure off-limits. The house he was living in with his band off Gillham Road in Kansas City was one block over from serial killer Bob Berdella’s house, but that’s not what he didn’t like about it. The sitting room had cherry trim, which bothered him because the rest of the trim was oak. It was supposed to be different to indicate that the sitting room was special. That’s what they did in Victorian homes, at least in Kansas City. Architectural history didn’t matter to him. Consistency mattered, order, and not being touched while eating, which I suppose is order-enforcement of a different kind.

I’d say all of this was problematic, but at some point, I stopped being able to sit in rooms without being squared up to them. In bed, I have to lie in perfect alignment with the walls to either side of me or things feel super off. And curved rows of seating in a square or rectangular room? Floating in the space like that, maybe even with seats whose backs are to the entrance? No, thank you. I’ll find a chair against the wall or drag one there if needed, none of this organismic bacteria-esque drifting as if we’re all being observed under a microscope.

I also don’t like to eat treats when anyone’s in the room with me, namely my husband, or when the news is on or I’m reading a shitty anything anywhere from anyone. My treat time is my me time, and it has to be just right. I have a soundtrack I listen to when eating treats. It’s moody music like Eno and Radiohead. Everything I listen to is moody, or maybe I just hear it that way. Barber. Corigliano. Orff. I’m genre-drifting musically now, probably because I have treats nearby, but my fingers insist on typing this before I eat them (the cookies, not my fingers) despite the fact that my husband’s about to return home, which means there will likely be no treat time for me tonight, especially if I start in on editing this post. I also don’t eat treats while writing and editing. My brain won’t register that the eating has occurred, and I’ll get the keyboard all treat-sticky.

The guy I dated also didn’t like to read anything long, so he limited himself to short stories. Say what you will about that, but he introduced me to Raymond Carver, Gabriel García Márquez, and Kansas City poet and writer Conger Beasley Jr. I was still a music major then, as was he. I hadn’t drifted from music to literature and ultimately to poetry, where I remain a producer-consumer to this day.

The last thing I’ll say about him is he showed me twin fawns who died in their mother’s womb and had been taxidermied shortly after their death. They were on display with other preserved animal oddities at a toy store in a Kansas City neighborhood called Brookside. Years later, he bought them from the owner and gave them to his new wife, who’s an artist. They’re art now, those fawns. They live in a vitrine. The artist sells prints of a painting of them. I don’t think it was her, actually, who painted them. Someone did. The fawns were on television as part of an art-competition show. I’ve seen pictures of the artist with the twins beside her under their glass. I love them and hope they’re at peace. I hope they are loved in the real way, not any other way.

It’s hard not to feel something for a man who values taxidemied fawns and shows them to all the girls he loves. Their vitrine is round, not square. Nobody touches them when they eat. They don’t eat because they are dead. They don’t read because they are dead but also because they are fawns, and even living fawns don’t read. Somehow, this last fact makes me profoundly sad.

The Napture

Today is not my day to experience the napture, that is being transported from Earth to heaven in the midst of a fabulous nap. Apparently, I will not have any nap at all today, despite being mostly awake all night with my sweet dog, who’s not feeling well.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Fitbit thinks I’m asleep all the time for some reason, including while I was sopping my sweet dog’s vomit out of the wool rug in the bedroom while the ceiling fan—which I’d turned on accidentally in the chaos of the moment—mocked my nearly bare back with wave after wave of cold air. Maybe I really was asleep. Maybe I’m asleep now. Maybe we evolved from sleep into wakefulness, but we’re never fully awake, even when we think we are. Maybe Fitbit knows this about me, about you, about all of its wearers.

Lately, Fitbit’s also been like, Hey, your heart rate’s totally low these days, super job, which doesn’t make sense because I’m not properly executing any of my self-care stuff. I’m barely keeping up with the 57 biomarkers I routinely track, not to mention the dozen or so behaviors I monitor. I haven’t tallied the exact number of behaviors I track, which shows you how much I’ve been slacking. Data only works if you work that data, right? Can I get a high five?

I mean, I’m trying to be a data-driven lifeform, but I’m failing better day after day. I’m having carbs again this afternoon, for one thing: the no-bake cookies that are my undoing when I allow myself to be undone, that is eating an uncorseted diet that’s bound to tank my efforts at improved mental health. If I had my continuous glucose monitor on, I could see in real time what those cookies do to my glucose levels, and from that data I could infer what’s happening to my mitochondria. I could look at old data, but it’s not the same. I need to see in real time what I’m doing to myself so I’ll stop doing it.

This is serious work, and I’m messing it up, and I can’t even take a nap, which seems like it would help. Why can’t I nap? 1: Birds. They’re too loud. 2. Lexi. She’s too restless. 3. Heat. It’s 76 degrees in here, and I’m too hot, the kind of hot one feels when one is menopausal, though I’m long past those days. I’m carb-hot. I ate carbs yesterday, and it’s made me hot. Not in a good way. 4. Husband. Things with, including accusations that I said something mean in all caps when I believe I said it all lowercase. 5. Husband again. Making silly vulgar gestures at me while someone I was talking to on the phone was telling me something awful and important. 6. The awful and important thing I was told and how I can’t do anything about it and how the whole world seems like a gaping maw sometimes, not at all heavenly, not at all a place where naps can be imagined or hoped for, let alone naptures.

HK

Three needles in my left arm deliver the immunoglobulins that I don’t make on my own. They used to come in little glass vials, which I loved because they were old-timey. Now, they come in big plastic syringes packed in more plastic with stoppers and plungers that are all plastic. Plastic is too much with us, and we’re moving toward it rather than away from it. Ah! But fungi can eat ocean plastic! Problem solved. Make more plastic. Empty barges full of it right into the water. Set off in your boat full of sachet packaging and throw it all overboard. No worries. The fungi got you. They got you.

It’s overcast today, windy. My neighbor’s roof vent is clanking every few seconds, its head spinning indecorously. Someone is backing up as evidenced by their truck making two discordant beeping sounds in the round. mleh MLEH mleh MLEH mleh MLEH. I want to walk through the world sounding like that, letting people know how I really feel. MLEH fucking MLEH MLEH mleh MLEH. I think I might already be doing that. I wonder what wild animals think of those sounds and if they’re as irritated by them as humans are or at least as this human is.

I’m looking at something round on my desk, now something octagonal, now something rectangular. I like the shapes of things and how they morph into shapes that aren’t tidy and that don’t have a name and that require calculus for analysis. I used to be able to do that. I could find the area of an irregular shape. I could rotate and translate shapes. I loved it because I loved my calculus teacher, who’s dead now: Lenny Gibson. He invented the abbreviation HK for who cares. I say that to this day. I give no shits about people understanding the reference. Mr. Gibson was a lot like the comedian Steven Wright. Who’s Steven Wright, you ask? HK, you’re probably thinking.

What’s the equation for loss, for memory, for a circle turned into a gaping mouth turned into a nightmare or a crime scene or a missing person report or an AWOL marriage? What’s the equation for who gets an immune system and who doesn’t? For who receives whatever’s being backed into their driveway? For who has a driveway? For who gets to keep existing.

Where’s the equation for dead water and dead forests and dead humans. I mean living humans who are effectively dead, who want death, who would come up with an abbreviation for killing everything in sight and say it proudly. Something that goes beyond WWG1WGA or 14 Words. Something unthinkable, unimaginable, until it’s seen and heard and cannot thereafter be unthought or unimagined.

Mary Reufle’s ‘Lapland’

Mary Reufle created a powerful moment for the audience here in Tucson when she read at The Poetry Center last fall. I was there and will never forget what she did. She read her poem “Lapland,” which she wrote fifty years ago. Then she read an essay about how the word Lapland is not offensive, but now it is offensive to use the word Lapp to describe the people in Lapland. She ended her essay by saying that although the poem’s title is “Lapland” and it’s set in Lapland and the word Lapp appears twice, it’s not about Lapland. Then she uttered this sentence, which enveloped the room:

“And if you don’t understand that, then I would go so far as to say you don’t understand poetry.”

Then, in the tradition of several poets who’ve come before her, she read the entire poem again without comment. So that we would hear it. So that, with our hearts and minds adjusted, we could hear it or have the hope of hearing it.

It was powerful. It was incredible.

Click on the image below to experience Reufle reading “Lapland,” then her essay, then “Lapland” again. The recording of the entire video is on the VOCA Audiovisual Archives. I’m just sharing the section that contains “Lapland” so you can have the experience attendees had that night at Reufle’s reading.

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.

Petrified

I dreamed I was dead but didn’t know it because my husband used petrification to preserve me perfectly. I looked like I was still alive. I couldn’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel, but I thought I could. I experienced the world as if I was still part of it, not realizing my husband was carrying me everywhere: from the bed to the sofa, from the sofa to my desk, from the desk to the car for long drives in the wildlands.

Everything I sensed was a vivid memory, not reality. I’d mined these memories to invoke the aroma the meals my husband cooked, the feeling of his hand holding mine, our dog’s fur tickling my shins, and dawn’s light glinting off vast cliffs and deep canyons while ravens flashed their oiled bodies and I turned to face my husband so I could say “I love you, I love you.”

We went on like this for months or perhaps years. Maybe nearly eternity. I had no concept of time. Every day seemed like past, present, and future all at once until, for whatever reason, I realized my body was a tomb that I was locked inside. I was dead and I knew it, but how could I know anything, even knowing I was dead?

Once I knew I was dead, I could no longer imagine I was alive. The dream of me was on the other side of an inescapable enclosure. Did my husband still carry me around? Did he prop me up next to him so we could watch movies together? Did he take me out to see birds? Where was our dog? Our house? The wildlands? The world?

When would my knowing leave, whatever vestiges of awareness this was? How long would I refuse to vacate this cold black thing where my mind was a fly frantically hitting every ceiling, every wall?

The Writing Life. Parting Words.

I wrote the essay below years ago for a literary organization that ran a series whose focus was on discussing poets whose behavior is inappropriate in an attempt to raise awareness and make poetry spaces safer. The series was also designed to encourage those who’d been harmed to tell their stories. The night before I was going to submit it, someone approached the editor who was handling my submission and told them the name of the poet I was talking about. When I agreed to submit the essay, it was on the condition that the subject not be named or identified. The divulgence made publishing the piece more complicated.

At about the same time, I was made aware of the letter that poet was circulating about me that made libelous statements, as detailed in a previous post. There were also feverish attacks coming from every direction on social media and in private online poetry spaces. One prominent female poet called sexual assault and rape as a whole into question, writing: Definitions have become so blurred and a no-accountability and unassailable victimhood is now the norm. According to today’s definitions of rape I have been raped hundreds of times.

That same poet also called anyone who’d been a victim or was advocating for victims part of a stupid little twat coterie, adding that they need to be sent to bed without their suppers. The fact that she writes for a major publication now brings me no comfort. Someone else used the phrase loathsome creatures to describe victims and advocates. Another called them evil. (That one got hundreds of likes from fellow poets.) Yet another said their efforts felt gratuitous, as if the women were taking pleasure in their pain.

I knew a lot of the poets who were making these kinds of statements. They were editors, publishers, friends, even some of my poetry heroes. Though I wasn’t talking publicly about what had happened to me, and I wasn’t part of the group or groups who were doing so, those attacks were on us all. Every one of us.

I couldn’t see how my essay would have helped at that point. I was unable to tell my story before the chance to do so evaporated. I don’t know what difference it will make now, but I want to share it so I can start to be freed from a horrific experience that began more than a decade ago and affects me to this day.

The last section, “Part 4: The Day You Are Reading This,” was designed for a publication date of more than a decade ago. But it’s still pretty spot on. There’s a timelessness to all of this: both to these kinds of abuses and how these kinds of abuses affect people.

—

The Writing Life: Parting Words

Part 1. Date Withheld

We are in the hotel where a writing conference is taking place, in a restaurant just inside the registration area. Hundreds of poets and writers flit back and forth like gnats. All dutifully wear their conference IDs on lanyards, all carry satchels, backpacks, and bags stuffed with books. They are on their way to and from panels, readings, the book fair, and the public restrooms, some of which have lines that extend all the way down one hall and into another.

He has chosen a seat in the most visible section of the restaurant, an open space near the intersection of two highly trafficked hallways, as opposed to a spot tucked deeper inside the venue. I feel he has selected this spot for a reason. For the entire event, he seems to have choreographed who he will be seen with—and when, where, and how he will be seen with those people. Being “seen” with him seems to be his way of introducing me, of making the statement that I am of some, however modest, worth.

He even orchestrates who he will walk to readings with. I learn this the hard way when, one night before a reading, it becomes apparent that my friend N and I are not allowed to walk with him the two or so blocks from the conference hotel to the reading venue. I realize this when trying to make eye contact with him over and over as he and a clutch of women stand at a small bar just inside the hotel’s entrance. I wave. I make more eye contact. But N and I are both ignored, my gestures shut down.

N and I walk within six feet of his group from the lobby to the reading, but it is clear we’re not walking with his party. Once we all get to the event, however, he makes a point of coming over to talk to me. He stands in front of me, his relative height a statement in a room full of seated poets. He touches me on the arms and shoulders. He asks for a hug. He leaves for a while then comes back, repeating the entire set of requests and gestures. This happens three times.

This is just a gesture, I think. It’s only a gesture. Maybe this is the way things work at this conference—new people make their way “in” based on how others seem to fawn over them. I’ve never attended this conference before, so I wouldn’t know its politics or social dynamics, though there do seem to be many of both in play, with overlap between the two.

At lunch, he tells me how much he loves my poetry and my thoughts about poetry. I go into detail about the panel N and I just came from, where the conversation turned to the notion of “doing violence” to a poem. One panelist’s points during that discussion are of particular interest to me, including his assertion that all acts of writing are violent, that language is intrinsically violent. Another panelist rejects this idea and feels more than uneasy with it. Why all this talk about violence, she asks the audience.

We have been in contact for several months, since I posted a note on Facebook saying I was looking for a poetry mentor. He works at a respected university and takes on many students to mentor, he tells me when he responds to my query.

The conversation pivots from how much he likes my poetry to how much he likes me. I really like you, Dana. I really, really like you.

He leans in and asks, Is N— in love with you, as he reaches out to hold my hand.

Part 2. Date Withheld

I am on my way to the first residency of my master of fine arts program. Because of the program’s check-in time, I had to fly down the night before. The poetry mentor I met through Facebook and with whom I have been interacting for months lives near where I am headed. He has offered to pick me up and drive me from the airport to the destination. He has also suggested we get two rooms at a hotel near the airport. That would give us some time to hang out and talk about poetry, he said. He could then drive me to the residency the next morning. He knew I had anxiety about traveling and being separated from my husband. He said he wanted to support me so I could focus on the residency without having to worry about the logistics of getting there.

His gesture seemed genuine. I talked it over with my husband and agreed to take the mentor up on his offer. He made the arrangements with the hotel and insisted on putting the rooms on his card, saying his school would reimburse him because he would be making an appearance at the residency, which is a form of promotion for his school’s program.

As my mentor and I stand at the hotel’s registration desk the night before the residency, the attendant only hands us key cards for one room, not two. Because of a flight delay, we are checking in several hours later than expected. It’s too late to get another room; they have all been booked for the night.

I’ve already taken one milligram of Ativan to sleep, and it’s starting to kick in. I am confused as we make our way down the long hall to the room. We had talked after the writing conference. I had explicitly stated that I was not interested in any kind of sexual relationship with him. He assured me that he didn’t mean his comment about “really, really” liking me the way it had come across. He was just trying to express how much he liked me as a person and as a friend.

In the following months, he gained my trust as a mentor. He presented himself as looking out for my best interests as a poet. The fact that he was a poetry editor and taught alongside esteemed poets in a creative writing program—as well as his assertion that he was especially interested in supporting the work of women poets because we face so many hurdles within the literary community—further deepened my trust in him.

He also earned my trust on a personal level. Once, when we were discussing my poetry, he said he saw evidence of sexual abuse in the subject matter. He shared that he, too, had been abused. That divulgence, coupled with the concern he showed surrounding my abuse, solidified my trust in him. I was speaking with a fellow survivor, after all, someone who was expressing a depth of concern for my suffering that few have shown. There was no way he would take advantage of my trust. What fellow abuse survivor would even consider doing such a thing?

The fact that he is an abuse survivor informs my thinking as we make our way to the room. I am trying to see the situation from his perspective, as a fellow survivor who feels he’s bonded with me in a way that makes sharing a room with two beds acceptable, like a slumber party between girlfriends. He has a very asexual, childish way about him, and there is a playful energy between us. Nothing in his behavior indicates he has a sexual interest in me. Over the past few months, I have wondered if he had a sexual interest in women at all. I don’t want to jump to conclusions that might be unfounded. I both trust him and want to trust him.

I tell myself, He’s not doing this. He’s not doing this. He’s my mentor. He’s my friend. I must be misreading this. Could he really be doing this?

I am still picking up on zero sexual energy as we settle into the room. He places all his belongings on his own bed, not the one I will be sleeping in. I am continuing to get more of a slumber party vibe than anything, which is in keeping with his overall childlike energy. I try to write the situation off as his having confusion over the boundaries of our friendship more than anything else. At the same time, my body is telling me a different story. Panic is setting in because I have so many sexual violations in my past. Bedroom spaces are particularly anxiety-provoking. It is difficult for me to sleep in anyone else’s presence, even those I trust.

I step out of the room and call my husband, explaining that it is one room, not two. He is shocked. I tell him that I think it is all OK, that I don’t believe there is anything underhanded going on, and that it feels more like a sleepover than him intentionally overstepping his bounds. My husband asks if I feel safe. I say that I do. I get off the phone and go back into the room, thinking, It’s just one night. Just get through this. You can do it. Everything is fine.

I take another milligram of Ativan, both for my nerves and because I need to make sure I get as much rest as possible to be ready for the next day’s residency. I make sure he knows I have taken two doses of the medicine and that is for sleep. Still not fully aware of the danger I am in—still both trusting him and wanting to trust him—my logic is that he definitely won’t try anything if he knows I am incapacitated. And I am. Two milligrams of Ativan is a sedating dose. The medicine suppresses the central nervous system so anxiety can be overridden and sleep can be induced.

I lie down on my bed. The sedating effects from the first and second doses of the medicine are underway. He asks me questions about my physical and sexual abuse. This seems like a strange topic to bring up at this time, when I am stressed and tired and have said repeatedly that I just want to sleep. Why would I want to explore this territory after I’ve had a very hard and long trip, when I have taken a sedative, and when I need to get some rest for the upcoming residency?

I can’t remember what all he asked and what all I said. My memories of conversations are usually quite clear, but the medicine was functioning as a kind of blur filter. I know he was asking for details about what was done to me and how it made me feel. I know the line of inquiry was invasive. He was asking for too many specifics, almost like he wanted to trigger me into reliving the experiences of abuse. The timing and context felt off. Something else was starting to feel very, very off—not about his questions but about him as a person, his intentions. I was beginning to realize the potential danger I was in.

He asks if he can rub my feet. OK, I say, afraid to say otherwise. At this point, I am trying to think clearly, trying to not pass out despite the sedative in my system, trying to imagine how I am going to get out of this unscathed, and—still—trying to tell myself this can’t really be happening. My “OK” is designed to buy me the time needed to figure out, through the haze, what is going on and how to deal with it. (And to be clear, because of my incapacitation, my “OK” was not effective consent. It also did not justify what he did next or the deception and breach of trust that got me into that room in the first place.)

Everything is getting hazier. I think, There’s no way he’s making some kind of move on me—especially not while he’s asking me to tell him about my sexual abuse. That would be really, really twisted.

He continues to ask about my abuse as he starts making his way up my legs. With a jolt, I suddenly know beyond a doubt what he’s doing. I am scared, terrified. I am paralyzed—both physically because of the medicine and mentally/emotionally. The fear associated with my previous sexual abuse kicks in. When I was molested, I did the same thing: I froze. When I was sexually assaulted as a child by an older child: I froze. When I was raped in high school: I froze. Freezing is related to the fight-or-flight response. It is a third form of automatic response the body can have during a traumatic experience. Because of my previous experiences, because I am isolated in a strange town and in a strange room with this man, and because I am incapacitated by the sedative I have taken, freezing is all my body can do, so that’s what it does.

He keeps moving his hands higher. He is touching my inner thigh. It becomes clear with a shock what he’s doing as his hand grazes my vulva through the long underwear I had put on in an attempt to sleep fully covered up. Overriding the sedative, adrenaline rushes through my body. I am still scared to confront him directly, to call him on what he’s up to. I tell him to stop.

I need to sleep, I need to sleep. I bat him away.

Do you need someone to hold you, he asks.

No, I say.

Are you sure, he says.

Yes, I say.

Where do you want me to sleep, he asks in his cloying, childlike tone.

Over there, I say.

Not here, he asks.

No, I say.

He pushes: Are you sure you don’t need someone to cuddle with.

No, I don’t I insist.

He gets up reluctantly. As he moves to get into his bed, I can see through his clothing that he has an erection. I think he was rubbing my legs with it at one point instead of using his hands.

I lie there stunned. I can’t fall asleep even with the medicine in my system, and I don’t want to. If I do, who knows what might happen. I lie awake, running on adrenaline and resisting the medicine’s effects, until I hear him snoring. As quietly as I can, I get up and attempt to pull pants on over my long underwear so I can sneak out of the room. I stumble, nearly fall. This wakes him up. I tell him I am going to stay in the lobby or that I’ll find another hotel (not that I have a way to get there). I say that I am not comfortable and can’t sleep with him in the same room. He apologizes and says he’ll go sleep in his car. I tell him not to come back. He says he won’t. He leaves the room. I pass out in my bed.

I feel safe, finally. I don’t yet have words for what I have just experienced and won’t for a long time. Phrases like “nonconsensual sexual touching” and “effective consent” are not running through my head that night. What is running through my head is a single thought: At least he didn’t rape me. That is the kind of logic many survivors of rape and child sexual abuse employ when someone revictimizes them in ways that fall short of outright rape. At least he only did x and not y is our way of creating a sense of empowerment and protection in the moment and not allowing the person who has hurt us to strip us of who we are. We feel that as long as it could have been worse, we can still move forward. We can become whole again, or at least we can live with the hope of becoming whole.

About four hours later, I wake up to my alarm. He is back in the room, asleep in his bed. I didn’t hear him come in. I have no idea how long he’s been there. I have no idea what he might have done while I was passed out. My sense—or at least my hope—is that he did nothing. But in reality, I know he’s already done something, even if he did “nothing” when he violated yet another boundary by returning to the room despite my insisting he not do so.

He takes me to my residency the next day. I am still in shock and still processing what has happened as he visits with other poets, lingering for hours before finally leaving the campus. He shakes their hands. He talks to them at length. I am too scared to say anything to any of them and wouldn’t know what to say anyway. They have a relationship with him. They don’t have a relationship with me. He is somebody in poetry. I am nobody. I continue to operate in survival mode, counting down the minutes until he will leave me alone at the residency, all without letting on to anyone that something is amiss.

Part 3. Date Withheld

The day after the mentor drops me off at my residency, he sends me an email. I really, really like you, he writes. He asks if we can take our relationship in a different direction, into the area of physical exploration and play.

Later, I will look at a book he signed for me the day before. In the inscription, he will say that I no longer need a mentor. It appears he’s decided that I do need a lover, and that he should be that lover, no matter what my feelings happen to be on the matter.

It will be months before I tell anyone what happened in that hotel room.

Part 4. The Date You Are Reading This

This poet’s actions had numerous short- and long-term consequences. First, they derailed my poetry studies. I had to take sedatives the entire time I was at that residency and bawled through half my time there, especially after problems cropped up in the program around issues related to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transgender discrimination. I barely made it through the first semester both because my mentor in the program was good friends with the poet and because the program’s director lowered my grade for the residency, stating that I did not “demonstrate a passionate commitment to writing.” At the residency, the director privately scolded me for arriving at the program with the poet, purportedly in order to flaunt him in front of my fellow classmates. That statement could not have been more damaging to me, or further from the truth.

Second, the poet’s actions hindered my ability to promote my own work. I was limited in terms of who I could approach and who I could trust. I was also afraid to reach out only to have another poet take advantage of me. I sent my work out infrequently. I didn’t pursue prizes and awards in case he knew or was connected to the judges. The list of ways I turned inward and did not actively and consistently promote my work goes on and on.

Third, the poet’s actions limited my participation in the broader poetry community. What he did—and the way I felt obligated to hide what he did out of fear, shame, and the belief that my concerns would be written off or, worse, that I would be told I was lying—has haunted me for years. I’ve passed the half decade mark at this point, and I still have trouble finding a way to move forward in poetry. I have met several poets who are deeply entwined with this man. I have been triggered in my community when he’s come to town to read. I have been invited to take part in safe, empowering groups of women poets, only to hear them mention this man as if he really is selflessly and genuinely promoting the work of women poets. I have tried to share space with him on social media, even though doing so never felt safe. (At one point, when I unblocked him recently, I saw that he was connected to more than a quarter of my connections on Facebook.) When my work is published in a literary journal, I check the table of contents first thing to make sure his name isn’t listed alongside mine.

In short, there is a hole blown through me, one only I can see. I carry that hole everywhere. It is impossible to be whole in the presence of that hole.

I’ve heard too many stories like mine to remain silent, including additional stories about this particular poet. I am still trying to find a path that will allow me to move forward in poetry. I am listening to the voices that have gone before me. I am being more careful than ever about who I associate with and who I trust. I am putting words to my experience and, regardless of the consequences, I am saying, This happened. This is wrong. It has to stop happening. This is about me, but it isn’t just about me. The issues in play in my story—power, manipulation, deceit, transgression, and the sexual assault that rose out of those issues—are central to other victims’ stories. My hope is to join the voices that are already calling for an end to the systematic subjugation, objectification, exploitation, and manipulation of women who want to be part of poetry. My hope is for stories like mine to be a thing of the past, not par for the course. I want all of this to end.