In a lot of ways, I’ve been processing my recent spiritual awakening/psychotic break by (I think understandably) not processing it; actively choosing to do other things, look away, take a break. And that is part of processing. It’s been an important part for me. When the pendulum swings dramatically to one side, it’s naturally gonna swing right back the other way with equal force and fervor.

So, having spent the last three-ish years in a deeply committed relationship with my Buddhist practice, I’ve spent the last month letting myself feel and process big anger, filling my empty little mind with constant music, cicada song, talking, and podcasts. Having not watched much television at all since discovering how dysregulating it can be1 for me, I’ve been testing the depths of my newfound spiritual regulation by watching tv shows (a weekly dose of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe has been life-giving and absurdly resonant with my recent experiences). I’ve even jumped back onto social media, having sworn it off completely (at least twice), and I’m scrolling and laughing and sharing everything that I want to.

The pretty cool news is that the tests are working. They’re reminding me with great clarity that yes, I did experience something spiritually and neurologically profound, and have been altered/altared2 in some fundamental way. It was quite disorienting to 1) already be aware of that, intensely, as it was happening, but then 2) to realize that it also turned quickly into a bit of Alice’s rabbit hole; where humans who might not really be humans anymore don’t need to eat or sleep or take medicine, but do need to “keep up appearances…”

This morning on the way to water a dear friend’s flowers (because August in Oklahoma is a cute little dried-up version of hell), I started listening to a podcast called “A Priest, a Rabbi, and Muslim Leader Get High” by Altered States out of UC Berkeley. I expected it to be interesting.

What I didn’t expect was to be rapidly catapulted into processing my recent not-in-the-least-psychedelically-induced experience by hearing the stories of these spiritual leaders tripping on psilocybin:

• The indescribable pain of facing past traumas with no escape.3

• The fresh, new, wholly-dependent-baby feeling that arrives, post “ego-death.”

• The immense and joyful clarity that comes with witnessing our shared, intrinsic awareness.

• That miracles are literally everywhere and constant, and also – critically – ordinary as fvck.

And I just cried, listening to these dedicatedly religious people describe their experiences with psychedelics. Ha! The highs and the lows. The actual hell of it and the actual, perceivable, heaven of our shared embodied experience.

I highly recommend this podcast episode, and the Altered States podcast more generally. And I disagree with the notion that many spiritual people have (my previous self included) that psychedelics are some kind of cheater’s short-cut to awakening. To this I say with clarity:

Nope.

You don’t have to put yourself through years, decades, or lifetimes of self-inflicted suffering to experience transcendence.

That’s what I call poppycock.

We suffer enough already. You’ve suffered enough already.

What I do agree with even more profoundly than before, is that it is essential you not try either ritual-based spiritual transcendence, or psychedelics without deeply attuned, well, and knowledgeable guides before, throughout, and after the process. I had these before my experience, and I had these during my experience, but as soon as I walked out of the monastery to “re-enter the marketplace”4 after my 7-day silent retreat, I was profoundly alone – and I don’t mean this in merely a spiritual sense.

The guiding abbot at the retreat brought me to an incredibly coherent state of weeping on multiple occasions over the week, but one specific instance was when he started an indescribably long and painful meditation by saying “In Buddhism we say: before Buddhism, you are like an orphan with no parents. After Buddhism, you are still like an orphan with no parents.” Yes. Of course we are always profoundly alone in a spiritual sense, this tracks for me - no one else can do this work for you. But what I actually mean here is that I was profoundly alone, in my car, driving for 7 hours on very little sleep after the equivalent of a massive psychedelic trip.

And, let me tell you, it was a glittering 7 hours. Dallas traffic was nothing. Truly! I wove seamlessly through and around cars with almost no effort, just immense joy and clarity. I felt just like the monk re-entering the dang marketplace, somehow moving easily through all the busy clamor with a calm, steady, effortlessness.

I was deeply safe - much safer than the drivers on their phones, or those filled with rage at one another. That’s true. It’s also true that I very soon started to lose my grip on reality in the moments when I most needed a guide, someone to help ease me back into things, let’s say, post ego-death. Because in my experience, nobody really talks about that; that there is a “post” part.

In Buddhism we talk about taming the elephant5, a beautiful visual metaphor for moving more deeply into communion with our own pure awareness. And it moves step-by-step, it’s a process. But it gets pretty confusing if you seem to jump from the first or second elephant straight to floating with your own little robe parasail in the sky. It can even seem like, oh ok, I’ll get instructions on this in my next life or I guess I’m whatever-this-is now…

I knew I wasn’t quite a bodhisattva or a buddha, but I was starting to think I was going to have to allow myself to become one, pretty much nowish, which would require some sort of next life situation. You probably see where this was dangerously headed…

Fortunately I had a compass in my heart that was and is so fvcking strong. It pointed north-west-north from the retreat center, and brought me home. To my literal home. To my beautiful husband, who is the goddamn ground floor of an infinite hotel. To my always already perfect child, who helped me to see through my initial flood of anger at Buddhism, by telling me he thought I had actually learned something. When I asked him “WHAT? What did I LEARN?!” he said:

And he’s right.

I have all the guides and teachers I need for the rest of forever, right here.

“The heart sutra will save your life” the Abbot said. And he was also right, just not in the way I thought.

There’s a lot more I have to write about this experience. I wonder what questions y’all might have, and/or what pieces of all this you are interested in hearing more about. As always, I’m grateful for any opportunities to connect :)

I’m doing a good job.

You’re doing a good job.

One thing about me is that I really can’t help but see everything as connected.

For much of my life, I tried to do that whole “compartmentalizing” thing: over here is my work and over here is my life and somewhere between them is supposed to be some sort of balance…apparently?

It didn’t ever really work - everything has always bled back and forth pretty constantly. The novel I was reading for leisure was obviously and inextricably tied to the metadata problems I was having at work; or, the poem I wrote 3 years ago about my own experience of motherhood was also clearly connected to my co-worker’s current experience of elder care; every tree/every hot cicada call/every groggy post-nap yawn, a metaphor for life and death; and on and on and on.

I recently had a significant spiritual experience, which happened to simultaneously mark the beginning of a (mercifully brief) psychotic break. I’m well now — more well than I’ve ever been, in fact — mostly thanks to my loved ones who cared for me with immense trust and compassion (and an exceptionally good Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor). The whole experience was awful and beautiful and fascinating and really, really scary.

As I rapidly came back to myself, I felt a lot of anger at Buddhism.

Like, what the fvck, right? How could this practice which has undeniably altered me for the better, given me self-regulation skills I never could have imagined having, and been a real source of healing in spiritual community, also be the source of the scariest mental health episode of my life?

There are lots of answers to this question, that I’m sure I’ll be exploring for a long time. But where I’ve landed for now is 1) I’m actually mad at myself, and 2) yeah, it was both. It was both purifying liberation and deeply scary. Did it have to be that way? I don’t think so, but I also don’t know.

What I do know is that, the connective tissue between all things has only amplified for me, and I’m fortunate enough to be at a point in my career as an academic librarian that it’s fine for me to let all that connection just manifest. No more unnecessary compartmentalizing - me as mother is me as artist is me as scholar etc.

If you’re interested in connections, and in how all these bits and pieces might connect into something meaningful, I invite you to check out my new website on Embodiment Literacy, or the video linked above on the same topic. I’d truly love to hear from you and know what you think. Also, feel free to poke at and try to break the website and lemme know if you succeed :)

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

Instead of having to share and congeal all of my ideas in a substack post to share today, I’m just sharing Phil’s recent talk. So stinkin’ good. Watch it, or don’t watch it. Either is fine, y’all.

Cool. :)

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

This event was incredibly beautiful - Oscillator Press is like a little healing center for weirdos in our town, and it was their anniversary show which we were invited to be weird for.

This was pure improvisation for the three of us, and it helped me figure out and remember something about who I am.

thanks, Lauren and Uncle Bubba. And Eric and Jenna. And Everyone.

oh, especially thanks to David and Wolfie. You guys keep me on track, thank goodness.

and duh, thanks mom and dad/s. :)

I am doing a good job. You are doing a good job.

You guys are so nice to come here and read whatever I write and share. Thank you for your kindness.

-Bailey

There is a dead bird in a parking spot outside of my office, its body smashed recently enough that parts of it are fluttering in the wind. It is a mockingbird and I’m watching it.

I’m watching it and suddenly, there’s movement above and beyond, in the main of the street. A second mockingbird, alive, and spitting curses at a crow who is stalking and creaking its way towards the echoing movements of the dead birds wings. And then another mockingbird, dive-bombing the crow, using every inch of its being to scare the scavenger away from consuming this immeasurable loss. It’s a thrilling, live-action street fight, a David and Goliath remake, with David as the rage of a mother in the body of two songbirds and Goliath a confusion of caws just scouting for a meal.

Everyone knows the bird is dead.

The rage of the living mockingbirds shimmers — a child, a friend, another small bird is dead — and the Crow in its willingness to eat what’s left, seems as surprised as I am at the persistence of these small songbirds, their tails whipped upright, bodies contorted and angled for maximum emanation of threat. Their loss is fresh, their rage ready to hurdle in every-thousand direction.

How perfect that two mockingbirds, often known only for their deceptive vocalizations, are today a living painting of sincere rage.

Rage happens to be the most difficult emotion for me to recognize in myself; impossible for me to handle in others.

But I know that like all things, rage is a manifestation of love, distorted and mis-uttered in our perpetual mumbling forward.

We say “fuck you” when we mean “I miss you”

We say “I’ll never forgive her” when we mean “my heart is a cracked bowl, poured out out out”

We say “I hope they rot in hell” when we mean “How can I possibly hold all of this reverberant pain without shaking some of it off onto you too?”

After my sister died, two very young red-shouldered hawks cried for what felt like hours in the backyard.

The young children in our family always manifest as hawks.

Some days after my child was emergency-born, a red-tailed hawk — inches from the car door on the shoulder of a highway off-ramp — tore bloodied muscle from the body of indecipherable roadkill, never un-anchoring its eyes from mine; stubborn too soft a word for what it told me.

I felt instant and immeasurable relief.

I knew my child would be OK.

Yesterday, the great crested flycatcher returned to my backyard. It has a soft yellow belly and a subtle gray mohawk, like a teenager unsure of exactly what they’re saying but knowing with certainty that they have something to say.

I watched and listened, rapt as it weee-eep-ed and sputtered between electrical line and oak tree, returning each time to the line with an insect, fresh in its beak.

Who needs television, I thought. Binoculars still feel revolutionary.

I’m tired of human stories.

Tell me what you felt today as a bird?

I’m doing a good job.

You’re doing a good job.

I recently went on the Autism Foundation of Oklahoma’s podcast, Unmasking with AFO, with hopes to affect some positivity in the world, to bring a gentle light to someone, and to share about the work related to autism and libraries that I am really fortunate to get to do.

I shared the recording with a group of family members and, on a whim, included my son as well. It was “on a whim” because anyone who knows him knows that he is adamantly anti-youtube, so much so that he generally refuses to engage with the platform. At 11, he’s already keenly aware of the crude and distasteful logic behind the leveraging of addiction for profit.1

So when, a few hours later, he told me how much he enjoyed the video and continued to reference it throughout the day, I was initially surprised, followed by a great wash of gratitude and clarity.

About five years ago, our family was moving towards deep crisis and devastating unwellness, all because we didn’t truly see and know our son. Today, my kind, generous, and deeply feeling child feels seen and known and connected. Knowing all things are change, and with complete surrender to all that may come next, I would just like to say:

HOORAY!

HOORAY for knowing and loving ourselves so well, that we can gently become more than we ever imagined!

HOORAY for good things! Good news!

HOORAY for people continuing to move and to try and to have grace for one another!

HOORAY for the boundlessness of compassion!

HOORAY for you! HOORAY for me!

HOORAY for this life that holds such possibility for alleviation!

HOORAY for the shattering of hard shells that hurt us far more than they ever protected us!

HOORAY, HOORAY, HOORAY!

The gratitude in my life is unfolding continually, so that the gratitude feeds the goodness feeds the gratitude and on and on and on; a balm to a creature prone (as all humans are) to remember more easily that which gives rise to aversion and fear; instead, noticing a grackle with a strange white neck morph and filling, unabashedly, with joy; instead, noticing and sharing with my husband the moments in a day that generated something positive in the world, however small; instead, saying hello to you and smiling smiling smiling right through the computer screen, my friend.

The world is on fire. I believe deeply that our hearts hold all that we need to put out the fire and rebuild something together in wholeness, clarity, abundant care, and joy.

Please, keep going.

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job. :)

Some words that are currently resonating after a recent read2:

convergence

motor synchrony

spiritual technologies

religious surrender

There is an ER doctor who wears baseball caps embroidered with birds — one for each season of the year. Winter is a chickadee because they stick around, he told us. My joy in that moment elevated me, I think elevated the whole frightened room. I told him as much.

Technically I’m not supposed to wear them here… this was Friday in Oklahoma. Under threat of dangerous cold, smoldering grass fires, and the growing echoes of political violence, the hopefulness of birds took precedent over wardrobe policy.

Thank goodness.

Yesterday, I sat in meditation quite a bit, and mostly my body shook. I’ve read this is normal, perhaps the effect of trauma and trapped energy finally leaving my body. There will likely be more shaking to come. My job is simply to allow it, along with anything else that shows up. So each day I am doing my best to surrender to being exactly where, who, and how I am, and it is good and difficult work.

I like to imagine — in fact, I believe — that if I can manage to weather this shaking; if I can allow the trapped energy of this lifetime to move through me; if I can open and surrender completely, then perhaps also in this lifetime I can help to release some of the trapped energy of our communal traumas. If this is even a remote possibility, and I’m unabashedly certain that it is, I must pursue it.

I woke around 4 this morning to someone, and no one, very clearly saying my name, Bailey.

I’m still not sure how to answer, but I do know this:

The chickadee sticks around, and the great bells of our bodies sing harmoniously together if we let them.

Amen.

Svaha.

Hallelujah.

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

Today, I learned that tears of grief and tears of joy have fundamentally different chemical compositions, resulting in different crystalline structures.

I wonder what happens when you cry tears of grief and joy simultaneously; what crystals might be forming on the hot bed of my cheek this afternoon.

Over the weekend, we lost my little sister, Mary.

I’ve been off of social media mostly for good for a couple years now, but I’m stuck at home with Covid and have limited ways to connect with loved ones over the immensity of this loss. So I’ve been grateful to be able to look at pictures and to read comments of love and sympathy for her husband, children, and parents. The things that are moving me the most are the prayers, the positive energy and intentions, the goodness and light shining outwards from everyone who knew her, right towards everyone else who knew her. And then onwards, to and from many many people who never knew her. It just makes me smile instantly to try to imagine the breadth of it, because I can’t. It’s a big ol’ shifting and faceted picture of joy, deep sorrow, and love, all thanks to this one beautiful life.

How grateful I am to have shed my own armor of cynicism prior to this moment.

Every bit of positive light, prayer, and loving intention is reaching Mary, is reaching me, is reaching her heartbroken parents, husband, and children. Of course it is. Of course it is. Of course it is.

Amituofo.

Mary was a joyful and loving mother, and friends of her family have organized a fundraiser for her two darling children. Please consider donating any amount towards their continued and future well-being at this GoFundMe page. Thank you, friends.

So then I thought, I’ll just start recording it.

I’ll record an initial episode, exploring and explaining the metaphorical basis for the podcast. And it won’t be high quality audio, cause look at me — I can barely get past GO, there’s no room in this plan for doing things the right way. No script, just a regulated body and thoughts constellating. It’s either do it or don’t do it.

So I did it. Months ago. And the recording has sat here, and I’ve been living my life and exploring what it’s like to have access to being okay in the world, and haven’t found much time/motivation/desire to write. And I’ve been well. Like, actually well. So this isn’t a lament. In fact, it’s more a humble and hopeful offering. If I can do anything to alleviate suffering in our world, I want very much to do it. So here’s an allegorical intro to a podcast that will never be, but that might get a few people thinking about the conversations we’re afraid of having, and the gentleness we all deserve.

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

Okay, so edge habitats, right?

The concept of an edge habitat is like this edge between two distinct habitats. So you can think of a forest edge coming upon a prairie; coming upon grass.

And edge habitats tend to be really fertile and diverse. There’s a lot of life and action.

Things happen.

A lot happens in edge habitats. Like, I’m sure there are studies I could point to showing the greater diversity of living things that depend on things, plants, other living things, et cetera, that exist and maybe only exist or maybe only thrive with access to or within these edge habitats.1

The other thing about edge habitats is that they are also spaces of great vulnerability, right? So imagine you are a deer and you live very safely for the most part within the woods, right? You know how to move with extreme quiet, to be unseen, you know where to sleep safely, you know how to feel safe in the forest.

But that prairie, that grassland, that open land, that’s a very different space for a deer neurologically, I would imagine, because in that open space there’s so much danger there’s so much exposure.

And so right along the edge between that forest and that prairie is like, let’s say for example, some kind of fruit that grows that deer really like; or different plants they really enjoy eating and they need even. They need nutrients that come from plants they can’t get in the dark shadows of the forest, but they can get if they come to the edge. So they don’t necessarily have to step all the way out into the open prairie, but at the edge, at the edge between the two, there is still great vulnerability because the deer gives up its ability to be unseen.

The deer in stepping into that space becomes more visible, becomes more exposed to predators, becomes something different than what the deer is within the dark and relatively safe forest.

So to me, the idea of edge habitats in conversation and in communication translates really nicely to any place at which we are attempting to communicate to one another from distinct bodies and experiences and perceptions, right? My body, experience, and perception is distinct and different from all the other bodies and experiences and perceptions in any moment, right?

So communication is this attempt between these separate, let’s say, habitats.

Let’s say my body is my habitat, okay. So communication between is always a bit vulnerable. It’s always, stepping into [perhaps] the danger of being misunderstood, right?

It’s stepping into this challenging space where we can only ever kind of attempt to fully understand one another, but we keep attempting, right? And so edge habitats, the idea of the edges in conversation, is like finding our way, allowing ourselves to go ahead and step to that edge, meet each other at that edge — whether it’s a political edge, a spiritual edge, even just like ‘this is what I think this word means’ and ‘this is what I think this word means’ and those meanings are different and so let’s step into the edge. Instead of agree to disagree, we step into it and hear each other and speak and listen deeply and we take time to process together.

And we just walk along and navigate that edge.

this post is part of my year of returns

now

hand me your guilt 
so that I might lie it down 
in the river
let it sink past the rud 
of water 
and return to the earth
in hopes of becoming 
something more useful

guilt has great needs
I will not carry them for you
and it’s time to go

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

this post is part of my year of returns

picture of David doing physical therapy #1

pile palms on a table
let the bird of them rise

wings cupped to gather 
like tongues of expectation

carry soft-petaled birds 
to the bone of your breast

let the stem of your neck 
forget flowers

be small 
and gaze up at your mother

feel the lift of your chin
as shut eyes wash calm

over the tortured bell 
of your body

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

How has autism influenced your life? How have you been changed by this caregiving experience?

This is perhaps the question I've been trying to share the answer to for the last 3-4 years. If I could easily distill how autism has influenced my life, I'd finally be ready to write the book I hope to someday write.

Autism is an explanation for the immense struggles I experienced as a highly intelligent and extremely socially insecure person for the first 35ish years of my life. It is an answer to the question mark that hovered just over and behind my head, the constant "am I doing this right?" that nagged at every moment in the presence of others, and often for hours before and/or afterwards.

Coming to know myself and my child as autistic individuals has meant coming to know myself at all; it has meant moving back into my physical body after a lifetime of persistent, mild to moderate dissociation. And the influence of autism on my life is inextricably tied to my experience of caregiving. Before I knew - before we knew how to understand ourselves, how to move through the world authentically and without persistent threat activation and fear - there was no access to thriving. We had no access, we had no language to story ourselves generously, we had no pathways for compassion for ourselves or for one another. And in carrying out the day-to-day patterns of modern American parenting - just like everyone else around me - I was, however much I intended the opposite, bringing great harm to my child. Processing and accepting that alone took immense time and space. For example, when I realized how traumatizing the culture around food in our home had become for my child, I didn't cook for a whole year. I couldn't cook for a whole year. I had been "sticking to my guns" and "Mother knows best"ing us into deep burnout, and realizing that was indescribably painful and difficult. But I needed to feel and know and be with that difficult for as long as I needed to, so that I could shift into something new and more attuned to our needs when I was ready.

These days I'm back to cooking, and I cook more than ever before! I love the sensory experience of cutting and cooking vegetables, of the living pillow of a high-hydration sourdough bread during proofing, of feeding my family with my hands and my joy. And as we have healed together, my child's suspicion of nearly all foods has started, ever so slowly, to melt away. Yesterday, he ate 1 blue edible flower from a borage plant that I described as "like a sweet cucumber" - I write this with baffled amazement because if you knew where we were 4 years ago, 2 years ago, 6 months ago, as relates to food, you too would be baffled and amazed. And literally all he ever needed was autonomy, trust, and time. Just unconditional love, trust, and acceptance.

I look at my child each day and feel immense and glittering gratitude for what he has given me and what we now get to experience together. And I want to be clear about this, I hear people say not to speak only to that which is good of autistic experience - and their reasons are well justified! We aren't superheroes to be valorized, we'd really like just to be seen and known as the human beings we are, no more, no less. But my experience of autism has been the complicated and messy experience of transformation, of self-acceptance, of finding what I knew was there all along: deep, unbounded, and truly unconditional compassion. And that is really beautiful and so to me, autism is really good and really beautiful.

I think people feel the need to cling to their notions of autistic people as somehow less than/worthy of pity/etc. because if they didn't, they'd have a lot of painful work to do within themselves, and people mostly aren't going to do that work unless they have to. I know I wouldn't have.

Autism - through my child, through myself, through the broader culture - has quite literally saved my life and provided a navigable pathway towards self-acceptance and thriving, things I never even thought to hope I might find and trust to stick around. And I trust it so easily these days.

In summary! Without my experience of caregiving, I'd be at best, still quite painfully lost, and at worst, probably dead.

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

this post is part of my year of returns

picture of David doing physical therapy #2

for weeks        in evenings        at kitchen tables
you practiced how it would feel to be sacred
dancing the still choreography of reclamation
hands rooting your wandering neck to its chest
like the dead might repose if they were half as lovely
or did I mean lonely and is there really much difference

all art must be god        I stared and thought
how easy it is to forget a man’s nakedness

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

this post is part of my year of returns

the implications of beginning

the heavy-muscled ox has no trouble
living forever          all those angels
and clouds in the cart behind

oh edgeless eternity          like breath
like water on the lip
of horizon          birth something

more comforting than all this
perhaps          a naked man
standing in a cold stream

certain things familiar
however strange          say
the contingency of bodies

like the sound of ending
the way it promises
echoes back 

the round ripple
of your finger in the water
expanding

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

Let the suffering of our world today catalyze our enlightenment.

Let it move us all towards that which is most deeply and unchangeably good in each of us.

Let it bring us pause, not reactivity.

And when it breaks us, let it break us open, open, open.

Let it break us open.

May we trust that our work now to alleviate the suffering of all beings will seed the fruit of a future in which we can all continue to move closer to that within us that is most sustaining, pure, and good. That we might meet anger and reactivity with peace, pure peace, nonviolence.

Let us trust that this is not only enough, but the only thing we can do, the only way we create a future in which all beings can be free of suffering.

Let us trust that the impossible is possible.

Let us bow down at the feet of one another.

Let us see only good in one another's hearts.

Let us find within the hard kernel of our enemies only pure light and good.

Let us see it.

We can see it.

this post is part of my year of returns

the father

given at birth the kiss 
of an ax’s edge

and given no other place 
to land it

he began the work of felling 
each lovely 

limber limb reducing 
his body’s potential 

to a low and known 
stump | hard

useful | of a kind
so no one questioned 

the ax when it continued 
to land making 

the whole forest of us 
firewood 

each log of obvious 
and immediate use 

the oak for its long burn
into the night

the birch equipped with bark
to start the fire

cedar to mask the smell 
of what was burning

the ax for its part 
was whet on his lips 

those 45-degree angles 
made to act 

as stone | better that they sharpen
and sand all futures

than be another pink 
thing tender in the sea 

better if the forest must burn 
to be already

a stump | a stone | low
and so very 

smaller than 
the full-blown tree 

of his red lips 
of his mother’s 

high heels 
of walking naked

in the cold morning air 
shameless 

as a body that knows nothing
but love | here

in my hands is the father
flesh and subtle 

and willing | in his old age 
tears come

like so many wasted 
suns quit

crying he says
refraining the small 

song he was sung into
we have lied to ourselves
 

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

this post is part of my year of returns

reckoning

say the fall was birth
say Eve was the mother of all living
say the losses of translation
say the gains

say Always the procreant
urge of the world
say Walt Whitman wasn’t racist
wrap the children 
in foil blankets

say sunshine as antiseptic
say water
say hum of pain in the inner
ear due to pollen
exposure to the sum
of daily dogma + fear

say everything is going to be OK 
say the way we move our bodies 
matters
say following the center of your palm
as it sweeps from left to right
gather the energy of the sky
press it to your belly hold it 
in your hands like a large bowl 
or watermelon at your waist

say living children will stop dying
if we pay enough
with our bodies
say to whom

say the birds are rejoicing
say how hard it is to have it all
say mud-caked and earth-strewn
limbs will save us

say life without knowledge of good and evil 
spit the taste of that fruit

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

this post is part of my year of returns

spring 

spring is coming up
and I stand everywhere
like spring

cold slouch of the untouched
good posture of being kissed
by the sun

over and over I repeat these things
a rounded shape of worse then better
then worse again

why does a body need so much
when I ripped the daffodil
from its own opening

it let go so easily
wept milky and then
sat tall and hopeful in the vase

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.

-bad_french

embedded poems

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three white-out poems on authority control, written during 2020 - linked as pdf to ensure proper formatting

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Librarians often reference the idea of “authority control,” when determining how best to organize and describe materials for access. It is a useful idea – one which allows us to group like things in ways that allow users to make serendipitous topical connections – but one which is inherently susceptible to bias.

While working with a group of library colleagues to propose a change to the Library of Congress “authorized subject heading,” for the Tulsa Race Massacre, I spent a great deal of time contemplating the following language from the Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) Participants’ Manual:

“For newly emerging topics and disciplines, it is not always easy to find consensus among authorities as to what term should be used for the topic. Generally, prefer current American usage for a concept. In cases where there is no consensus among American authorities, SHM H 187 instructs catalogers to make an intuitive judgment based on available evidence...It is important to remember that sources consulted must be relevant to the topic being established.” [emphasis mine]

The following found poems came out of this contemplation. Each poem is a representation of the entire Merriam Webster definition of a relevant word, as well as one Oxford English Dictionary entry, both considered by SACO to be acceptable general authorities. Much of each definition is whited out so that it is impossible to see on the page. The poems thus presume their own authority, removing the words and language that did not serve them, inverting and thus implying the ways in which dominant white culture in America presumes and shapes authority; embeds it within our knowledge structures. The entire project is complicated by the fact that I am a white woman functioning within a disproportionately white field, attempting to invert white supremacist notions of authority from a place of whiteness. The poems are an exploration of what meanings surface through erasure, and how we might salvage our way towards more equitable and nuanced understandings of knowledge organization, creation, and authority in this country.

The proposed change was put forth in the year 2020, and was a request that the term Tulsa Race Riot be changed to the more currently used, relevant, and historically accurate Tulsa Race Massacre.

The proposal was successful.

in returning to the three white out poems above, I found three short poems I had originally appended to the beginning of each, which I include here separately.

current

tell me a river
runs stagnant
tell me the place

all rivers
arrive
stay put

don’t circle
back through
one anothers’

living bodies

American

if I ask you
to imagine a rock
which portion

belongs to your 
mind and which 
mine

usage

to make firm
to make reason
to make law

the enormous and
moving multiplicity
of now

already eroding its face
like breath
like hands

like tongues
of water
to stone

I’m doing a good job. You’re doing a good job.