walk 1: 60 minutes minnehaha off leash dog park 45 degrees
The hiking with Delia and FWA at the dog park is back! I’ve missed our walks and chats and encounters with other dogs. This morning it was beautiful: sunny, not too cold, calm. There was some mud at the top of the hill, but not much in the flats. We heard woodpeckers knocking and calling. Felt squishy mud and sand that nearly sunk me — so soft and difficult to climb out of! Saw the tall bluff on the other side of the river and remembered moving along its rim during my longer runs to the confluence when I was training for the marathon. A spring goal: be trained up enough to run this loop again by May.
FWA and I talked about rules and norms and our difficulty in following them. Not because we like to break rules for the sake of breaking rules, but because they didn’t work for us and that we recognized otherways to be outside of them.
Often on these walks through the dog park, I hear people calling out the names of their dogs. Today I recall it happening only once: Rosie! Come here Rosie! I mentioned to FWA how I’ve encountered several dogs named Rosie around here. I wondered if they spell the name Rosie, or Rosy, or Rosey?
Two favorite dogs: One was a shiba inu1 that was running around its human in wide circles, with the human holding a long leash and remarking to someone else, I feel like I’m playing with the airplane on a string toy I had as a kid. The other dog was tall and lean and a beautiful gray. He (I heard his human say he) was graceful and gentle and leaped over Delia to avoid bumping into her. I was so impressed, that I mentioned to his human what a wonderful dog he was. The human was wearing BRIGHT blue running shoes. Nice!
walk 2: 60 minutes neighborhood / winchell trail 58 degrees
A wonderful afternoon walk with Scott. We walked through the neighborhood and down to the Winchell Trail at the river. Open water, blue, with glowing white snow on the banks of the other side. A pileated woodpecker: drumming then laughing then calling out. Other walkers in tank tops and shorts. A steady stream of cars.
Scott and I stopped at a deluxe, Scott called it a “high-rise”, free library. It had a shelf of adult books and a shelf with kids books and dog treats. I gave Delia a treat, which was for dogs twice her size. As we left I said to Scott, I would like to find a way to make the kind of delight I feel encountering things like this possible for others. What sort of delightful thing could I put up in our yard?
There was a note on the door of the library explaining that the owner re-stocked it frequently and had an instagram account where she gave book reviews! It’s @beccasnotsolittlefreelibrary. I followed her, and thanked her in the comments for bringing joy to our neighborhood.
Holes (aka New Yorker experiment)
Should I try some new erasures, or continue to work on turning my “hole in your vision” into something? Maybe I’ll try both. I’d like to push at this idea of a hole in the vision, with the hole not being (just) empty or a void, but something — like a rabbit hole: an in-between space, a passageway, a liminal space, a threshold, but also a clearing (JJJJJerome Ellis), the Nothing around which something functions, the gorge.
a note about reading and writing: I like using an erasure to show how I read words.2 Taken as a whole, words are too fuzzy or unintelligible to read. I can only read them as individual words. And when looking at one word, I often don’t see of the others around it, just one word then then next word then then next. I used to be able to grasp full phrases and sentences at once — at least I think I did. This not seeing the surrounding words is a problem when I write. My Plague Notebooks are full of examples of words running into each other, or one word being written over another. Whenever this has happened, I try to make note of it by writing Vision Error and drawing an arrow to it.
vision error from the Plague Notebook, vol. 15 spy balloons, winter class, snow / 13 april 2023
Throughout the day, I was adding blind spots and then, when those were too big for the space, I added smaller circles (made by tracing the bottle caps for my iron pills and my old lexipro pills). Here’s how it looks now:
holes / work in progress
I’m pleased with how it is looking. As of now, I’m imagining this version as a template for another, more polished version. I might replace some of the pencil shading with material — like gauze or netting. Maybe other holes will be filled in with glitter or sparkling something, feathers, twigs?
FWA identified it as a shiba inu; I couldn’t see it well enough to do that — it was all blur and bark to me ↩︎
It might be interesting to do some audio, too. I’d like to record myself reading something for the first time, to show how I struggle to read words. ↩︎
2.5 miles 44th street parking lot and back 35 degrees
Ran n the afternoon. Colder today. I wore gloves and a headband to cover my ears. It felt harder, maybe I ran too soon after lunch?
It snowed last night. Not much — not even an inch, but enough to cover the grass and make everything glow white. By the time I went out for my run, the paths were clear.
omens of spring-to-come: someone was roller blading! Not roller skiing, but roller blading. And, a woman was running in shorts. It’s not unusual to see a man running in shorts during the winter, but it’s rare to see a woman. That usually doesn’t happen until it’s spring, or feels like spring, or is warm enough to be spring.
I was planning to finish my rabbit recap today, but then I started thinking about and experimenting with my holes poem. No time for the rabbits — well, except for several paragraphs below, when I realize that my naming of this poem, Holes (or hole?), is probably at least partly a reference to the rabbit hole!
New Yorker Experiment #4, continued
Today some part of me decided that we (the Saras) would offer a more detailed account of the process of thinking through my latest poem, so that’s what we’re doing.
I want to keep working on my fourth experiment. Yesterday afternoon, I printed out the New Yorker article, “A Screaming Skull,” and found my poem on its four pages. Then I taped the pages together and mapped the poem out. The theme: holes. I imagine it as part of a larger project about my blind spot. Maybe this project won’t be all erasure/found poems; I might try to connect it to some other work on the blind spot — work I’ve been doing for several years now, but haven’t quite figured out how to turn it into something. Yes! Experiment #3 — swap the dead-eyed liturgy of doomed vision with shadow (or shadowed?) acts, wild and improbable could connect with my study of JJJJJerome Ellis, the stutter, and his liturgy of the name! Very cool!
I took a picture of what I’ve done so far:
12
What to do next? The second image offers a possible approach: Applying my blind spot — the one I recently created by staring at a blank wall until it appeared, then tracing it — to each of the “found” words. I could sketch the blind spot directly on the page, around the word, OR I could place a cut-out version of the blind spot on top of the word. Maybe I’ll try a practice sketch. Another idea, which is probably definitely beyond my technical ability: create an animation of the process of reading this that starts with an overview of the poem, then zooms into the first word, encircled by the blind spot which appears as I read it. Then it moves to the next word/phrase, and the next, and the next until the poem is finished. I could also do it as a series of stills (instead of an animation). You could look at each one individually1, the image as a whole, and the series of images in a gallery.
I like this last idea! The focus on individual words — isolated from the other words and the meaning as a whole, which is how I read, because what’s left of my central vision is so small it can only fit a few words, and which is how I often (but not always) experience the world with my big blind spot — in isolation, and removed from others. A question: should I keep the larger poem as a square, stacked 2 x 2 pages? Or should I have it extend as 4 pages across? I can play around with it.
an hour or two later: Here’s something I tried with a paper cut-out of my blind spot as a template. I’m thinking I should ask Scott to make a sturdier, cardboard version of this template.
in progress / 1 PM / 7 march 2026
Something to think about: should I have the blind spots on the entire poem/map? I was going to write: no, because that’s not how I would see it; I would see a somewhat fuzzy version of the map of the poem. But this poem is not an accurate representation of how I see. I hardly ever see my blind spot as a gray blob. But the blind spot is there and it distorts how/what I see and I need to represent in some way that others can see too.
Another question: should I hand-sketch this poem, or figure out how to do it on the computer? I like the hand drawing — the material aspect of it + I can do it all myself — but drawing it by hand is messy and unreliable. I’m thinking that this series will be part of my vision art installation — along with my snellen charts and mood rings. It seems too messy if I don’t do it on a computer.
Also: how should the individual stills look? Should they be a close-up on that part of the poem, or just the word/phrase centered in an otherwise blank page? Should they include the blind ring? If I have more of the text, should it be too fuzzy/distorted to read, or should I have it surrounded by gray? Looking at the words on this screen, I see: 1 or 2, maybe 3 short words in focus, then other words too dim or fuzzy to read, and, after staring for a few seconds, a glowing dark ring around it. This ring is not solid or very dark, it’s almost gauzy, like a veil, or the feeling that there’s a ring there. Does that sound strange?
(rabbit) holes: Today I start a new volume of my Plague Notebook: vol. 28! I’m calling it, What about Epstein, Trump? As I was writing in it, describing my latest visual poem, Holes, a thought: Am I calling this holes (or hole?) partly because of my recent study of rabbit holes?! Maybe! And maybe I could bring rabbit holes into a poem about my blind spot!?
Get Out ICE
“Accountability in this case looks incredibly simple. Minnesota must investigate the violation of constitutional rights at the hands of Noem and her ICE agents and prosecute where appropriate. The best part about this process is that Trump can’t pardon state convictions.” Boom. (from a Occupy Democracy post, citing a MSNOW interview with Tim Walz)
While applying my blind spot to the phrase, “another word for,” I realized that that phrase was too big to fit inside the inner ring. So, that’s a new limit to how I can construct this, and other blind spot, poems: the phrases/lines must be able to fit within my blind spot. It wasn’t a big deal in this poem; I just took out the for from “another name for” and found it somewhere else in the article. ↩︎
3.5 miles locks and dam no. 1 48 degrees / drizzle
A few more warm days, then cold again. I didn’t mind the drizzle, everything was gray and soft and misty and wet. Dripping and whooshing and seeping. Of course, now that I’m home, the rain has stopped and the sun is almost out. I ran to the bottom of the locks and dam no. 1 hill and admired the ford bridge. It looked more like a painting than an actual bridge — although it sounded like a bridge, with trucks rumbling overhead!
I love the reflections in this picture I took, especially the upside down street lamps and railings.
If the sky were a little darker, the river a little lighter, you might not be able to tell which bridge is up, which is down — at least, I wouldn’t be able to tell!1
Smiled at several runners and walkers and bikers. Made note of all the empty benches and parking lots. There were not too many people out there. For the last bit of the run I was able to get deeper into the mist by running on the Winchell trail. Very haunted and other-worldly!
I listened to water for the first half of the run, and “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist for the second. A new song popped up: Rabbit // Hole by Siddhartha Khosla. It’s part of teh music for a one-season series called Rabbit // Hole with Kiefer Sutherland. It’s a great song to run to. Near the beginning, the music breaks up for a few seconds then plays again then breaks up. I imagined a fast moving rabbit passing by an object when the music broke up, then being in the clear (when the music resumed), then passing my another object when the music broke up again.
Rabbit Recap, part 3
Can I finish this rabbit recap today? Nope. I got distracted with other stuff.
11 —20 feb 2026
All late fall and winter, 2 or more bunnies have been hanging out under our crab apple tree — at night, in the afternoon, at sunrise and sunset. They’re very bold, these bunnies, not running off when I walk by. When this happens, I’ve started saying, these bunnies are as bold as brass! Why? Not sure. And, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea: I like bunnies or rabbits about as much as I like squirrels, which is not at all.
Get Out ICE
Yesterday afternoon, Scott came to my desk n the front room and said, Do you want to hear some good news? I mean, some actual good news?Kristi Noem was fired!
from Needle & Skein (the red hat people)
As of March 5th, we have raised an incredible $705,000 to help our immigrant communities here in MN. This is just us. Other yarn shops in Minnesota and around the country have also raised money and generously donated both here and locally. ICE is still here. Our fight is not over. Join us.
If you are a business who has raised money, please send us a message. We would love to try and get a full picture of what the amazing fiber community worldwide has accomplished.
Read the comments for more on how the fiber arts community is showing up!
New Yorker experiment #5
These experiments are slow-going. I run out of time to work on them. I struggle to see what I’m doing. I’m messy and haven’t figured out how to work with glossy magazine paper. So why am I continuing these experiments? I asked that to Scott and FWA in the kitchen the other day and then answered it myself: For some reason, I2 want to do these erasures, so I’ll keep doing them until I don’t want to or can’t (because it is too hard with my bad vision).
a flash of an idea: As I was writing that last paragraph, I was thinking about how visual poetry is increasingly inaccessible to me as my few remaining cone cells die (are the dying or just malfunctioning?) Then this popped into my head: yesterday’s erasure involved using marker to cover almost the entire text. When I had FWA and RJP read it, they both got marker on their hands — not in big streaks, but in tiny marks that almost looked like cuts or scratches. What if I made these erasures about touch too? My first thought was about doing the erasure in such a way that created a residue. Second thought: what if these erasures involved texture and touch — here, I’m reminded of the kids’ book Pat the Bunny and its different textures to touch: the soft bunny fur, the rough bunny . . . nose? I can’t remember what was the rough thing in the book. If you can touch these erasures and their textures, which would somehow speak to the words/ideas on the page, maybe you can hear them too? I’m thinking of scales, and thick layers of paper, maybe some holes where the paper has been ripped open, some extra rough sections, some smooth, like a thin film, crinkly, soft, sharp-ish. And — maybe in terms of the visual aspect, find ways to cover it that reflect or glow or shimmer or sparkle. I can see these textures in a way that I can’t see the typical flat, black expanse of an erasure. So things like glitter, little mirrors, metallic surfaces, ridges. What about covering it with things that offer colors only visible in the light — thinking of bird feathers here. So many ideas! Again, difficult to execute without it looking like a mess, but fun to try.
Before I had that last flash of inspiration, I was thinking about how I’ve decided (as of yesterday) that the overarching theme of these found poems is my vision and how I see. Then I thought, I should apply my blind spot to these pages. Create an amsler grid out of the text, and then place a cut-out of my blind spot (found while starting at a blank wall and then drawing what I see) on top of the words to find the poem.
Maybe some of these erasures could be all/only about texture, some all/only about my blind spots, and some both. And just now, another thought: What if these erasures were all about my blind spot and the idea of blind spots? Would this work: one of the erasures could be covered in spots or dots or holes in the paper?
So many fun ideas to try. I imagine that some of them will only ever be ideas that are good in theory but don’t work on the page.
Oh — I almost forgot, until I looked over at an open tab that reads, “tools to use for magazine erasure poems,” I started writing about this experiment because I wanted to mention my need for better materials. I love how writing in this log opens me up and helps me to see new things to try! Before writing about textures, the supplies I thought I needed were: sharpies, an exacto knife (can I see well enough to use this?) and possibly paint. Texture through thicker and thinner layers of paint is an interesting idea. Now I’m thinking I need scraps of fabric — next week, RJP and I should go to the fabric scrap store at the Textile Museum! — that are soft and rough and bumpy and gauzy. I need glitter and sparkles and little things that reflect and crinkle. Fun!
Here’s a new version of experiment #3. I decided to paste the text into a document so I could have an easier time drawing on the text. Is this a good solution? I’m not sure, but I do like how this version looks:
swap the dead-eyed liturgy
Bummer. I just realized that I erased the ed on doomed. It is supposed to read: of doomed vision (I guess doom vision could work?).
text:
swap the dead-eyed liturgy of doom OR doomed3 vision with shadow acts wild and improbable
And now I’m redoing yesterday’s experiment:
text:
Another name for barely
not blind is a hole in your vision that makes for an uneasy fellowship with the world.
Both Scott and FWA could tell, but only after studying it for a minute. The giveaway: the waviness in the upside down version — in the streetlamps for FWA, the arch for Scott. I wouldn’t have been able to notice that because most lines/edges, if I can see them, look wavy! ↩︎
Who/what is the “I” here? Not the fully conscious Sara-I. I am not entirely sure why I keep returning to these erasures — either in this particular experiment, or in previous experiments — when they are so difficult with my vision and I’m not very good at them. Is it shadow Sara, nudging me? ↩︎
I prefer doomed vision; I think it works better. I really like this idea of challenging/getting rid of/swapping out a dead-eyed liturgy, where liturgy = “Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and participation in the sacred through activities reflecting praise, thanksgiving, remembrance, supplication, or repentance” (wikipedia). ↩︎
Still feeling like spring, another run with bare arms for the second half. Chirping birds, rushing falls, a knocking woodpecker. Kids on a field trip, walking on the river road trail. Only a few random clumps of snow remaining in the grass. I’m sure we will still get snow, either later this month, or in April, but it won’t stick around. Spring is coming!
I recited Alice Oswald’s “The Story of Falling” and Lisa Olstein’s “Dear One Absent This Long While.” I intended to think about my mom on her birthday, but I forgot to, or did I? I’m sure she was there when I recited — in my head — the last lines of Olstein’s poem: Your is the name the leaves chatter/at the edge of the unrabbited woods.
As I listened to the rushing falls, I recalled my discussion yesterday about the poster with the words, Believe Your Eyes. I thought more about why you should Believe Your Ears and Your Eyes, although less catchy, is more accurate. I recorded a thought into my phone:
5 march 2026
transcript: the sound of minnehaha falls and, occasionally, some wind. “I’m thinking about my poster and switching it from Believe Your Eyes, to Believe Your Ears and Your Eyes. And I’m thinking about, on their own, they’re both unreliable, but when they work together, and with the other senses, they offer a more accurate representation of what’s happening.”
Listened to the birds, my feet striking the grit on the path, someone say, I’m a classroom teacher near the overlook, the falls, sounding like a June rainstorm on the first half of my run. Listened to my “Bunnies and Rabbits” playlist on the second half. I started with “Rabbit Fur Coat,” and was struck by this verse:
She put a knife to her throat “”Hand over that rabbit fur coat”” When my ma refused, the girl kicked dirt on her blouse “”Stay away from my mansion house””
My mother really suffered for that Spent her life in a gold plated body cast.
This last bit about the gold plated body cast — what a great way to describe someone who is obsessed with objects, like gold or fur coats, that bring status and luxury.
Happy Birthday Mom
If she hadn’t died in 2009, my mom would be celebrating her 84th birthday today. 17 years gone. Some memories of her have softened, lost their edges, others have been condensed into a flash or a few words. I was reminded of some of those words the other day when I heard Heather Cox Richardson say, oopsie poopsies. As I remember it, Mom was driving me and my best friend (JO) home. When we pulled into the garage, she called out, Front door service, Missy Doodles! I can’t remember our reaction in that moment — did JO and I exchange looks? did we laugh at her? — but I do remember that it became something we repeated to each other later for a laugh and as a way to mock my mom (mostly good-naturedly, I think).
Why does this dumb sentence stick, when others don’t? Maybe it’s partly because my mom often had a strange way of saying things — happy as a clam bake is another one that comes to mind; also, the way she pronounced absurd — abzurd — and milk — melk (I do that one too). There must be many more that I’m not remembering now; I should ask my sisters. These strange ways of speaking were part of her charm. Front door service, MissyDoodles fits with these others. I googled it just now, thinking it might be a famous catch-phrase from before my time, or that Missy Doodles might have been a character on some show from the 50s or 60s. Nope.
Returning to HCR’s oopsie poopsies, I’m thinking about how she uses it instead of swearing.1 Another connection to my mom surfaces: not swearing, or rarely swearing, or swearing in French or German. And now I’m thinking about her shit rock, which is now my shit rock. I created a digital story about it 10 or so years ago. I also posted about it on my TROUBLE blog. I need to find the video and a transcript of the story somewhere on a hard drive. I’ll post it when I find it.
the Rabbit Recap continues
Yesterday, working backwards, I made it through page 5, page 4, and half of page 3 of entries tagged, rabbit.
6 — 15 nov 2022
The optical illusion: the rabbit or the duck
I surmise that my general visual experience is something like your experience of optical illusions. Open any college psychology textbook to the chapter on perception and look at the optical illusions there. You stare at the image and see it change before your eyes. In one image, you many see first a vase and then two faces in profile. In another, you see first a rabbit then a duck. These images deceive you because they give your brain inadequate or contradictory information. In the first case, your brain tries to determine which part of the image represents the background. In the second case, your brain tries to to group the lines of hte sketch together into a meaningful picture. In both cases there are two equally possible solutions to the visual riddle, so your brain switches from one to the other, and you have the uncanny sensation of “seeing” the image change. When there’s not much to go — no design on the vase, no features on the faces, no feathers, no fur — the brain makes an educated guess.
When I stare at an object I can almost feel my brain making such guesses.
Sight Unseen / Georgina Kleege
7 — 27 sept 2022
Those who have it to give are like cardinals in the snow. So easy and beautifully lit. Some are rabbits. Hard to see except for those who would prey upon them: all that softness and quaking and blood. (I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again/ Vievee Francis)
rabbits — visible only to those who prey upon them — all that softness and quaking and blood.
8 — 1 dec 2021
You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:
when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel, but when it stops, it blends in again; (First Snow / Arthur Sze)
So, does a bunny have two distinctive aspects to their form: ears and tail? Ears if it’s only the head, ears and tail if it’s the entire silhouette. Most things blend into the backyard if they’re still for me. I only see them by their movement and maybe the flash of a tail streaking away.
9 — 25 dec 2025
A child’s plush stuffed rabbit. (Ode to Gray / Dorianne Laux)
Why are stuffed animal toy bunnies usually gray when real rabbits are more often brown?
10 — 15 may 2025
“It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight. . . .” Rabbits as prey, always needing a way to be escape, when cornered, they shut down. Survival strategy: run until you can’t then go stiff, play dead. The idea of always looking for an exit resonates for me. I would much rather avoid a bad/dangerous/uncomfortable situation than confront it. Wherever I go, I always look for the exits, or the entrances into other worlds.
And now I’m wondering about rabbits playing dead and how that works. According to a few different sites, it’s called tonic immobility or trancing and it is”
a behavioural response to a perceived threat, characterised by muscular rigidity, profound motor inhibition, and suppressed vocal behaviour. This behaviour occurs when freezing in response to a predator approach, fight, or flight are no longer perceived as options (Gallup 1974, Gallup 1977). McBride et al. (2006) observed that rabbits held in a tonic immobility position had elevated respiratory rates, heart rates, and plasma corticosterone concentration. Additionally, they expressed fear behaviours such as widened eyes and flattened ears, and demonstrated more hiding behaviours and fewer grooming behaviours post-trancing.
In yesterday’s Politics Chat, talking about her reaction to the news that Trump was bombing Iran, she said, “I said all the swear words you never think I say.” ↩︎
Get Out ICE
From Recovery Bike Shop in Northeast Minneapolis:
This is what community looks like. This is what “bustling” looks like. This is looking out for our neighbors. This is taking care of our own. This is supporting our city.
We feel safer when other people are around. We are those people. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And when we make our street a place that’s comfortable for walking, more people will feel comfortable walking. It’s a virtuous cycle. And it’s something we can do.
So come walk with us every Thursday evening at 5:30. Meet at Recovery Bike Shop. (And next week we’ll be walking in the sun!)
Note: any time you are out walking, you are making your community safer.
Any time you are out walking, you are making your community safer. I love this idea!
New Yorker Experiment #4
But before I move onto #4, I added some numbers to #3, so it was easier to follow the path of the poem:
Experiment #4: A Screaming Skull / New Yorker 18 august 2025
text:
You may feel like a shadow.
Another name for blind is a hole in the vision
You may feel like a shadow.
I tried photocopying the pages from the New Yorker, but the quality is terrible. Also, I ran out of time. I like the idea of another name for blind is . . . but I could find the right words to fill that in. I’ll work on this one more tomorrow. I think that my theme for these is my vision.
45 minutes neighborhood with Scott and Delia 48 degrees
No sun today so it felt cooler. Mud and puddles mixed with bare grass. Noticed some bright green moss at the base of a tree. It was nice to take a walk with Scott; we haven’t done an afternoon walk like this in months.
a Rabbit recap*
*which is a summary, not a redux (revival). Rabbit Redux is the second book in John Updike’s series about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom The first book is Rabbit Run, which I just checked out of the library.
This morning I reviewing all of my entries tagged, “rabbit” and seeing what I can find.
1 — 2 june 2019
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean (The Mending Wall/ Robert Frost)
What a wonderful first line! The rabbits and the gaps — I wrote about this a few days ago in my rabbit eyes section. I am less interested in going down rabbit holes and more in exploring rabbit peripheries, in the shadows, on the edges, in the unnoticed corners. For me, this isn’t about hiding-as- prey, but about dwelling on the edges, near the exits and the entrances to other places.
2 — 20 aug 2020
Listen to the black capped chickadee’s 2 note song. Can you hear him posing a question to the gorge? Can you hear the honking geese overhead? Can you hear your lungs grasping for air and the green leaves thickening as they hold us? Can you hear the chainsaw start, the tight weave of the savanna’s oak unraveling? It’s August, thick, crowded. Listen to the path, cluttered with acorns. Listen to the sewer stink near the ravine, the sex-crazed gnats swarming the hill. Can you hear the virus spreading through the neighborhood? Can you make a noise like a panicked rabbit? There are sounds your tweet lacks names for. (Homage poem to Helen Mort / Sara Lynne Puotinen)
Rereading this poem from that first pandemic summer, another word popped into my head: cornered, as in Can you make a noise like a cornered rabbit? Which is better? Not sure. I like this poem; maybe I should do something more with it? Maybe that something should involve hybrid writing about that summer? And maybe I should return to Mary Oliver’s Long Life for inspiration?
3 — 24 april 2020
Lisa Olstein’s unrabbited woods in “Dear One Absent This Long While.” Yours is the name the leaves chatter/at the edge of the rabbited woods. So good! I memorized this poem five years ago; I need to refresh my memory. Just did!
4 — 24 feb 2020
A cup holds sugar, flour, three large rabbit breaths of air (My Weather / Jane Hirshfield)
I love imagining how much air is 3 large rabbit-breaths worth. How big is this rabbit? And, in general, how big are rabbit breaths(from the 2020 entry)? Yes! A rabbit’s breath! I should look it up. Googled “rabbit breathing” and this listing of a rabbit’s vital signs1 came up first:
A rabbit’s body temperature should ideally be between 101.5°F and 104.2°F.
The normal respiratory rate for rabbits ranges from 30-60 breaths per minute.2
A healthy rabbit’s heart rate averages 205 and has a resting range from 180-350 beats per minute.
While sifting through links, including watching a brief video on how bunnies apologize to each other — they touch heads, and if the other bunny doesn’t accept the apology, they run away,3 I read a line about how rabbits are very smart mammals and then this: “The rabbit is commonly used as a laboratory animal for inhalation toxicology tests” (source). I wondered, do rabbits feel pain? “Rabbits have the same neurophysiological mechanisms as humans to produce pain and therefore have the same capacity to feel pain as humans” (source). How awful!
A few more random breathing facts: rabbits breathe through their noses; respiratory issues are a main cause of death; if a rabbit is healthy, their breath should not stink.
I didn’t have any luck when I googled, ” how big is a bunny breath,” but since they breathe a lot per minute, I imagine it’s fairly small. In the middle of writing this sentence I looked up “rabbit lung capacity.” One of the, People also ask, was, Are rabbit lungs good for dogs? The answer, “High-value: Rabbit Lung is considered a super food due to its nutritional composition,” comes from a site selling rabbit lung treats.
All of these results are reminding me of a line from yesterday’s research about how rabbits are unique in their position as both beloved pet and food source.
5 — 21 may 2023
This is a poem in which no chickens will die. A rabbit will bound across the road and the car will slow in time. The fox will discover the trampoline behind the house next door and with it the wonder of flight. Everyone I love will live and call me after supper to say goodnight. (What I Am Telling You, Jessica, Is That Those Chickens Are Fine/ K.T. Landon)
I discovered this poem from a poetry person on twitter. It was part of their running list of “Not Today, Satan” poems. Have I ever noticed a rabbit road kill? I must have, but I don’t remember it. Near me, it’s mostly squirrel or raccoon roadkill. Anyway, I love this poem so much that I might need to memorize it. And, like I wrote in this 2023 entry, I might need to create my own “Not today, Satan” list!
6 — 15 april 2023
these are the going closures that organize mind, allowing
and limiting, my mind’s ways: the rabbit’s leaps and halts, listenings, are prosody of
a poem floating around the mind’s brush (garbage / A.R. Ammons
This! For today’s entry, I only posted the rabbit part, but the rest of the excerpt I posted on april 15 is wonderful too. All about motion and our interactions with the land/our surrounding and how they shapes our motions. The halts and leaps and listenings of a rabbit as it responds to its surroundings — the terrain, predators, the weather. These are the rhythms and sounds of a poem (prosody) — not a poem on the page, but a poem in the flesh, a poem that is a living and breathing and moving creature being made by and making the world. So good! I say, I am a poem. A rabbit is a poem. Any and all of us who move through the world, responding to its winds and rivers and storms, is a poem!
In a footnote, there’s a link to a pdf comparing vital signs of several different animals ( ↩︎
The average human’s breathing rate (whatever average means here) is 12 – 25 breaths per minute. I’m not going to try counting mine because that would stress me out too much. I don’t want to think about breathing; I just want to keep doing it! ↩︎
From another more reliable source (reliable = trained expert, cites sources), I discovered that this head touching idea is from the 2018 movie, Peter Rabbit. According to the Bunny Lady, rabbits might groom each other after a disagreement. But this begs the question, why do bunnies disagree? What does a bunny argument look like? ↩︎
Get Out ICE
Protest art around the cities:
The banners, flags and posters can be seen in storefronts and porch windows, on telephone poles and electrical boxes, in neighborhoods across the metro area. They are part of an explosion of art made in response to ICE’s presence that has included protest songs, comics and zines and coloring books, snow and ice sculptures, stickers and buttons and whistles 3D-printed in every color of the rainbow.
Through this article, I found out about Heart Your Art and their ICE OUT posters and this event tonight at the Witch’s Hat:
This Wednesday, The ICE OUT Protest Posters take over the Witch’s Hat Water Tower for a one night outdoor projection. . Large scale. Public. After dark.
One of the posters from Heart Your Art struck a chord with me. The poster says, Believe Your Eyes, and it features the text in big block letters in the top half with two open eyes below it, and then a quote from George Orwell in smaller text at the bottom: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and your ears. It was their final, most essential, command.”
In the description of the poster, the artist writes:
It is important now, more than ever, to believe your eyes. You know what happened. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. The narrative is trying to sway you — to make you question yourself. You know the truth!
I deeply appreciate all of these posters and the artists who are designing them. I also agree with the call to resist the double-speak of the Trump administration and to never stop challenging the lies they present as truth.
And, I struggle with the privileging of sight and eyes as (the most) pure and reliable truth tellers. Eyes are not always reliable, and not just for people like me with low vision. As I’ve mentioned before on this log, eyes are not just cameras sending pictures to the brain. There is filtering and guessing and selective seeing — some things are seen, some ignored, some the brain filters out.
You might argue that this is not the point here and I would agree and disagree. Yes, there is a bigger message here about resisting manipulation and calling out fascist propaganda and trusting your own experiences of events. And yes, the inaccurate promotion of seeing/eyes as the way to access the truth, is easily manipulated by those in power. In the era of AI and the altering of images in such convincing ways that even my husband — whose attention to detail and nose for sniffing fakery out is very impressive — has been fooled, relying on eyes is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.
So, what would I like the poster to say instead? I’ll have to think about that; maybe I’ll try to collaborate with Scott on my own version? A preliminary response: Believe Your Eyes and Your Ears — which is what Orwell’s quote does; it’s not just looking/seeing but hearing and listening. I’m not satisfied with that as the solution, but I’ll leave it for now. I’ve already written abouteyes and witnessing on this log in different contexts, and I’m sure I’ll return to it again and again.
New Yorker experiment #3
Today’s experiment comes from a book review in the 25 august 2025 issue titled “Me, Myself, and I.”
text:
1 point to sentences sliced in half askew wile with strangeness. Stutter just enough to let in the surreal.
Occupy who knows where stay vague improbable
2 swap the dead-eyed liturgy of doomed vision with shadow
experiment #3 / from Me, Myself, and I
thoughts: Again, find markers that work before I start using them. Also, the second poem needs arrows but I didn’t know how to do that with the blackout. And, I wanted to add another word to shadow: reinvention, but I accidentally colored over it. Oops.
Spring-y! Sun, above freezing, and a clear walking path! I was able to take the trail that dips below the road between the double bridge and locks and dam no. 1! Also: birds and grass and no gloves. A good run. I feel more power in my legs and able to run for longer without stopping. I heard kids on the playground, the call of a bird that sounded mechanical — similar to the strange, high-pitched siren I heard earlier today, and the doppler effect on the light rail bells as I ran south to the falls. I heard Panic at the Disco, Radiohead, Gene Autry, and The Jazz Crusaders on the way back home.
Speaking of hearing, as I write this at my desk, I can hear a woodpercker outside my window pecking on a tree in our front yard that I think is dead or dying. Every peck is saying, right right right right (you’re) right. Ugh! Is it time to call a tree service?
At some point during the run I thought about I wasn’t thinking about much of anything. Then I thought, the purpose of today’s run is not to work out a writing problem, or encounter some inspiration, but to move and breathe, feel the sun on my face, and be by the river.
10 Things
a thin skin of ice on the river
larger areas of the creek open with dark water, some snow stretching out from the banks
an occupied bench! someone is sitting on the bench at the 44th street parking lot
overheard: some guy talking to his two friends about something being only 2 loops — when I passed them a few minutes later, I noticed they had on shorts and running shoes on
that same truck that seemed to be hiding under the bridge last week was back again today — why?
a few parts of the trail that still had any ice or snow were also covered with dead leaves
enough snow had melted so that I could cross the road and walk on a wide strip of grass instead of mud and snow
vision mistake: up ahead of me, it looked like a truck was parked on the path, blocking the way. I crossed over to the parking lot then immediately realized the curve in the trail made it look like the truck was blocking it, but it wasn’t. Oops
more people near the falls, more cars parked in the parking lot
stopped at Rachel Dow Memorial bench to admire the view through the slender tree trunks and to take a few pictures.
sitting beneath the bench looking up at the trees / 2 march 2026
more rabbits bunnies
It started on 20 feb, this occupation with bunnies.1 When will it end? Not today! Here are some more bunny things I’d like to archive:
1— buuuuunnies
In footnote 1, I mention that bunny is fun to say. That might be partly because when I say it, I think of how Tom Haverford says it on Parks and Recreation2:
2 — Boynton Bunnies
At first he was skeptical, but I’ve managed to get Scott thinking about and noticing bunnies and bunny-related things everywhere! This morning he sent me an image someone posted on social media:
you say rabbits, and I say bunnies / you say comics, and I say funnies
Actually, I don’t say funnies — who says funnies? — but it worked for the reference to “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” Is Sandra Boynton still popular in 2026? I remember her greeting cards in the 80s and her kids books in the aughts. What was the one with the cd/songs that FWA and RJP loved? did they love it? I can’t remember; I think they at least liked it, or was that just me who did? I think the book/album was Philadelphia Chickens.
In addition to sending me random bunny images he finds, Scott was willing to watch the Disney Alice in Wonderland, which was awesomely weird, and sadly could never be made now, I think. Some of the nonsense in it, which was fabulous, reads not as kooky kid imagination but as being under the influence of psychedelics. There was also this menacing edge to the characters Alice encounters: they seemed fun or dangerous at any given moment. Two examples: the flowers in the garden — that head Rose! — and Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum — doing fun acrobatics but also stopping Alice from leaving.
3 — the Bronze Bunny
Their official name is “Cottontail on the Trail” because they are a bronze statue of a cottontail and they are right on the minnehaha bike trail, but I always call them the bronze bunny. Other people call them the Minnehaha Bunny.
The sculpture has garnered the nickname of the “Minnehaha Bunny” from residents.[4] Children often climb on the sculpture and people who live nearby have frequently costumed and decorated it based on seasonal occasions or topical events such as leaving eggs by the sculpture during Easter or cladding the mouth of the sculpture with a large cloth face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’ve written about this bunny on here before. They’re 4.5 or so miles from my house so I only see them on bike rides and long runs when I am training for the marathon. Passing the bunny on a run is a big deal; it means that I’m fit enough to run for 10 miles or more.
This bunny was erected in 2002, but it seems like it’s been here much longer.
I’ve tried to say rabbits, but I just like bunnies better. I think it’s partly because of how it sounds as I say it. ↩︎
Finding and creating this clip took WAY longer than it should have. I kept at it because I was determined to get the clip, not because Tom saying “buuunnies” was worth it (I think I spelled buuuunnies with one n in my title, ugh), but because I wanted to figure this out. Before losing most of my cone cells it was so much easier to do stuff like this. ↩︎
Get Out Ice
Here’s an example of an existing group using their established community to provide mutual aid and support to people during the ICE occuption: How a Dungeons & Dragons meetup turned into mutual aid during ICE operations. Members have organized “know your rights” workshops, accompanied immigrants to appointments, coordinated food donations, and made barbecue for families in need.
This quotation fits with the erasure poem I’ve been working on this morning:
“In a story, you can be the underdog who defeats the big, bad, evil entity,” said D&D player Kat Hennan. “I think that having that kind of thought exercise and storytelling right now is extremely important.”
New Yorker Found Poetry Experiment, Day 1:
Picked a random old New Yorker. Found an interesting article, “The End of the Essay: What comes after A.I has destroyed college writing? / Hua Hsu. Put my watch timer on for 30 minutes.
Poem:
question: Has there ever been a time in human history when the arts could not offer hope and help us to be open to more possibilities? answer: Never
A good first try. It’s funny that I want to do these visual poems when I struggle so much to see the words or how to make the boxes and lines that I need, but something in me keeps persisting, so I’ll keep trying. Hopefully it will get easier.
It’s messy — and with my vision, it will always be. and I added an extra to that’s just floating out there, disconnected. It’s too busy with too many lines. But it was fun and challenging and I like the poem I came up with a response to an article about AI ruining college writing.
When I showed it to Fletcher, he liked it and said there were ways to refine it. I agree, but not to this poem. I wrote on the original essay and I don’t have another copy. The question: next time should I scan the essay before drawing on it, or is the risky (you only get one shot) approach part of the challenge and the fun?
experiment #1 / 2 march 2026
note: I also need to learn how to take better pictures of my work!
March? March! We’ve made it to March, and March, as I told FWA last night, is a spring month. Weather-wise it will still be winter in Minnesota for 1 or 2 more months, but March is in spring.
Bunny Ears / Rabbit Ears
All of this rabbit exploration is fun and wonderfully distracting. I thought I’d start out today with ears. Last night, I made a note in my Plague Notebook 271: Liam’s bunny ears, Louise’s bunny ears, rabbit ears on top of a tv.
1 — Liam Conejo Ramos and the bunny ears
A widely shared photograph of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos has come to represent ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota.
The boy is wearing a knit bunny hat complete with floppy white ears, while an ICE agent stands behind him and pulls slightly on his Spider-Man backpack.
There have been conflicting stories about how Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were detained by ICE at their Columbia Heights home. The differing versions pit local school officials and observers on the scene against federal immigration agencies.
The conflicting story here is that school officials and observers claim that little Liam was detained by ICE on his walk home from school and used as bait to get his family to open the door. ICE agents claim his father abandoned him as he fled, and that they were protecting him from the cold. Even though there were many adults who could have and wanted to take custody of Liam, ICE took him and his dad and sent them to Texas concentration camp.
In the twin cities and around the world, people were outraged by these actions and moved by the photo with the bunny ears. One example: activists have been crocheting the hat and spreading the pattern online for others to crochet too:
“[Liam] is one of many, but his sweet bunny hat has become an enduring symbol for those of us who oppose the cruelty of this administration and the unchecked violence being perpetrated against our neighbors. There are a lot of tears woven into this silly bunny hat,” the crocheter wrote on social media.
If you want to make your own hat, I think that would be amazing. I would love to see a line of protesters wearing bunny hats, or like-minded individuals putting love out into the world.”
The youngest Belcher on Bob’s Burgers always wears pink bunny ears. Why? Apparently it is explained in the movie, which RJP has been trying to get us to watch for more than a year. I guess we should. Another thing to watch: the episode in which the bunny ears are stolen, “Ear-sy Rider.” Okay, I found the clip on Youtube:
Louise and the bunny ears
In the example of Liam, the bunny ears represent vulnerability — Liam as little and innocent and the ICE actions as a terrible violation. What do they represent for Louise? I’ll have to watch more of the Bob’s Burgers movie to understand that, but it seems like she thinks they represent vulnerability and weakness — she’s thinks she wears them because she’s not brave — but they actually represent a quirkiness she shares with her grandmother. That’s what I got from the clip; I’ll have to wach more of the movie to get a better understanding.
3 — rabbit ears as tv antenna
When I think of rabbit ears, I think of the little antennas2 you put on top of your tv when you don’t have cable. We still have a pair for our upstairs tv.
Marvin P. Middlemark (September 16, 1919 – September 14, 1989) invented the Rabbit Ears television antenna (dipole antenna) in 1953 in Rego Park, Queens, New York. Marvin P. Middlemark revolutionized how television was watched in the United States, as his Rabbit Ears increased the television signal reception made available to the mass market; this move is considered by many as the single most important reason for the television boom of the late 1950s – 1960s.
Reading about rabbit hearing, I found these two little sad sentences —
The outer ear, known as the pinna, is very different because rabbits need to rely more on their hearing to detect predators. Domestic rabbits can suffer from hearing problems due to selective breeding for a ‘cute’ look.
The outer ear also acts as a radiator: rabbits can’t sweat like we do, or pant like dogs, so regulate their temperature by pumping blood into their ears.
Some other things I read about rabbit ears: rabbits can swivel their ears; rabbit ears are kept up by interlocking cartilage, some rabbits can’t keep their ears up because they have a gap in the cartilage (called lopping, and the floppy eared rabbits are called lops); according to a study, rabbits like chill classical music, soft new age, and probably Kenny G (ugh!).
a few more rabbit ears: putting your fingers up in the dark and creating bunny ears with the shadow; doing “bunny ears” as you sing “Little Bunny Foo Foo”; the They Might Be Giant’s refrain, hammer down / rabbit ears, in their song “Rabid Child”
bunny ear silhouette
Writing this last bit I wondered, are the ears the defining shape of a rabbit silhouette? Yes, I think so. Those ears are very distinctive and particular to the animal. The distinctive quality of this shape returns me to my vision: To identify/recognize things, I often rely on their silhouette and its most distinctive features. All I need to see are those two ears and I can tell, rabbit. Now, that’s true for drawings of rabbits, is it true in recognizing them in my yard? I’m not so sure. I’ll have to think about that some more — maybe try to notice what I see when I see something in the yard and think, rabbit (or more likely, bunny).
Just a few more pages to fill before I’m onto vol. 28. I’ve been filling these up since just as the pandemic began, hence the name, the Plague Notebook. ↩︎
Doing some more digging on antennas, I discovered that rabbit ears are used for VHF channels, while a loop and bowtie antennas are for UHF. VHF = longer distances / UHF = better quality ↩︎
a found poem experiment/practice
At any given time, I have A LOT of ideas for experiments buzzing around in my head. Many of them make it into this log as things I’d like to try. Some of them, I try. And a few of them become a dedicated experiment, then a monthly project, then an obsession, then a poem or a series of poems or something even bigger. I rarely predict what will stick and what won’t, and when that might happen. I like living in geologic time — slow and long. Working on something for five or more years is not unusual!
For several months, the idea of doing more erasures has been buzzing around. The recent fascination started with my discovery of Lisa Olstein’s latest collection, Distinguished Office of Echoes — I checked; I discovered it on 20 dec 2025. I should archive all of this (this = discussions, links, ideas, quotes) on one page soon, when I have time. Since that rediscovery, I’ve been thinking about found poems — centos, erasures, white-out, cut-outs, which led to do my series of found love poems about love in the time of (ICE) occupation. Yesterday I mentioned erasure poems again in my Plague Notebook, and this morning I happened upon (following a rabbit search — rabbit Marie Howe — down a rabbit hole) a found poem collection by Annie Dillard. I’ve already requested it from the library!
Last night, a problem: I’d like to do more erasures and try cut-ups, but almost all of the text I find/use is online. What can I do about that? My first solution before going to bed: I should go to thrift stores, used book stores and buy cheap and old used books. My second thought during the purple hour: go to the basement and find that box of old books that I haven’t had time to donate yet. My third thought while down in the basement when I couldn’t find the box: look through the kids’ old books, especially the crappy paperbacks. And my latest thought after gathering some books and as I walked up the stairs: use the ridiculously tall stack of old New Yorkers on the bookcase in the front room! So, that is what I hope to do. I’d like to make it a daily practice — as inspired by Mary Ruefle and her erasure practice. I think I’ll start with the New Yorkers because I have more of them, and once I’m more practiced, I might move onto the books. It’s the first day of March, so I’d like to make this my March challenge.
the preliminary rules for week one: pick (randomly?) 2 pages from the New Yorker, read them several times, then use them to write a sentence or a short poem — link them with dots, lines, and arrows.
Get Out Ice
In the middle of the night, scrolling through Instagram, I found out about the Kaleidoscope of Love Art Mobilization. It happened yesterday afternoon at Powderhorn Park. I wish I would have known about it; I would have tried to go and be a part of it.
YOU are invited to participate in a choreographed movement of more than a thousand people holding colored placards to the sky to create a gigantic open-winged butterfly, surrounded by poetry and choral singing.
Kaleidoscope of Love is a celebration of you; of Minneapolis and Saint Paul; of neighbors who check in, deliver groceries, shovel sidewalks, walk kids to school and friends to work, sing, march, and offer comfort and care. We invite you to celebrate our city at Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis to lift that spirit of community into the sky, forming a living butterfly in a joyful, shimmering mosaic of color, co-created by you, your neighbors, family and friends.
Kaleidoscope of Love was designed the public artist, Christopher Lutter-Gardella. Wow! He also created a giant heart for We Defend the Heart, among many other public art installations/mobilizations.
