Leah Mensch, Magic the Gathering Ad Disguised as a Discarded Draft of My Wedding Vows | L*STS

 

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 Magic the Gathering Ad Disguised as a Discarded Draft of My Wedding Vows

Leah Mensch

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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after Matthew Olzman & for Geramee Hensley

Ok, I’m weeping about the shape of the Rincon Mountains & how we thought briefly, we were moving to Ohio last year & all the love clutching at us here, in this place we once thought we’d leave as fast as we could. I’m driving home from the pharmacy on Speedway Boulevard (winner of the 1970 Life Magazine Ugliest Road In America award, and rightfully so), and the clouds are bleeding coral against the Circle K. At the light, I go to text you sky, but you have already texted me sky. I’m crying also about that scene from the end of Arrival, when Louise realizes time is not linear, and she can see the entire circumference of her life, that her daughter will get sick and her husband will leave her as a result, and she says to him, if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things? I’m feeling disgustingly sentimental this week, I say, though I fear this is almost my chronic state now. I can feel my ribs cracking. I tell my friend Margo that sometimes I cry about how well she loves her daughter, and Margo says this is fine, that anyone who has ever thought seriously about ending their life may cry with as much tenderness as often as they wish & make it everyone’s problem. I don’t make the rules, though lately I’m unsure I was ever serious at all. Maybe I just forget the texture of those years or maybe I’ve been inducted into the club by way of adjacent early-20s psychiatric achievements. It’s like an honorary PhD for writing a smashing rap album or like how marrying me makes you, my beautiful Catholic Schoolboy, impossibly Jewish. Speaking of marriage, here’s an argument as to why I think ours will work: because you hate my favorite pants and waited three years to tell me. Because you bench press 300 & cut your pinkie finger (stitches needed) with a butter knife. Because we both have stomach issues but have made do with one bathroom. Because you write about grief but talk mostly about joy, and cooking, and sometimes farts. Once someone told me I was so lucky to be partnered with a writer because we must talk about writing all the time! Yesterday we did not talk about writing at all but discussed the 3 oz gold bar at Costco, and also, time. (Is “a month from June 30” July 30th or July 31st? One argument is numeric, the other is syntactic). Because once, we resorted to playing rock paper scissors to decide who had to be on top, and you always go paper first, and I always, somehow, still lose. Because you are impossibly gentle, and the most violent things I’ve ever heard you say are about people who drive like they have a branch up their ass & you remain silent when I have to shift into reverse during a U-Turn. Because you clean the crock pot when I’m too tired & won’t admit when you’re pity laughing at my jokes. Because you get out of bed to kiss me goodbye when I leave for a run. Because that one time you drank six Diet Dr. Peppers in a row (wife don’t need to know about soda, you said) & stayed up till 3 AM & I was so upset I wrote myself a note on the back of the Tucson Electric Power bill. I am never not afraid you’re going to die. And this is true. It consumes me, the way joy and sorrow and love all echo each other, some exploding star at the center of my life, which has become yours, too. And yeah, I am crying about Arrival again. The next day you sent me a photo of the pimple on your chin (did it look infected, you wanted to know) & a meme that lamented having a good partner is weird: what do you mean all I have to do is worry about them dying and what Magic deck they building next? & goddamn it, I thought. Maybe there really are no original experiences left. Tucson Electric Power makes a billing error so it turns out I actually do need that paper I defaced with my feelings. Dear Carl Philips, I too walked the plank backwards, so steadily I was sure I was not moving at all, but now my love & I are digging through the recycling on a 108 degree day and I know what they’re going to say—stop recycling our bills, or at least tear them up first! But instead, they just start laughing. 

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This essay started as a list of things I cry (tenderly) about on the way to work, to which Geramee said, "you know there's a word limit, right?" The other half of this essay was a love poem I started writing after reading Matthew Olzmann's Mezzanines. I couldn't find my way to the end of either project, until I realized they fit together. 

Leah Mensch loves her spouse and Kate Braverman. She occasionally throws away important things, but not on purpose. More, if you dare, at leahmensch.com.

Gretchen Ernster Henderson, A Problem of Shape: (In) Accessibility | L*STS

  

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A Problem of Shape: (In) Accessibility

Gretchen Ernster Henderson

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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What is the Shape of this Problem?

—Louise Bourgeois (1999)

Imagine a door or window. A passport or online password. An icecap or sea trench. A painting or song or dance.

Shape implies proportion and dimension, form and contour. Problems puzzle, like a riddle or difficulty seeks to be solved. 

This is one point. 

Two points make a line.  

Line by line, poems are measured.

This is (not) a poem rather a problem: the shape of accessibility. A changing shape in a changing world.

To access accessibility harks back to Middle French (meaning “that can be reached or entered, available, obtainable”), rooted less in access than accede, as in approach, accept or agree to, draw near, resort to, join, assent to, accrue, attain a dignity, perform or fulfill.

What does it mean to perform (in)accessibility? 

“There exists still another force which develops not within the point, but outside of it,” writes Wassily Kandinsky (1926), “and a new being arises out of it which leads a new, independent life in accordance with its own laws. This is the Line.”

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Another point, another line:

In The Analysis of Beauty (1753), William Hogarth claims that beauty arises from serpentine lines. To which William Hay responds in Deformity: “Since I finished this Essay, I am in Doubt whether I ought not to change the Title. For I have heard of a very ingenious Performance, called The Analysis of Beauty, which proves incontestably, that it consists in Curve Lines.”

Is the shape of this problem Curved? 

1. Refer to history of “Deformity.”
2. Refer also to “(de)Form.”
3. Refer also to “(mis/over/under)Representation.” 

A metaphor for _______.

Sentences feign legibility and linearity, reverberating as an echo chamber, an architecture of acoustics, using the pretext of prose.

Poetics of space inhabit architectures like houses, nests and shells, according to Gaston Bachelard (1964).

I am (not) the point. You are (not) the point.

Another point, planted among planets: our round little house called Earth.

(in)accessible echoes across poetics to politics, libraries to technologies, Universal Design across the Web across a wider world of shifting shapes, ramping access to clean water, food, shelter, education, human rights.

A metaphor for _______.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even a vacuum. 

Amid other etymological branches of accede, active and arcane, lie hints of “burning.” 

What heats up the heart of this shape? Can this problem boil down to a molten mass underfoot, the heat of this living planet?

If you are (not) the point, and I am (not) the point, then:

If, then: together we can (not) make a line. We can make a line in or from this essay or poem or whatever you want to call this shape, this problem, part of a web, unraveling and spun from what appears bound as a book. 

Note: For instructions on “How To Make This Book More (In)Accessible”: see Galerie de Difformité (2011), page 221.

Time and space affect our relationship with points and lines and beyond, as we grope into shifting shapes, probing this problem, which isn’t static or defined, or even singular. Is this a problem or a possibility? 

“After it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to the Books of the Accessible Poets,” writes Charles Bernstein (2008), “I persisted.”

Two more points: a timeline. 

Something is burning. Something is melting. Not everything boils down to an equation. Points and lines are more than conceptual.

“When a disabled body moves into a social space,” writes Tobin Siebers (2004), “the lack of fit exposes the shape of the normative body for which the space was originally designed.”

Accessibility shifts inter/sections/actions. X approaches A. door, B. computer, C. poem-fiction-essay-crossing-the-line at D. with another checkpoint at E. and can/not access A, B, C, D, E. X becomes confounded, discouraged, inspired, hurt, moved, ________ (fill in the blank). X is moved to confront what fits and what doesn’t. X is moved to think: What is the point? Another point? Can I draw a line?

According to John Muir (1911), “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

R. Buckminster Fuller wrote (1970), “Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

A metaphor for _____. 

X wants to understand A, B, C, D, E. And more. X senses limits and knows she can/not exist as a point because so many other points are at stake. X wants to connect more dots. X wants to make new lines, to try to understand the shape of this problem. X wants to move beyond lines.

(Listen:)

     “If the sound is in ‘M’ and the listener in ‘N,’ the sound will be believed to be in ‘S’ if the court is enclosed at least on 3 sides against the listener,” according to Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). [1]

Can our writings set up atmospheres and acoustics to interpret, more than linear or literal readings, re-sounding? What is the shape of this problem? 

                     A                B                 C                D                E

           F                 G                H                 I                 J

  K                L                M                N                O                P

           Q                R                 S                 T                U                V

                    W                X                Y                Z

Better to leave you not with one point, but many. You can draw whatever lines.

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Works Cited

“accessible” and “accede.” OED Online. March 2013. Oxford UP. 5 June 2013. Web.

Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. New York: Orion, 1964. Print.

Bernstein, Charles. “Recantorium.” Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. 279. Print.

Flake, Gary William. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998. 129. Print. 

Hay, William. Deformity: An Essay. London: Dodsley, 1754. 82. Print.

Henderson, Gretchen E. Galerie de Difformité. Chicago: Lake Forest College P, 2011. 221. Print.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. Trans. Hilla Rebay. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1979. 54. Print.

Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. Boston: Houghton, 1998. 157. Print.

Siebers, Tobin. “Disability as Masquerade.” Literature and Medicine 23.1 (Spring 2004): 8. Print.

von Rotenhan, Christina. “Louise Bourgeois: Between the Lines.” Art in Print 2.6 (Spring 2013): 18. Print.

Winternitz, Emanuel, ed. Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982. 117. Print.

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NOTES

[1] Analogy may be made with the Galerie de Difformité: if a sound is made in one Exhibit while Gentle Reader resides in another, she may seek out additional Exhibits to coordinate orchestrations. For a contemporary point of access, which in future years will become inaccessible, scan the QR (Quick Response) codes at this essay’s beginning and end to investigate “What is a Page?” and “How to Read?”

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A Lost List: This list-ish essay from 2013 was lost when The Volta's online presence ended. "A Problem of Shape: (in)Accessibility" was an outgrowth of my long-hibernating, genre-bending Galerie de Difformité (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Being inadvertently lost, this essay unwittingly reflects how many digital-borne works become inaccessible or fossilized as media change over time.

Gretchen Ernster Henderson is the author of five books, most recently Life in the Tar Seeps: A Spiraling Ecology from a Dying Sea and Ugliness: A Cultural History. She is an ecowriter, artist, librettist, educator, and the Spence L. Wilson Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. 

 

Brittany Crosse, How to Get Back into the Dating Scene as an Emotionally Jaded and Socially Awkward 27-Year-Old | L*STS

   

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How to Get Back into the Dating Scene as an Emotionally Jaded and Socially Awkward 27-Year-Old

Brittany Crosse

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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1. Download Duet and Hinge. Create a profile for the former. Start to create a profile for the latter but give up halfway through. You’re not that desperate, besides, you’re busy enough as is. You’ve been skeptical about dating apps in the past, but then again, look at the men you’ve met the old-fashioned way. Even if the next one turns out to be a serial killer, at least he’ll just murder you instead of send you into a weeks-long deep depression. That shit was worse than death.   
2. Speaking of old-fashioned, don’t listen to your father whenever he tells you to not have sex with the next man, that if he really loves you, he’ll marry you. Your father will never say it outright, but he believes that everything that happened with **** happened because you slept with him. Not because he’s in a perpetual state of arrested development (hey, that’s the name of the show!) and changes his mind almost as fast as he comes. Your mother believes this as well. 
3. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t fall for the same bullshit (I really, really like you, you’re important to me, I’m going to ask you to be my girlfriend) you fell for in the past. You’re not a naive 26-year-old anymore.  
4. Don’t expect things to work out right away, or even at all. Life doesn’t always happen the way it does in books and movies. You know this better than most. 
5. Remember that even if things don’t work out, there’s a 50% chance you won’t die alone because you promised your best friend that you’d move in together if you were both still single at 40. Only 13 and a half more years to go. Tick tock, bitch. 
6. Swipe left on guys with four-letter names AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fuck 13, 4’s the new unlucky number.   
7. Keep going to therapy and puppy yoga (which is itself a form of therapy), taking your medication (not that it helped much when you were depressed), doing schoolwork, writing your novel. Consider volunteering at an animal shelter. Keep yourself as busy as possible, but also don’t forget to indulge in self-care.
8. Convince yourself that you will not let the next man you meet walk all over you and/or want you exclusively for your body. 
9. Realize that this is the same thing you said after ****, and look at what happened with **** not even a year later.
10. Realize that perhaps you are simply cursed.
11. Realize that it is more possible you are simply too kind, too forgiving, too weak.   
12. Realize that you are approaching 13 steps.  
13. Realize that perhaps you should stop at 13, because it’s not unlucky. You are.

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This is basically me reflecting on the mistakes I made in my previous two "relationships" (in quotes because they could hardly even be called that) and how to not repeat them in the future. Without getting too personal, my previous two "relationships" were very one-sided in that they were all takey and no givey. My piece is essentially a how-to guide on how to break the cycle of being used by men. This was deeply therapeutic for me to write, as not only was I able to poke fun at one of my previous partners, I was able to poke fun at myself as well. The names of my previous partners have been censored partly for privacy, but mainly because they don't deserve mentioning.  

Brittany Crosse was raised in the Chicago suburbs and currently lives near Miami, where she attends Florida International University's Creative Writing MFA program. Her work has been featured in The Bond Street Review, Maudlin House, and more. She is working hard or hardly working on a novel, depending on the day.

Caitlin Horrocks, Notes from Daycare | L*STS

 

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Notes from Daycare

Caitlin Horrocks

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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Exploration

Went on a walk to find the moon. Explored water. Explored wood chips. Explored hats. Explored musical instruments. Explored farm animals. Explored hula hoops. Explored an air mattress. Explored spatulas & Tupperware. Explored painting with yogurt. Explored rakes on the playground. Explored a bumpy gourd. Explored diggers down the road. Explored sea creatures. Explored pool noodles. Tunnel play. Played with Ms. T’s special balls. Explored a big branch with bugs inside.

Music 

Sang animal songs. Sang rain songs. Sang snow songs. Sang finger songs. Sang lots of songs. Listened to symphony. Made funny noises by yelling into cups. 

Health

See note about thrush on board. Rash worse. Slight fever. BM leaked, change of clothes. Bump and bruise on forehead. Wouldn’t eat lunch. Old pacifier is in diaper bag: it looked dark and moldy. Fall while walking. Bite to upper left arm. Bump to forehead: L had his shirt sleeve stuck on his arm. He came to the couch to get help then fell and hit his head on the couch. Bite on nose and cheek: L was lying in a friend’s lap while in the wagon. The friend was hugging him then leaned forward and bit L’s face.

Work

Worked on puzzles. Worked on saying “ball.” Writing experience. Read books. Read a lot of books. Practiced getting on the climber. Practiced on our new tables and chairs. Practiced walking in the hall. Worked on coloring. Worked on recognizing friends’ pictures. Practiced body parts with Mr. Potato Heads. Played with trucks & then helped put them away. Gross motor activities. Played in a wagon: climbing in & out. Fine motor activities. Dumped paint from a small cup into a bigger cup. Painted on 3 different textures. Worked on taking turns.

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Went on a walk and saw apples and ants! Watched the dump trucks dump dirt! Went to the downtown market and saw the fish! Went on a loooong walk: very relaxing! Loved pumpkin guts! Very chatty on toy phones! Picture day! Pajama day! Crazy day! Very loud today! Smiley guy! Loved the salad! Drank first bottle from sippy cup! Hungry boy! Showed off his crawling! Dance party! Happy morning! Happy! Made it to the weekend! TGIF!!! 

Nature

Rain in the courtyard of the cathedral church. Loving the chilly wind on his face. Watched the snow fall. Enjoyed the sun. Had a tornado drill. Played in the grass. Played in the snow. Went outside to feel the rain. Smelled herbs. Saw water on leaves. Collected milkweed. Collected seedpods. Played outside: new things to explore in the garden. We saw a man planting grass seeds: he planted some for us. Found the moon on our walk.

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At every afternoon daycare pickup, when my kids were in the baby room or toddler room, I would be handed a half-sheet of paper with the essentials of their day: when they napped and for how long, when their diapers were wet or dirty, and the list of foods served that day with a percentage circled for how much of each food they ate (crackers: 100%, goulash: 0%). Almost all of the information on this sheet was practical, meant to help me understand how hungry they might be at dinner, how tired (or not) at bedtime. But at the bottom were several lines left blank for “Activities.” The entries were usually very brief—the (heroic) teachers were too busy doing the activities, plus the diapers and feeding and napping, to exhaustively catalogue them. Occasionally there was nothing listed at all; most often, exactly one thing that had happened that day. Apart from incident reports explaining bumps, bruises, or bitemarks, this information was arguably inessential, but I loved the entries both for their tiny insights into my children’s days, and for the accidental poetry of the entries themselves, especially as they accumulated day after day, month after month, year after year. I kept my eldest child’s half-sheets for a long time, past any actual use for them, past when he graduated into the older classrooms where the papers stopped, the children old enough to narrate their own days. I eventually sat down with a stack of the papers, typed up many of the activity entries, sorted those into categories, and then felt able to let the papers go. Only the arrangement is mine: the words belong to the extraordinary teachers at the Grand Rapids Early Discovery Center, just one of the many, many debts my family owes them. 

Thank you also to Mark Ari for originally publishing this piece in Flock and in the audio compilation EAT Flash Vol 2.  

Caitlin Horrocks is author of the story collections Life Among the Terranauts and This Is Not Your City, both New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selections. The Wall Street Journal named her novel The Vexations one of the Ten Best Books of 2019. Her stories and essays appear in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Paris Review, One Story, and other journals and anthologies. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Charlotte Diehl, A Place to Lie | L*STS

  

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A Place to Lie

Charlotte Diehl

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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You really should have seen this coming. 

Maybe some part of you did, but didn't want to. We'd have that in common, I suppose. I almost did when I cut you off once before, told you I needed some space after what you said. Space to process. Space to internalize. Space to fill. I couldn't stay away forever, though. My friends were your friends, and we were making things awkward. I wanted to be considerate, and, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Easier to just close my eyes and get on with it.

I tried to expand the distance this time: unfriending you here, deleting your messages there, telling you I couldn't make any promises. Anything but actually saying it outright. I wonder if a part of me had hoped you wouldn't notice, would just have kept acting like nothing had changed, like nothing needed to change. Because maybe, it hadn't, it didn't. Maybe, I was just overreacting. After all, I'd always been such a pessimist. According to you. 

Someone reading this might think we were lovers. We weren't, though I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed my mind. Invasive, unwanted, stepping over my boundaries for no other reason than that it could. I remember the time we went to the Fourth Avenue Street Fair: we were giving each other shit in and a vendor, smiling, told us we made a cute couple. It was the first time since transitioning that anyone had called me cute.

Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe the memory, in its desire to be significant, was willing to kill off its competitors. Perhaps the memory had the survival instinct I never did, until it was almost too late. Dramatic much? Maybe. I certainly got off light, all things considered. You never raised a hand to me, saving that sort of abuse for your partners. You say you can't remember, but they do. Maybe your memories don't have the survival instinct they did when they left.

Perhaps the reader thinks us siblings, then; you could be the brother I never had. Nevermind the one I did, the gulf of age between us too large for us to cross, or large enough not to bother. Proverbial then? Brothers—then later siblings—in arms? We certainly went through the trenches in high school, taking verbal bullets for each other many times. If only I'd noticed how many of those were friendly fire. I'm sure you were aiming for someone else, most of the time. These things happen in war.

Then the reader must conclude we were just friends. Yes, of course, that must be it. Friends always tell the truth and, whenever we argued, which was often, you'd helpfully remind me that I'm a terrible person. Repitition. Reinforcment. Realization that it must be true, because it explained why I was always the one who had to apologize. I could live with being terrible, though, because at the end of the day, week, month, we always made up.

Except that's not entirely true, is it? I made up:

• Apologies, to those who got caught in the middle.
• Contrivances, that made it seem like you had a plan.
• Excuses, that made the scars easier to conceal.
• Motivations, that made you the hero of this story.
• Rationalizations, for what on Earth you could have possibly been thinking.

You made up: 

• Your mind, like a bed, made it comfortable so you'd always have a comfortable place to lie. 

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I wrote this piece shortly after making the difficult decision to cut ties with one of my oldest—as I thought of him then—friends. Though we shared some good times growing up, I didn't recognize his emotional abuse and manipulation for what it was until long after I should have. Though it's the first creative nonfiction piece I've written in some time, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Charlotte Diehl is an aspiring writer currently living in Maine. Her work, if she ever gets around to it, will explore the topics of queerness, identity, and acceptance, among other things. She is currently psyching herself up to write her (hopefully) first (and hopefully not last) novel.

Bri Chapman, Somatic Ritual 4 the corporate hardware store | L*STS

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Somatic Ritual 4 the corporate hardware store

after CAConrad 

Bri Chapman

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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for randy and maureen and betsy and lynn and robert and amanda and hailey and laverne and jean and tammy and brandon and brendan and scott and heather and fred and the other 20somethings with whom i split register time and nancy and rodney and the boys in lumber and the gen x punk couple that bought me a bubblegum flavoured lollypop which i saved for when i felt happy, only to suck it into a little pebble two weeks later, crying and unable to finish Past Lives.  

1) Memorize these lines from Purgatorio:  

As sheep come out of their pen, in ones, twos, and threes, and others stand timidly, with eyes and nose towards the ground, and what the first does, the others also do,  

2) Get a seasonal position at a corporate hardware store: preferably one with a red vest, preferably one in your hometown (which you will return to after grad school—though it is important that you insist to everyone who will listen you will not return to your hometown after grad school), preferably the one your father used to work at when he was between jobs.  

3) Wear your only pair of sneakers. These should be a gift, a hand-me-down from your friend in Savannah who insists you throw the old ones (the ones with the holes which you’re wearing now, in the rain, your socks squishing and toes pruning) in her dumpster. You will wear a hole into these new shoes, too. You will wear a hole into every pair of shoes you ever own.  

Wear these sneakers every day on the hard concrete floors of the corporate hardware store.  

4) Do not purchase insoles. When/if your partner purchases them for you, cut them into a shape too small to be useful.  

5) Ask your manager to stand in self checkout for the nine hours of your shift where there is no mat to separate your feet from the hard concrete floors of the corporate hardware store. Resist walking around. Resist helping people.  

6) If you follow instructions without cheating, your feet will begin to burn on hour four. Press your heels harder into the concrete floor of the corporate hardware store. Wait for the burning to become cold. Focus all of your attention onto pressurising this cold burning.  

7) When you have achieved Proper Burn Level, assist a customer with their military ID. Do not make polite conversation, only recite the lines you’ve memorized.  

8) Repeat four days a week.  

9) Return home. Drink White Monster. Write a poem.  

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“Somatic Ritual 4 the corporate hardware store” was written after the Somatic Rituals conceived by CAConrad with the hope of re-grounding that very particular out-of-body experience brought on through standing on your feet for nine hours in retail; living in the “extreme present,” as they mention in Introduction to (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals. The ritual is intended to place emphasis on invisible labour, workers unacknowledged, often treated as “dead stock.”

Bri Chapman is a writer and visual artist from rural Virginia. Her works can be found published or forthcoming in Unstamatic, Puerto del Sol, Chatterbox!, and others. She thinks that if you haven’t read today’s “Nancy,” you probably should. 

Susan Briante, Resistance Procedures | L*STS

   

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Resistance Procedures

Susan Briante

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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List the birds native to your state and the birds that arrive for a season.

Diagram the placement of all the nests that appear within a quarter acre of your home. Look in the scribbled branches of the Palo Verde, along the ribs of the saguaro, on lights strung under porch eaves.

List the average number of miles the following creatures migrate in a year:

• monarch 
• flycatcher
• jaguar
• javelina

Start a list of people killed by ICE since 2024, a list of all those killed in immigration detention in the past year, a list of those who died shortly after leaving immigration detention. [i] Create a list of all the new detention centers built in the US over the last twelve months, another of new data centers.

Read these lists out loud at least once a week until ICE is abolished.

Remember the mourning dove builds twig by twig.

Record every detention or data center located, planned, or proposed within a 500-mile radius of your home. Plot them on a map; connect them. Notice if they sketch an awkward face across the terrain. Does it scowl or smirk?

List the names of wildflowers on the squiggle of land between your front door and the street. How many are native? How many nonnative? Who decides these designations?

List the names of the search engines you used to make the above lists.

List the birds in your state whose existence would be threatened by the creation of additional data centers to fuel the search engines you used to make the above lists.

Make a list of the people who live on your floor or in your building or on a block of your street. If you don’t know the name of the family that strings holiday lights for every season or the woman who shovels dirt after work in her pumps, introduce yourself or consider the reasons why you won’t.

Create a visual representation of the sounds made by the 200-year-old cottonwoods destroyed in Lochiel, AZ, to build the border wall. [ii] Write three words to describe what you feel when you listen to the hiss of chainsaw or moan of wood.

Improvise a list of at least six ways a tree can be a model for resistance.

Create a list of the top three Department of Homeland Security officials, the names of their children, their net worths and the net worths of their children.

Place piles of black stones on each site where ICE has kidnapped one of your neighbors. [iii]

Visualize the flight paths of every bird in your neighborhood: mourning dove, cactus wren, vermillion flycatcher, red tailed hawk. Do they form a tangle or a weave, a signature or a snare?

Print out six hardcopies of the names of identified ICE officers from the ICE List [iv] website. Give two of them to confidants, two of them to strangers. Preserve the other lists for a time when they might be broadcast like wildflower seed. 

Imagine a list of all the government lists upon which your name appears. 

Note every redaction in the documents obtained by the ACLU proving how ICE and CBP “have access to huge amounts of highly sensitive location data harvested from people’s cell phones that enables government tracking of our movements over time.” [v] Use pencil, paint, or collage to turn the blackboxed redactions into mouths warped to scream. 

Find an image that represents every manmade satellite circling the earth. [vi] Describe what you experience when you look at the swarm. 

List the parts of your body that feel relaxed, the ones that feel raw or tight or shot through. List the ways you want to soothe them.

Record the days in the last month when it rained. Note the days you worried the arroyo would never run again. Imagine rain clouds rolling in from every direction. Imagine water coursing through every gutter, creek, or riverbed, flowing like a news ticker, scrolling like end credits, unfurling like a list. Remember the cottonwoods, the piles of black stones, a jaguar pacing the fence, a whole flock of willow flycatchers that will not return.

*

[i] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ice-will-no-longer-report-deaths-detainees-recently-released-custody-rcna348719

[ii] https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbThZWYpsTU/

[iii] You may be able to find a map of ICE apprehensions in your city (for example, the Tucson Migra Map, https://tucsonmigramap.com/)

[iv] https://www.bpdaily.com/how-activists-identifying-ice-agents-ai-open-source-investigation

[v] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/dhs-is-circumventing-constitution-by-buying-data-it-would-normally-need-a-warrant-to-access

[vi] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5258/

*

This began as a series of proposals I was brainstorming for L*sts that just became a list in itself. It is in some way a cousin or comrade to “Further Exercises,” a piece that appears in Defacing the Monument.

Susan Briante’s most recent book 13 Questions for the Next Economy: New and Selected Works  was a finalist for the CLMP’s Firecracker Award in Poetry. She lives in Tucson, AZ.