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