"Androids Made of Mourning Metals" (Excerpt)

I’m dreaming my body into existence.¹

I am liquid birds poured from a Blue Woman’s hands.²

You have to break an egg if you are to know what’s inside.³

Where did the bird land? Or maybe it weakened and was swallowed by the waters, no one could know.

Who are you?⁴

Bone/muscle No studies Inhibition of periodontal bone formation; and alveolar wound healing No studies So if you have Uranium inside you, a lot of it is on the DNA (nuclear scientists say it’s on the phosphate in the bones, but DNA is phosphate also), it then acts as an antenna sitting on the DNA—converting background radiation into photoelectrons which smash up the chromosomes like an egg whisk.⁵
 
I’m dreaming of my death.⁶

How the impact to the neck bone will cause rupture and death, how the ‘demon metal’ does its damage. You want to approach my metals in a Good Way? You should apologize now. Each of my metals holds a ghost, wrenched from the earth, each with its name.⁷ I inhale slowly and dirt fills my lungs.

¹ “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he realized that he, too, was but appearance, that another man was dreaming him.” Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins,” in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press and Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).

² Blue Woman ushers the Lakota soul through the Big Dipper onto this realm. See Ronald Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge (Mission, South Dakota: Sinte Gleska University, 1992). 

³ Most language in this text has been prompted by the first line and modified slightly, generated by Gpt-2 and trained on a curated library of texts. Openai/Gpt-2, Python (2019; repr., OpenAI, 2021)  

⁴ See Mamoru Oshii’s anime Angel’s Egg (Studio Deen, 1985). 

⁵ Chris Busby, “Uranium: The Demon Metal That Threatens Us All,”CounterPunch (January 2, 2014).

⁶ “A physical computing device, created in a Good Way, must be designed for the Right to Repair, as well as to recycle, transform, and reuse. The creators of any object are responsible for the effects of its creation, use, and its afterlife, caring for this physical computing device in life and in death.” Jason Edward Lewis (ed.), Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper (Honolulu: The Initiative for Indigenous Futures and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 2020. ⁷ Corey Stover told me this over the phone. 

“Bear Woman Reminiscence"

Each summer, our family gladly returned to a worn trail on a tall mountain to find our favorite berries. We licked from our hands the juicy tart hope of baskets full of ripened life. Along the trail in awakened light and awakening shadows, we boasted and teased and called out our various dreams. We measured our distance from one another by those calls: sons, daughters, eager grandchildren. And melancholy elders, whose rheumy eyes reflected images of always-one-more child running up a trail to test precocious summer berries, always-one-more almost-woman drawn forward by the unyielding embrace of a future walking toward her on two legs.

And as I followed that man who walked on four legs, that bear who walked on two, I saw that what I had thought a mountain was only a log, and what I thought logs were no more than cedar embers glowing in bundled fire. We greeted yesterday’s smokehouses now watched by haunted rivers, we chased nested godwits, we followed trails created in the image of runaway boys. Backs bent, we scrambled across lowbush willow and walked along riverbed and shore, through every timbered edge of alpine tundra. I began to love the twilight. I already loved the man.

I counted the changes come over me. I admired my forelimb claws. Newly uncovered beetle grub delighted me. Soft flesh. Thick, wormy savor. Who knows how many steps we took before we reached his village, who knows how long we stayed. After a while we left. We found a hermit’s mountain and made our home at the frayed hem of time, at a place between worlds where now-thin forest meets waiting, snow-covered rock.

"Futurity" (Excerpt)

7. Futurity, noun: yes, alright, future time, the sense that there will be a future. The very thing we are all trying to hold onto, as we wait for it to arrive. The projected shape that future makes. The shadow (or light?) it casts over the present.

But also: futurity, noun: a race for two-year-old horses, into which they are entered before they are born.

8. As a metaphor for gender, maybe that’s a little obvious. But also: futurities offer some of the richest prizes in horse racing.

9. From the windows of my study, I can see the largest hospital in Maine. By law the ambulances must turn off their sirens this close, and so periodically when I look up from my desk now, two months into the at-home time, I see silent flashing lights. After a few days of this constant screaming silent alarm, and of the helicopters that land on the hospital roof at all hours, their thrum so loud as to consume me in the beat of metal wings, I write a prayer with a blue Sharpie onto a purple index card and thumbtack it to the wall between the two windows, right in my line of sight: May they be safe. May they be happy. May they be healthy. May they live with ease.

10. When we learn that men are dying at an exponentially higher rate than women from this virus, a friend asks me if I’ll keep taking testosterone. I mutter something about how, well, I’m not going to go off a drug without medical advice, and my doctor has other things on her mind right now.

That answer, I know, is bullshit. One of the purported benefits of the daily gel I use, versus a weekly shot, is that its progress is slow, and each day I must choose to apply it, must reaffirm my choice of who I am, of who I am transforming to visibly be. I could choose no.

What I really mean, but don’t say, is that men have shorter life expectancies, more heart attacks, higher rates of dementia, and that I already knew all that. The trade-off did occur to me.

But I do ask the doctor if I will lose my hair.

That’s what Rogaine’s for, she says. It’s not a reason not to live your life.

Obviously, I want to live my life. I’d just like to live it with hair.

11. Here is how, researchers say, we slot one another into genders with a glance: the shape of the hairline, the shape of the eye socket, the ratio of hip to waist, the shape of the jawline, the shape of the chest. Clothing, hair length, manner of standing. Where fat is distributed. Quickness to smile.

You Can Tell by the Nose: the title of a 1995 study.

We look for patterns. We look for what we know how to see.

And I get that with the bodily factors, I’m talking about sex, not gender.

But what I am really speaking of is how people perceive. The slotting, the conflation, that happens the instant they perceive.

That instant’s what I keep thinking about. Just an instant—but in it, a whole narrative (my life) unfurls.

12. Imagine the horse’s owner perusing the pages of racing magazines, loading websites late at night in an office tucked in beside the tack room in a stable, the smell of sweat and dirt thick over the printouts of lineages that litter the desk. Perhaps there is a cup of coffee beside them. Perhaps a pregnant mare whinnies from down a long line of stalls, pacing before settling into her bed of hay. The owner sips from the coffee, clicks the mouse to scroll down the page, searches the list of the races in several years’ time. (You have pictured the owner either male or female; which? Doesn’t matter, the owner is not the one we care about here, but—which?)

Shadows pool around the blue light of the laptop. At the foal’s birth, and then regularly thereafter, there will be fees to pay for each race in anticipation of when the horse will be ready. There must be a budget, calendars to be planned, a choice of projections in which to invest, the mapping out of finances and a life.

13. Imagine, too, that equine fetus, long limbs folded beneath it, not yet ready to run; tiny hooves still soft and shredded, not yet hardened by the pounding of movement; how now it rests and grows curled in the warm wet womb for eleven months. The owner clicks and sips and allots money and decides which racing ovals will inscribe its future path, where bets will be placed, where its hardened hooves will someday run. I have a twin brother. We had a triplet sister, a sister in chromosomes at least. She would die too young for any of us to know anything about her, so here is what little we knew; the blue eyes of a baby, tiny like us and like us premature, girl.

One of each, and me.

Two girls and a boy! the announcement.

At eight, I became aware I wasn’t a girl.

"Ñeñe’i Ha-ṣa:gid"

Ha-ka: ‘ac g ñeñei’i mo ’am kaidaghim
’Am kaidaghim taṣ huḍnig wui.
’Am kaidaghim si’alig ta:gio.
’Am kaidaghim ju:pin tagio.
’Am kaidaghim wakolim tagio.
‘Am ’ac ha’icug ’id ṣa:gid.
mo ’am kaidaghim
S-ap ta:hadag ’o g t-i:bdag.
S-ape ’o g t-cegǐtodag.
S-ape ’o g t-jeweḍga.
S-ke:kaj ’o, ñia ’an g ‘i- ñeid.
S-ju:jpig ’o, ñia ’an g ‘i- ñeid.

Ka: ’ac g ka:cim ṣu:dagi t-miabǐ ’at.
Ka: ’ac g ge’e jegos t-miabǐ ’at.
Ka: ’ac g s-ke:g hewel t-miabǐ ’at.
Ka: ‘ac g s-ke:g nene’i t-miabǐ ’at.
Ka: ‘ac g s-ke:g ñeñe’i t-ai ’at.

"In the Midst of Songs"

We hear the songs resounding.
They are resounding toward the sunset.
They are resounding toward the sunrise.
They are resounding toward the north.
They are resounding toward the south.
We are in the midst of songs.
Our heart is full of joy.
Our mind is good.
Our land is good.
The land is all beautiful, take a look.
There is light rain all around, take a look.

We hear the ocean in the distance.
It has come near us.
We hear the beautiful wind in the distance.
It has come near us.
We hear the dust storm in the distance.
It has come near us.
We hear a beautiful song in the distance.
It has come near us.
We hear a beautiful song in the distance.
It has come upon us.


 

"Author's Prayer"

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

"Race Against Time: Afrofuturism and Our Liberated Housing Futures" (Excerpt)

I. Introduction: Time in the Law

Early on, many of us are taught to map out major events, world history, and even our own lives onto a timeline that runs horizontally from past to present to future. The timeline typically looks like a straight line, with major events representing discrete points on the timeline, where time comes from behind us and moves forward. Linear time on the standard timeline represents “an irreversible progression of moments, yielding cardinal conceptions of past, present, and future, as well as duration.”¹ Carol J. Greenhouse describes how “[t]he Western cultural capacity for that belief [in linear time] was established a thousand years ago, or longer, when institutional and social structural changes gave linear time a path from the sacred domain to the domain of the everyday.” She argues that this belief becomes “reproduced in the juxtaposition of institutional forms and temporalities which constitute everyday experience in the modern world.”²

Thus, the role of time and temporality is inextricably linked to a variety of systems and institutions that touch the moment-to-moment lives of people. This is glaringly true of the legal system, where, as Rebecca R. French puts it, “time enters every part of how we practice, analyze, project, and balance legal arguments; it is integral to our daily schedule, our client appointments, our classroom teaching time, our court dates, our tickler files, our view of our careers.” Despite time’s entrenched nature in the legal system, “we rarely think about how ‘time’ actually works, presuming that it is the simple linear measuring device that the clock creates for us.”³ Renisa Mawani agrees that “law is fundamentally about time.”⁴ She notes that “few have examined how law appeals to particular conceptions of time, whether linear, chronological, circular, or instrumental,” while “even fewer have asked how law produces time, how it orders the nomos through its own temporalities, aspiring to assimilate and absorb other temporalities in the process.”⁵

I would argue that fewer still have taken up closer examinations of constructions and intersections of race, time, and the law. Although much has been written about legal constructions of space and race, the time dimension is not covered with the same breadth, despite playing a daily and crucial role in how people—particularly Black, poor, disabled, and other marginalized people—are valued, treated, punished, erased, or underserved by and within the legal system.⁶ The timescapes and temporal structures of legal systems are especially underexplored in substantive areas of civil rights, poverty, and public interest law, as are the ways in which class oppression and institutional racism are reinforced by the union between time and the law.

¹ Carol J. Greenhouse, A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures 223, 230 (1996).
² Carol J. Greenhouse, Just in Time: Temporality and the Cultural Legitimation of Law, 98 Yale L.J. 1631 (1989); see also Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars 146-47 (1989)
³ Rebecca R. French, Time in the Law, 72 U. Colo. L. Rev. 663, 664 (2001).
⁴ Renisa Mawani, Law as Temporality: Colonial Politics and Indian Settlers, 4 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 65, 71 (2014).
⁵ Id.
⁶ See work by Michelle Bastian, Emily Grabham, Renisa Mawani, and Sarah Keenan.