Tester

haptic
A Zine of
Distituent Works

entangled prosthetics, sensory heaps,
heat/noise, subjective orders of affect and
abject, immunofictions of sovereignty,
nodes in metabolic circuits, voids poised at
the threshold of substance, reverberating
ekphrasis, unbutchered meat, relational
tissues, supervenient sandpiles, unfinished
sculptures, heterogenized surfaces, ethical
evocations, vectors of sinuous desire, the
middleground, reconstituted organs of
ongoing exaptation, stinkpits, ecologies of
otherness, products of care labor, exertions
from nowhere, costume factories, failed
transcendence, habitats of ritual and
enunciation, autocatalytic bundles, control
architectures, cosmetic idol-fetishes,
microfluidic assays, decaying afterbirth,
form-giving absence, archaeologies of
social position, recalibrated morphogen
gradients, films playing in empty
Cartesian theatres, frustration-excitation
futures, plugs and extensions, discursive

:bodies
November 2015
Editorial Collective
Nathan Eisenberg
Anna Montgomery
Sam Smith
Design
Sam Smith
Special Thanks
Sam Law
Stephanie Maurer
Anastacia Tolbert
Contact
editors@hapticzine.org
Hapticzine.org
Haptic Press 2015

Contents
01
Genevieve Goffman
Who’s Afraid of Richard Prince?:
Towards Ugliness
12
Ruthie Natanzon
It Was a Pleasure Having
You in My Car
19
Sara Yinling
Shelter
21
Colin Rosemont
Maroon

27
Anna Montgomery
Notes on Running
29
Grace Covill-Grennan
Historicity
31
Nathan Eisenberg
Border Porn
41
Anastacia Tolbert
Selected Poems + Q&A

Who’s Afraid of Richard Prince?: Towards Ugliness
Genevieve Goffman
Who’s Afraid
of Richard
Prince?
Not me. I have nothing to be afraid
of. I am not skinny enough, cool
enough or successful enough. Plus
I’m pretty sure that, at 24, I’m past
my peak creep prime, at least from
the perspective of 65-year-old
Prince, who seems to run more in
Terry Richardson’s line of thought.
Why fear a body snatcher if you
don’t have body worth snatching?
That’s really all Prince is guilty of.
And it’s not even an original crime.
If you are not familiar with
Richard Prince, he is an American
appropriation artist who became
well known in the 1980s for his
project Cowboys, in which he rephotographs
Marlboro Man advisements
stripped of their branding.
In this work, he was said to
be questioning everything, from
American masculinity to “what is
real.” This work was followed by
a collection called Girlfriends, in
which he rephotographs pictures
taken of bikers’ girlfriends sprawled
out on bikes. So, other than a brief
stint in 1985, when he turned his
attention to painting mildly sexist
jokes on canvas, Richard Prince
has always been a body snatcher.
Most recently, Richard Prince
has caught a lot of flak, not for
body snatching, but for “stealing”
the photographs of Instagram users,
printing them out and selling
them for ridiculously high prices as
part of a series of shows called New
Portraits. The series consists of 37
prints, and first opened for private
viewing at the Gagosian Gallery
in New York City in October of
2014. Each print is a 65-by-48-
inch screenshot that Prince took
of someone else’s Instagram photo,
always including an often mocking
and nonsensical comment made
by Prince himself. The photos are
mostly of young, conventionally
attractive women, many of them
highly sexual, many of them selfies.
Almost all of them are of highly
successful Instagram users or celebrities,
though some of them are
celebrity fan accounts.
Much of the critique of Prince
so far has concerned his stealing
photographs and making money
off other people's work (although
many have rightfully accused him
of being a big old creep and making
boring art). But it's not necessarily
the photograph that Prince is
profiting from. Instagram is made
of photographs, but what powers
it is bodies and aesthetics. Pho-

tographer Donald Graham wrote
a cease and desist letter to Prince
and the Gagosian, asking them to
stop showing or attempting to sell
his photograph, Rastafarian Smoking
a Joint, Jamaica. However, there
are several layers of Internet gray
area between Prince and the photograph.
Prince found Graham’s
photograph of a Jamaican man
smoking a joint on the Instagram
account @rastajay92, which had
reposted the photograph from the
Instagram account of Australian
use and reuse, it becomes hard to
pinpoint who is culpable for what.
Maybe those who uploaded the
photograph should have credited
it, maybe Richard Prince should
have alerted the artist to its use.
But there is another layer of
appropriation. The man in the
photo has no idea his picture was
hanging in a New York gallery. A
picture of a man of color was taken
by a photographer, his aesthetics
matched to one user and then
another user, and that picture is
Photographs: Robert McKeever
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matthew-israel/your-instagrams-are-richa_b_5908264.html
Jamaican model @indagoochild,
who presumably liked Graham’s
photograph enough to upload it
to Instagram. Like the majority of
Instagram photos, it was uploaded
without credit. Unlike the majority
of Instagram photos, it is now
potentially being sold for thousands
of dollars. In this chain of
now suddenly worth thousands
of dollars. This may be victimless
crime. It may not be. Donald Graham
is by no means an underdog
starving artist. He can clearly afford
a lawyer to pen his cease and
desist letter. He is internationally
well respected and his works hang
in major art galleries and private
02

collections. Perhaps the credit and
the $90,000 should go to the man
whose appearance and lifestyle,
while completely marginalized,
are aesthetically considered a hot
commodity.
Interestingly, Graham is not
the first white male artist to come
into conflict with Prince over the
use of the black male Jamaican
body. Prince recently won a fiveyear-long
legal battle with Patrick
Carou over his use of Carou’s
photography in his self-described
“meaningless” collection of work
Canal Zone. In Canal Zone, Prince
cut out and defaced pictures from
Carou’s book Yes, Rasta, an anthropological
photo essay on Rastafarian
culture in Jamaica. While many
who sided with Carou pointed out
that these photos were taken after
extensive community
engagement and research
in order to gain
the trust of people in
the culture, it’s hard to
not view the squabble
as two white men arguing
over the use of
a black man’s body.
This is not to defend
Prince, whose treatment
of the photographs could
easily be read as racist (for example,
when he enlarged the subjects’
mouths and erased their eyes). At
the time, he wrote,
I don’t want to talk about where
the Rastas came from. Like most
images I work with, they weren’t
mine. I didn’t know anything about
Rastas. I didn’t know anything
about their culture or how they
lived. I had plenty of time to find
out. What I went with was the attraction.
I liked their dreads. The
way they were dressed […] gym
shorts and flip-flops. Their look
and lifestyle gave off a vibe of
freedom. Maybe I’m wrong about
the freedom but I don’t give a shit
about being wrong.
But one of Carou’s biggest complaints
was not Prince’s disrespect,
but the fact that he lost his show at
a Paris gallery due to Prince.
For me the majority of Prince’s
New Portraits were repugnant only
in that they were symptomatic of
one the art world's greatest crimes:
body snatching. I think the term
“re-voyeurize” is important to understanding
how Prince snatches
bodies. When a photo is placed
on Instagram, it is intentional
and meant to be viewed by anyone.
There is nothing voyeuristic
03

about a sexual Instagram photo
posted by a consenting party. OG
sad girl artist and Instagram super
star Audrey Wollen told I-D,
What Prince is doing is colonising
and profiting off a territory of
the internet that was created by
a community of young girls, who,
needless to say, do not have the
cultural space Prince has. Selecting
specific bodies from a sea of images,
amputating them from their
context, and then naming himself
the owner of those bodies.
Prince takes what was a consensual
picture of a body and places the
body in a non-consensual context.
Part of the appeal of the project,
part of its “sexiness,” is that he
throws into question the agency
of those whose pictures he uses.
Now, instead of a woman posting
a sexy picture of herself online, you
are spying on her body in a context
she never consented to. He
re-voyeurizes the bodies of young
women, who, in posting pictures
of themselves online, are seeking
to profit off their own bodies and
working to reclaim the theme of
the young nude female as something
owned and controlled by
young the nude female herself. By
using their photos he forces them
back into the role of passive model.
He renders them innocent again.
Ripping away the agency of choice
and credit, he sends them reeling
back in the realm of spied-upon
and preyed-upon. The issue is not
whether Prince used photographs
he did not take, the issue is that
Prince is laying claim to the visual
capital of the bodies of those who,
through designing, curating and
consenting to publication, have
acted to reclaim what is rightfully
theirs, namely their bodies.
Of course, not all the Instagram
users included in New
Portraits are offended. Karley
Sciortino, a writer for Vogue and
the woman behind Slutever.com,
told Business Insider that she was
“honored” to be in Prince’s show,
because he was a “successful artist.”
However, Karley Scortino is
already a well-known writer and
critic. Many of the younger and
less well-known participants were
not as enthused by their inclusion,
especially those who were trying
to own and profit from their own
bodies. For example, Sean Fader, a
young recent MFA graduate had
a picture from his performance
art project Wishing Pelt seized by
Prince. Fader’s project consisted of
letting people take selfies of themselves
rubbing his chest hair. They
were told to make a wish while
they were doing so, and that if they
posted the picture to social media
the wish would come true. Sean
expressed his frustration to Hyperallergic,
saying,
There’s obviously that part of me
04

that’s mad because I’m a poor
starving artist with six-figure student
loan debt, and you’re just a giant
that runs through Instagram pillaging,
taking things into your own
museum, and calling them yours.
Then there is the snappy response
of Selena Mooney, founder of
SuicideGirls, a model-run, highly
lucrative pin-up community.
Upon hearing
that her photo was
being sold for $90,000
dollars, Mooney started
selling it online for
just $90. However,
Mooney is in a unique
position to play this
game. Ann Collins, a
self-described “working
student in school”
who is “extremely
broke,” was also outspoken
in her frustration
at Prince’s exploitation
of her body.
“I could have used that
money for school,” she
told the website Artnet.
Artnet was quick
to point out that Anna did not actually
take her own picture. However,
Collins’ issue was the not the
use of the photograph itself, it was
the use of her body. Collins explained
to Star Entertainment that
she wanted to “send a message to
the art world to stop commodifying
women’s bodies for the sake
of art.” Collins was not interested
in the use of her photograph, she
was upset about the use of her
own body, now in the public eye
without consent or credit – a situation
which, as a poor and young
woman, she could do little to
change.
It is not a coincidence that a
struggling performance artist (like
Fader), members of a ballet troop
(like Collins), models and makeup
artists are upset with Richard
Prince. Unlike Sciortino, they use
their bodies to survive. The structure
and material fabric of which
their body is built is precious to
them. Models, dancers, sex work-
05

ers and artists pour their energy
into shaping their bodies, so they
may profit off of the shapes they
create and survive off of those
profits. Many change their bodies
for cultural capital as well. While
we all should fight for the licensing
right to our bodies, for some this
is the bare means of their survival.
Male artists who capitalize off the
bodies of women and white photographers
who capitalize off the
skins of brown and black subjects
are hardly a novelty. Yet, except
in specific circumstances, these
bodies are seldom credited. Prince
ripped away the credit that many
on Instagram are finally receiving
for their bodies. When one posts
a picture of oneself online, one
is laying claim to the product of
all the labor it took to make and
present one's body. The models of
SuicideGirls put an extraordinary
amount of work into their bodies.
They work out, they get tattoos,
they spend time on makeup,
clothes and piercings. They strive
to be financially rewarded for this
labor, and that financial reward is
a societal affirmation of the credit
they deserve.
When visual artists make use
of models, they seldom credit the
work the model does to maintain
her body. I think they should
start. When a photographer travels
through America, to rural areas
or poor black neighborhoods, or
abroad, to seek out distinctive cultures
or lived experiences, I think
he should give partial credit to
every person he photographs and,
probably, some of his royalties.
After all, the body produced by
the agency of the model is partially
responsible for its own pictorial
iteration. Think how this would
radically shift the demographics
and economics of representation
in major art institutions. The muse
– a model used continuously over
time – is supposed to be a creation
of nature that captures the
artist’s heart and mind; she is as
much responsible for her power to
dazzle as a child is for the clothes
that their parents buy them. But in
today’s society we are never innocent
of our bodies. The natural is
fetishized, but only as framed by
a narrative fiction. “Natural beauty”
is a patriarchal fallacy that tells
us that being beautiful is essential
and, at the same time, that to
strive to be beautiful is shameful.
Plastic surgery, incredibly common
among a diverse section of the
world’s population, is still widely
condemned. The reasons given
for this – that it can be dangerous,
that it sometimes doesn’t make you
look better, that it is often obvious
to the beholder – ring hollow. The
real problem is that while we want
people to adhere to monetarily
profitable beauty standards that
uphold the superstructures of patri-
06

archy and the male ego, we do not
actually want them to have control
and ownership of their bodies. If a
woman looks as if she spends time
working out, she has a man’s body;
if a guy spends too much time on
his appearance he is effeminate.
We approve of people who “pass”
in the gender they identify with, as
we can see with the media reaction
to Caitlyn Jenner, but, in general,
we shame other members of the
Kardashian/Jenner family for the
aesthetic plastic surgery they pursue.
I think that anyone who gets
plastic surgery should be considered
a designer. After all, they are
striving to create an ideal thing of
beauty, just like an artist.
I read an article by Karley Sciortino
a while ago called, “Why do
we like having sex with artists?”
(The title really should have been,
“Why do straight women want to
have sex with successful, attractive
male artists?”) Sciortino writes
about the time she participated
in Prince’s Frieze Art project: she
wore a bikini top and short shorts,
and waxed his fancy car. She enjoyed
it and also resented it when a
woman tried to hand her a sweater—waxing
a car will make you
hot—and I can understand why.
It sounds like hard work, but the
attention could be validating. Sciortino
went on to explain that she
wanted to be a muse, a dream she
seems to have achieved. There is
nothing unfeminist about wanting
be a muse. What is unfeminist is
the idea of a non-consensual muse.
The muse who is striving to use her
body to inspire herself, the muse
who is seeking to profit off her
own body, only to have it snatched
from her and placed in a non-consensual
context, the credit for all
her bodily labor taken by someone
else.
As an artist, I want credit for
any time my body is used. If a guy
jacks off to my picture on Instagram,
I want a check in the mail.
But being realistic, I know that
many muses are non-consensual,
and will never receive credit. So
what do we do if we don’t want
others to profit off our bodies? My
only advice is to make your body
as unprofitable as possible. If you
are in a place where this feels safe
and comfortable, don’t give a fuck
about “passing.” Don’t work out.
Get fat or maybe don’t – that can
backfire. Don’t brush your hair.
Don’t even think about make-up.
Get really nasty, obvious plastic
surgery. Dress up like an animal all
the time. In other words, get ugly. I
mean really ugly, don’t get “riot girl”
chic, don’t get alt, don’t get edgy,
get unattractive. It’s tricky, because
ugly is in the eye of the beholder,
but I have faith in us. And maybe,
if you get just ugly enough, no one
will want to snatch your body for
their art.
07

am
an
outcropping.
Body Compositions I-IV
Virgil B/G Taylor
08

p u l l a t t h e f o l d s o f

although
way
the
sound
away
from
me
saw

p u l l e d
t h r o u g h
t h e s p a c e
b e t w e e n
a n d t h e n
p u l l e d
o v e r t h e
s p a c e
b e t w e e n
a n d t h e n
t w i s t e d
i n & o v e r
t h e p a c e
b e t w e e n .

It Was a Pleasure Having You in my Car
Ruthie Natanzon
UNBECOMING:
“The Young-Girl only
exists as a Young-Girl
within the system of
general equivalency
and its massive circulatory
movement. She
is never possessed for
the same reason that
she is desired. The
very moment one acquires
her, she is taken
out of circulation,
the mirage fades, she
sheds her magic aura
and her nimbus of
transcendence. She’s
stupid and she reeks.”
Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
We live vicariously through her “self discovery” and her
fucking.
We hear her on her birthday eating pancakes at a diner in
New Mexico,
she says “I’m having a great time!” She has a mullet
now, she’s a stag.
Her mother tells her its okay to be confused about her
sexuality, “but please don’t wear Old Spice.” She aspires
to be this frozen boy.
12

LABOR & OCCUPATION:
I imagine you inside her tiny body,
Both of you tidy and smelling like,
Fourth of July.
13

I found Horacio Olivera’s Kibbutz. Everyone was
gleaming in the field, everyone was home, but the
gift of revelation was wasted because I forgot. I was
expelled: this is the feeling of being culled from the
site of a promise that depends upon erasure. This is
your cousin calling you on the phone in terror because
of the boy on the other side of the yellow gate.
14

VULNERABILITY:
Encountering masculinity and
relinquishing control: my mother
taught me to never get in the
car but I got into the car seventeen
times. Moving along at
another agent’s speed, this is
the height of my potential as
disposable, but it’s mutual. We
asked a man with a Croatian
license plate in the gas station
near the Balaton for a ride.
He drove us to Zagreb, it took
three hours. He told us about
the breakup of Yugoslavia while
we drove by green mountains
and white houses with terracotta
roofs. I didn’t want to know
about him or his IT job in Budapest.
I didn’t want him to ask
any questions. When we got
out of the car I was frantic for
momentum.
A diary entry of the object who desires above all else to inhabit the
unattainable status of perfection (that is, an object who controls of
the conditions of her objectification):
15

I always act (act) like I can’t hurt men because
men don’t care, especially not men, because
masculinity has never offered me evidence
of hurt. Of course, I know that this is not
true, but where is the model? I think hurt
looks like your friend’s dad inviting you for
ice cream at 7:00 in the evening and its already
cold out. You all stand there with your
hands in your pockets in some public garden
on the East River. You remember the dream
you had when you were seventeen that he
was coming on to you. It’s only upsetting because
it’s a little real. My reply to these rigid
representations is another apology.
In Rijeka we realized we couldn’t get across the border into Italy so
we looked for a place to sleep. There was a bar at the top of the
hill, no one there spoke English other than a man in his late forties
who said he was from L.A. He was in Croatia with the Navy, he said
his favorite city was Dubrovnik. He was sitting in front of a fig tree,
smoking and pretending to read the newspaper. I didn’t notice
him when we sat down but when I came out of the bathroom they
were already talking. He tried to dissuade us from hitchhiking and
offered us money, which we didn’t accept. That night we slept next
to the pier, near a smaller bar, in a playground between a ping
pong table and a tree with keys and pocket knives between our fingers.
It rained hard. In the morning, the American national anthem
was playing from one of the ships.
16

OBFUSCATION:
“The Hebrew language has eight synonyms for beauty, each emphasizing
a different facet of that elusive and seductive quality.
Grace (chen) is the aesthetic of symmetry whether in movement,
form, or proportion. It is a state of balance and harmony between
elements which implies a higher, hidden point of synthesis. The lure
and enchantment of grace is its ability to suggest unity within a state
of multiplicity through the balanced arrangement of parts.”
A Kabbalistic Approach to Spiritual Growth: Part 29
17

I don’t remember when they turned off the lights, I
don’t know what they are talking about at the table.
You, sitting next to me, gave me two sets of pesos
for my twenty-second birthday. You pulled them out
of your shirt pocket and said, “It’s a chess set, but
only the kings and queens.”
This is our ritual. We play games
with coins until it’s so late that we
can’t see the stratagem we have
laid out. We attempt to organize
ourselves and our losses but instead
we end up sitting in the
dark.
This is faith in duality. The akatastasia of communication,
the blind chance at an interstice of understanding,
the impossibility of stasis, is a grace.
18

Shelter
Sara Yinling
They ask me how I can claim to be an ally of survivors if I have not
known abuse.
We are barricaded in the basement of the youth shelter where I
work,
me, and these two teen clients,
tough kids—street weathered, defiant
and sometimes I am the enemy, and sometimes a tool, and occasionally
a friend.
In the house above us, we hear smashing of dishes
I have not called the cops
They say restraint angers the soul weary of restraint
So instead I have called a relative, an abuser of another form,
“can you pick up your son, please?”
When they ask how I can be an ally of survivors
What I hear is:
Have I nursed bruises from threats followed through? Have I
stood up for myself and been incarcerated because of it, my
body handcuffed and put in a cell, have I kept a vest of ice in
the freezer, have I hid pain for so long that when it bubbles up
it blacks out and rages and sends those trying to help me hiding
into basements, has the state sent me back to my abuser
time and time again saying “it’s not so bad—”
These stories are true. They are not mine and so I am afforded the
opportunity to hold them within my head but they do not belong
to my body.
But I have known fear for my physical being.
And when this raging teen threatened me with teeth, blood,
knives, fists and guns,
the other ones—street weathered, defiant—stood in front of my
body and said,
“I’ve got your back.”
They do not discriminate; a threat is a threat and my fear is so
familiar that in the face of his anger they are either solidarity or
betrayal, there is no middle ground.
And then back to the hierarchy.
He is picked up.
I tell his father, to whom I have already filed numerous counts of
physical abuse,
“your son has an anger issue; it is not your son who is not welcome
here, but his anger.”
19

“your son tells the most wonderful stories.”
And walking home I feel my heart within my body,
I notice that my wrists are so thin as to snap
And for the next few days I think they might, that someone might
hurt me,
Until those days pass and it’s back to my own life: secure, unafraid
for my life.
I go back to watching the teenagers through my thin castle of security,
while their bodies sharpen their arrows.
Power Sun Meditation #1: There Is No Body Here
Imani Jackson
20

Maroon
Colin Rosemont
I lay in bed,
one hundred and
some odd numbered fever baking me
from the inside out.
They knew about this storm for
weeks or longer I’m sure, kept quiet
about it, and then decided to give
the entire city a week to prepare for
the coming onslaught. So as I lay
there—vacillating between fits of
feverish rage and the icy isolation
that comes with being sick and
alone—I felt a distant ease about
hunkering down for a week or
more. My cupboards now housed
a week’s worth of dried food and
water. My brick apartment building
appeared menacing in its wear,
looking as though it had withstood
countless other storms, and I felt
confident in its hands.
The morning came without
a word. My apartment windows
with their sun-burnt glass let in no
light. The grey hues that filled the
sky before first light never dissipated,
but became the backdrop to
the entire day before the slow dial
turned from grey to black. I tend to
speak of The Storm as a particular
event or moment in time, despite
its having lasted some six days.
But this seems much more accurate
than referring to a chronology
of time: Day 1—8:20 am… Day
3—4:30 pm… The power went
out and I have long since lost my
heirloom watch that might have
held a steady tick throughout the
week. So instead it feels more like
a rounded event over the course
of several days, encompassing the
early fatigue of my sickness, its
precipitous rise to a feverish nightmare,
and its slow abatement with
that of the storm.
As I began, I lie in bed, struck
through by that ominous fever
that portends of something much
worse. Sometimes, in the past I recall,
I’ve been in feverish fits and
felt the tension of life bend and
the dark coolness of death appear
as a real avenue that would surely
be better than the seemingly eternal
hellfire of my burning sickness.
It is no wonder that in times past
those who were struck with fever
could be likened to having been
pierced by the devil’s tongue, on
their way to their infernal fates.
I feel, enfolded in the covers of
my bed, old and weary. My body
bears the mark of many lifetimes
before me—my parents, grandparents,
great grandparents—living in
completely different worlds of the
aspiring rush to the West and the
depressed East of the big city, but
always getting by. I reflect upon
my still young flesh and count the
21

moments; I imagine myself in the
terribly strange state of old age,
and reflect upon the brevity of it
all, and I make myself through this
image: part nostalgia, part surrealist
requiem. Shivering and shaking
in my bed, I try against all intuition
to enjoy my discomfort, because I
might just not have the same kind
of feeling again. And as I lie in the
sweat drenched sheets, I begin to
see the color blue. In between fits
of expelling anything and everything
from my body’s depths, I lie
back, thankful for the brief respite
and thinking, for the briefest moment,
that someone is sitting there
stroking my hand. The color blue
fades to a soft black. My bed is a
boat lodging and dislodging itself
all the time. Its movement carries
me along and I shift back and
forth trying to regain my balance.
Sustained, specters of my
lonely lost friends—and watching
eyes of the brilliant stories, theories,
and thoughts—my books sit
on their shelves, collecting days.
Over the years I’ve read many of
these books. I remember them as
important interlocutors to different
stages of me: from Harry to
Holden to the Hobbitses. Looking
across my cave of a room, I
feel the walls curling around me.
Swaddled and cocooned in the
layers of my bed, I read the titles
of the books. The fondness with
which I remember the characters
makes me question their status as
my real friends. They’re vulnerable
from the start, yet I forget them so
easily. Despite their fleeting concreteness,
or in part due to it, life
takes on the mythos of an endless
play—of characters flying in and
out through the cusp of that interfluvial
dream(life). And when I feel
overwhelmed by the immensity of
all of these fictional worlds, drowning
the moment in near canonical
fashion, I fog my gaze and see the
books as objects. These objects are
alive and I smile as I scan the old
Hebrew books my grandmother
gave me some years ago when I
visited her desert home, situated
right beside the King James Bible
that I stole from a hotel room.
When did you last water your
plants? Did you forget to water
them? They only need to be watered
once a week and they’re
probably going into some hibernating
shock with wind and rain
sounds pounding their neighboring
windows. So I think it’s ok…
You like to keep plants hanging
around your room. Pieces of wood
and bark you’ve hung on the walls
have moss growing on them, and
the air feels thicker. It’s a kind of
tasty. The moss, and the orchids and
bromeliads, they drink the air and
are astounding. Plants are growing
on other plants and they frame
water droplets all of the time. The
plants are painting you and mak-
22

ing you over. Series of gangly plant
arms reach out in concert, the
green sounds a constant soft drone
and the flowers stand as beautiful
colored sentries, singing melodies
and watching all the while. They
hang from the ceiling in ornate
mobiles, spinning and growing out
of their glass containers. There is so
much moisture in the air that they
are just growing and growing until
there is a scream and they stop.
They shrink and wait. With a deep
breath of fresh air you take in the
hanging plants and growing moss
and the body relaxes a beat, comforted
in their presence, displaced
so far from their laboratory homes,
and yet so beautiful against the
brick cave walls.
I dream a plant kingdom. All is
lost and my body is hot.
I think I mentioned my affectionate
relationship with the walls
of my apartment. They yield the
sensitivity of skin fused with the
dependency of bone. I fall into
prayer, reverent. Without these
walls I don’t know where I’d be
right now. Sick—out in the storm.
These walls bleed a history of injustice,
built by people who perhaps
never enjoyed their comforts.
Each brick stacked on another
creates the private enclaves that
perpetuate the private enclaves of
my body—as some individual task
force machine—urging me to fear
my neighbor until things are tamed
and difference is erased. Each day
the culture of terror resumes. The
private outpost houses the wary
sentinels, diagnosing the violence
and wretched existence carried
out beyond their walls. Under the
weight of such a damning vision,
the prophesy is fulfilled: people
making themselves through the
worst image of their enemy. The
fear breeds the feared. I spend so
much time in my private room. I
crave the mess hall. As I lie tracing
the history of this building
and its people, I imagine the story
of the storm. It is nascent now,
but it will come again and again,
with increasingly erratic ferocity. I
wonder whether or not this history
of the building can stand up to
the fantastical storms of the future.
But for now, I stay in bed, lights
flickering on my bedside table with
each ebb of power. The wind and
rain blow against the window and
the sounds leave a tremble…
I am made up of things. I
don’t mean the tired stardust adage
or the even older Epicurean
model—although I do think my
body is swerving all of the time.
My body is part of this room…
and the sickness that surely arises
from some malignancy within me
forms new ties to its environment,
to this room. Bodies work, day by
day, in the drudge of physical labor
23

or in ever growing sedative labor.
The athleticism of the seat, the
micro-motions of the sitter. The
agility of the writer sitting for indefatigable
hours, the fortitude of
the office worker’s 50+ hour week.
What eats me? Lying in this bed all
week long, suspended in a blinding
monotony but not outside of the
spiritual ecstasy. Every moment I
escape boredom—the desire for
desires—I conquer something
pressing in from all angles around
me, and I am a spirit, even if I am
sick, stuck in my room, in a storm.
Now, sleep feels cathartic. It’s
an active form of expression. Then,
my phone starts buzzing, disrupting
my body’s breathing rhythms.
I am annoyed and I experience fits
of falling and catching myself in
and out of sleep dimensions. A not
so gentle compulsion pulls me into
the grasp of messages and media.
My phone is an over-sexed machine.
Its seductive round edges fit
together with my own curves and
it flirts endlessly with my desiring
social body. Without a thought I
am scrolling through Facebook,
lost in a fevered fugue state, spit
out the other side some countless
dozens of minutes later, violated by
my own lack of conscious consent.
The power has surged one
too many times and gone out. I
like to think that the power is
out throughout the city. I have a
headlamp and a few extra AAA
batteries lying about. I’m listening
to the sounds outside. The
rain whips against the window in
syncopated rhythms and the wind
unfurls a bass that shakes me to my
core. There is no escape from these
sounds and I sink into the serenity
of the storm’s embrace.
24

Concealer
Genevieve Goffman

Notes on Running
Anna Montgomery
I. Surroundings. Her surroundings are important to her not because
of the inherently anti-egoistic directionality of “getting outside of
herself,” but instead because they are a part of the emergent now
that she arises as and through.
II. The now + the now, ideology of. As itself, the now is the only
thing that I will always have. As an ideology, it is one of many I can
potentially have. As ideologies, each is within the now. As all of
these, the now is everything I will always have.
III. Kafka + Emergence. The internal ruse of the will to knowledge
is that one day the I will know. But the anatomy of the will to knowledge
is that understanding, finding, knowing are never finished. It is
not “a project” that is never finished. The unfinishedness itself is the
fundamental fact of the project’s existence. This is not a reflection
on the beauty of not finishing. It is also not a relaxing realization that
nothing is ever finished. Section III identifies a seductive drive, a motion.
It is the how of aspirational being’s flimsy race forward. Being’s
knowledge of itself exists within the almost known: the unceasing
movement, pursuit, and desire toward, of, and for.
IV. Bergson + Kafka. The unrealizability of knowing (e.g., the experience
of always almost knowing, the unending closing in on of
understanding) is an example of the multiplicity of the temporality
of lived experience. The one moment always necessarily consists
of at least two: the now—which presents itself as a singular tic—is
itself the movement between the unknowing and the will to know,
the flow from tic to toc. Time as never not moving—not a series of
stillnesses, but a perpetuality of movements.
V. Form (bodily relations) + content (the will). Form—itself shaped
by the will—tends to overpower will. After some time (two weeks) of
not running regularly, I am running today. And today running helps
27

me think beautiful things and feel joy. And this is why I am running.
But two weeks ago (after running regularly for the three weeks prior
to that) the thoughts that filled my runs were: how many times will I
run this week?; am I hurting my ankles?; do my shorts show my ass?
The form took over the content. The repetitious thought-patterns
whose source lay in my bodily experience of running emerged and
surmounted.
VI. Shock + content. Through the shock of inserting myself into new
forms, I sometimes lose the tired form, replacing it with a new will.
Running a new route. A step back.
VII.a. The individual. Individuality as a rhythm + repetition. The individual
as an occurrence over time. This occurrence who feels, thinks,
and acts with specificity is not an essence, a static bearer of diachronic
responsibility, an intentional recipient. The I as an ever-shifting
form, a happenstance. The I as a collection of capacities, structures,
and patterns. I as a rhythm of capacities, structures, and patterns.
VII.b. Relationships I am interested in and not interested in. I don’t
want intimacy to be code for a space to express (reproduce) my
insecurities.
VIII. Donald Ewen. Ewen says I should prioritize “having fun.” Of
course I should also always be moving toward the now’s kernel of
growing qua the emergent self-structure that I arise as and through.
But it could be good to balance this unceasing directionality with a
movement toward now’s kernel of joy.
IX. Production and Relation. The will to knowledge does not have
an end. Instead, its resulting ends are its real effects and affects. For
example, the experience of going on this run right now, and creating
games of truths (see parts I-VIII) is (affect) and produces (effect).
28

Historicity
Grace Covill-Grennan
behind my yard, behind my ears
the forest is a looming gray wall
crows circling something within
cold branches clipping my elbows
what can I tell about what I saw
in the woods this afternoon?
the purity and unmanageable weight
of thing that remains
in a rotting stump I found
a fingernail partially embedded
nearby, a molar beside a stained stone
my tongue, traversing its
white picket fence tastes
loam and long forgetting
recognition
this site might as well be historical
I can assume I should feel
uncanny
aware to the radical continuity
of place, trees
moss, stones
bone
29

Visual Stimulation is a Substitute for Thought
(#1)
Grace McMicken

Border Porn
Nathan Eisenberg
CW: Rape, Sexual Assault,
Graphic Sex, Border Violence
“For the images to become a source of true information, they would have to
be different from the war. They have become today as virtual as the war itself,
and for this reason their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the
war. In addition, due to their omnipresence, due to the prevailing rule of
the world of making everything visible, the images, our present-day images,
have become substantially pornographic.”
Jean Baudrillard, “War Porn”
“Watch these guys hunting the illegal female immigrants and giving them a
lesson on why the law should be obeyed. Cruising in their SUV, agents catch
these college girls in the field and fuck them really hard. Getting fucked by
border patrol agent is one thing, but these girls don't know that this doesn't
really mean they get to pass the border afterwards. The harsh school of
reality!”
Border Patrol Porn promotional material
The border is already pornographic.
Border Patrol porn only literalizes There is an implicit and unspoken
this fact.
promise that he will let her go if
Each video unfolds according she services him. The sex itself runs
to a basic formula. A (white, male) through the usual script of straight
uniformed border enforcement porn (blowjob, several sex positions,
him ejaculating somewhere
agent is on patrol somewhere out
in the desert of the US-Mexico on her exterior) and is entirely
oriented towards his pleasure.
border or the exurban landscape
of an American city. He encounters
someone (a Latina woman, he is still detaining her and offi-
Afterward, he informs her that
alone or in a group) who he suspects
is in the country “illegally” deported.
cially arrests her, presumably to be
and detains her. He brings her to An apparatus of control, the
a secluded spot where he touches border depends on what anthropologist
Nicholas de Genova refers
her under the pretense of searching
for weapons or contraband. He to as the “Border Spectacle.” 1 As
then coerces her into having sex Guy Debord noted, the spectacle
with him, with varying degrees of is no mere collection of images,
performed capitulation on her part. be they porn videos or deportation
31

quotas, but a “social relation among
people, mediated by images.” 2 The
Border Spectacle does not represent,
but in fact constitutes territorial
sovereignty and its relation to
populations moving across it. More
to the point, it is an assemblage of
images, practices and technologies
that produces and is produced by
the bordered space of the nation
and the exceptional status of the
migrant.
Spectacular regimes of power—e.g.,
capitalism, nationalism—are
necessarily dramaturgical
productions: they stage events according
to an ideological mis-enscène
and induce forms of spectatorship
in a process of making-(in)
visible. In this way, certain lived
experiences are erased from discourse,
while others are rendered
public monstrosities, thus enforcing
the hegemonic narrative.
Though certainly deployed by state
institutions, the border crisis narrative
gains momentum of its own,
percolating throughout discourse,
substantiating the nation and its
borders from diffuse and multiple
sources. Border porn registers the
operative, fantastical elements of
the Border Spectacle, conducting
bodies in a manner intended
to simulate the “harsh school of
reality.” These productions have
substantive impact. They are indistinguishable
from the practice of
bordering—not separate and prior,
but simultaneous and coterminous.
In the context of porn, these
fantastical elements are mobilized
to enter viewing subjects into what
queer theorist Paul Preciado terms
“excitation-frustration cycles,” 3 a
process of reorienting the “somatic
32

mechanism” for the management
of pleasure and affect. Crucially,
excitation-frustration cycles perform
actual work, integrating
bodily events into a global media
circuit. In such terms, porn generates
an embodied social relation:
the viewers, the actors, the producers,
the cops, the migrants all
become entwined in the spectacle.
Porn films are “embodied images,”
to use porn scholar Linda Williams’
term, incorporating themselves
into the body and staging
an “encounter with an eroticized
technological apparatus” 4 beyond
the body, effectively mediating social
relations among people.
Preciado identifies porn as a
paradigmatic media form, the limit
case of the body affected by the
techniques that collectively constitute
the Border Spectacle, which,
we cannot forget, is fundamentally
a refocusing maneuver, a matter of
making-(in)visible. Porn is instructive
because, in Williams’ terms, it
somewhat inverts the normative
optics of obscenity (that which is
off-scene) by bringing into “the
public arena the very organs, acts,
bodies and pleasures” that are usually
obscured, thereby operating
as an optics of “on/scenity.” This
characterization assumes a prior
reality, stable but hidden, which is
revealed through pornography in
a manner that Williams typically
understands as liberating. Against
this reading, de Genova offers that
while obscenity is constituted by
acts of concealment, it is through
image. Border porn exists, however,
on a spectrum of genres and
“gestures of selective exposure”
that an event’s obscene nature is
33

normalized and enforced ahead of
its unveiling. For de Genova, the
obscene is already out in the open,
despite being publicly disavowed.
This is paramount to the
Border Spectacle’s capacity to
reify the legitimacy of border enforcement.
Its primary operation
is to make the contingent process
of political calculation that
forms the very premise of migrant
‘illegality’ disappear entirely
from view. De Genova writes
In place of the social and political
relation of migrants to the
state…the spectacle of border
enforcement yields up the thinglike
fetish of migrant ‘illegality’ as
a self-evident ‘fact’, generated by
its own supposed act of violation.
The Spectacle strategically elides
the terms under which migrating
people are incorporated into the
workings of the neoliberal state.
This elision requires a double maneuver,
in which the “scene of exclusion”
is continually asserted over
the “obscene of inclusion.”
The ‘scene of exclusion’ is, in
de Genova’s terms, where border
enforcement “performatively activates
the reification of migrant
‘illegality’ in an emphatic and
grandiose gesture of exclusion.”
It features iconic and particularly
fetishized figures of ‘illegal immigration,’
through which “the
purported naturalness and putative
necessity of exclusion may be
demonstrated and verified, validated
and legitimated, redundantly.”
The scene of exclusion justifies
itself. The dissemination of such
scenes insists that migrants do not
belong where they are, should not
go where they are going and that
their removal is inevitable. The
scenes depend on the development
and cooptation of certain stereotypes
and tropes, which are used to
criminalize migration and enforce
white supremacy.
These caricatures are hyperreal,
emerging not from any enduring
qualities of actual migrating
people but from the securitarian
management of fear. The Border
Spectacle participates in and draws
legitimacy from hygienic nationalism,
which imagines foreign
contagions perpetually invading
the state from its margins. In de
Genova’s words, the border is figured
as a “space of encounter, interaction
and exchange,” materializing
a “constitutive indeterminacy
at the liminal edge of the state and
law.” The sense of boundary loss
and its resulting anxiety becomes
sublimated into what postcolonial
theorist Anne McClintock, talking
about Victorian-era imperialism,
calls a ‘porno-tropic’: an imagined
space in which “knowledge of the
unknown world [is] mapped as a
metaphysics of gender violence”
where “the world is feminized and
spatially spread for male explora-
34

tion, then reassembled and deployed
in the interests of massive
imperial power.” 5 Women appear
wherever boundary markers of empire
give way, often as a sexual force
to be violently subdued. The colonial
genealogy of porno-tropics
translates into contemporary hygienic
nationalism, configuring
the (gendered and racialized) caricatures
of the Border Spectacle,
such as the ritualized scenes of
submission in border porn. This
acute source of anxiety engenders a
state of protracted national crisis in
which scenes of exclusion proliferate
and are made as conspicuous
as possible, in order to render the
spectral presence of invading otherness
palpable.
Such scenes must show that
law is being violated, that there is
an existential threat to the national
body, and that enforcement is effective
and decisive in maintaining
peace and order by reversing this
transgression. Scenes of exclusion
are sites where the official, public
doctrine of exclusionary citizenship
is continually clarified. They
are always punitive. Their distinctive
feature is the denial of migrant
agency. Towards this end, deportation
is the most potent weapon.
It is important to recall that these
scenes are not merejust representations,
but also stagings in which
actual people, who have been systematically
vilified, are routinely
apprehended and expelled from
the country. What is visible is not
necessarily the expulsion itself (as
this typically occurs in an archipelago
of nondescript gulags), but the
migrant’s condition of deportability:
from stigmatizing narratives
to anti-immigration legislation,
migrants are visualized as simultaneously
threatening and vulnerable.
This visibility multiplies and
extends the individual devastation
of deportation to become a general
specter that plagues undocumented
people as a class.
From the perspective of an
undocumented migrant, the circulation
of scenes of exclusion—in
which detection, detention and deportation
are always possible—enforces
a state of ambient terror and
police impunity, exacting a disciplinary
psychological effect. Migrant
deportability is a tactic that
fits into an overall strategy of imposed
mass disposability and precarity
that confronts the working
class and people of color at almost
every junction. The “deportation
regime,” as de Genova terms it, operating
as a tool of labor discipline,
is the basis of the unseen terms of
migrants’ actual incorporation into
the state as labor for capital: the
“obscene of inclusion.” The scene
of exclusion is a repeated, public
denial of the existing “banality of
a continuous importation of ‘unauthorized’
migrant labor,” ensuring
35

that “inclusion is itself, precisely,
a form of subjugation.” Juridically
abjected, flung from the body of
the nation, able to take up residence
in the space of the state only
when reduced to a kind of bare
life, “the ‘illegality’ of ‘undesirable’
migrants, then, supplies the crucial
feature of their distinctive, if disavowed,
desirability.”
Though the scene and the obscene
are inseparable, the Border
erotic payoff of the genre, however,
stems from its particular move
towards on/scenity: in the “plot”
of each film—insofar as her position
of precarity is leveraged to
extract sexual labor from her—the
obscene circumstance of inclusion
as exploitation remains. In this
rare instance, the entire obscene
power dynamic is made explicit;
but rather than unravel the Border
Spectacle, this “selective exposure”
Spectacle constantly refocuses attention,
naturalizing the former
and obscuring the latter. This doubled
optic regime permeates the
entire discourse, patterning the
way that border porn constructs
erotic tension. Each video presents
a veritable scene of exclusion, beginning
and ending with the migrant
women’s putative “illegality,”
deploying the usual signifiers in
an exaggerated mis-en-scène. The
reinforces it.
As de Genova notes, “the Border
Spectacle enhances the efficiency
of its own power precisely
through this sort of obscene intimacy,
whereby the ‘dirty secret’ of
migrant ‘illegality’...may be occasionally
revealed but must be generally
guarded through sanctimonious
acts of [...] dissimulation.”
By presenting the subjugation of
migrant labor (and its structur-
36

al relationship to their condition
of deportability) as a patriarchal
erotic fantasy, border porn refracts
the state’s desire for migrant bodies
through the lens of sexualized
domination. Media is never neutral;
it necessarily frames events
in a manner that demands to be
viewed and perceived a certain way.
Though the obscene of inclusion
is placed potentially in view, the
visual techniques that porn deploys
construct a certain gaze within the
viewing subject, here a heteropatriarchal
perspective. As embodied
images that have particular capacity
to reach, so to speak, into the
physiology of the viewer through
the induction of excitation-frustration
cycles, porn is powerfully
interpellative, doing the work of
gazing for the viewer and positioning
them in a given relation with
the subjects onscreen. Border porn,
despite momentarily revealing
the structure of coercion behind
the images, ultimately dissimulates
this coercion by identifying
the viewer with the state. The migrants’
“desirability” is avowed, but
any threads of solidarity between
viewer and subject that might unsettle
the conditions of desire are
obscured by the scopophilic fixation
on sexual subjection. The deportation
regime is in plain sight,
but only as a cipher.
An analysis of how the videos
make use of actors’ bodies will
aid in deciphering the entangled
and encoded discourses that they
index. Border porn first seeks to
establish a recognizable scene of
exclusion. The border agents are
invariably dressed in green fatigues
and bulletproof vests. They are
carrying sidearms, emphasizing
both the ostensible danger they
face and their mastery over the
situation at hand. In nearly every
video, the agents wear dark aviator
sunglasses, which they never
remove for any reason. By hiding
their eyes and facial expressions,
these sunglasses impose a one-way
exchange of information, transposing
the panoptic gaze of the state
apparatus onto the actors’ bodies,
which, along with the tactical uniforms
and equipment, establishes
them as an appendage of state
power.
The migrant women are typically
found just walking down a
dusty desert road or encamped behind
a bush. Their motives for migrating
are rarely referenced. They
are imaged as ahistorical ambulating
bodies, spontaneously sprouting
from the landscape itself and
disembedded from any prior conditions
that might prefigure their
decision to migrate. Their being is
further truncated by the frequent
use of the sole term “border-hopper”
to name them in the video titles.
As soon as the women are ap-
37

prehended, their bodies are handled.
They are pressed up against
walls, trees, trucks or down to the
ground. Their hands are always
within the the orbit of the agent's’
grasp, whether placed behind their
back or raised in the air. They are
instructed where to look, when to
stand and where to move. In other
words, as soon as they are seen,
these women are in the sphere of
a carceral bodily order. One agent
says to another, “You got her?” He
nods. “Alright, contain her.” This
strategy of containment is only
ramped up from this point forward.
In scenes of exclusion, the fetishization
of identifiable transgressions
serves to retroactively
justify the heavy enforcement and
the stigmatization of migration.
Thus, the women are usually not
merely traveling but have some
tokenized contraband, a joint, for
example, hidden somewhere in
their clothes. This is discovered
at some point in “the search,” the
point at which the manipulation
of the women’s bodies crosses over
into overt sexual assault. Under the
guise of routine police procedure,
the agent subjects the woman to
aggressive fondling. The agent’s
stoic expression is unbroken here:
the impunity he knows he has is
immanent to the certainty with
which he touches her body.
The videos tend to make a
show of the women consenting to
this, giving the impression that a
deliberate, if unspoken, transaction
is taking place: if the women perform
for their captors, they will be
released. In spite of these gestures,
what is being portrayed is rape.
The conflation of rape with willing
sex has a long history in the
iconography of porno-tropics. As
McClintock describes, the erotics
of imperial conquest was often
also an “erotics of ravishment,”
presenting the colonial hinterland
simultaneously as an unassuming
virgin to be taken by force and a
seductress, full of sexual excess, to
be contained and “civilized.” As
the geography of colonialism has
metastasized into the nation-state
form, borders remain as liminal
spaces where conquest and manifest
destiny have been recoded as
defense and crisis. In border porn,
just as in Victorian porno-tropics,
“women [serve] as mediating
and threshold figures by means
of which men [orient] themselves
in space, as agents of power.” As
such, instances of boundary loss
are ameliorated through an “excess
of boundary order and fantasies of
unlimited power” exacted onto the
bodies of women. The autonomy
exhibited by the women’s migration
is intolerable and the breach
is recovered through the reassertion
of gender hierarchy: women
as object, men as subject. As an
38

agent said in one video, “You cross
my fucking border? You take my
fucking dick.”
This citation of the “erotics
of ravishment,” taking place in a
different historical moment and
porno-tropic space, can be referred
to as an “erotics of disposability.”
It depends on the absolute removal
of agency from the women
migrating and the reinstatement
of total control into the hands of
the law, rendering them sexually
subordinate and physically pliable
to the will of the agents. Scenes
of exclusion often operate with
the erotics of disposability as an
emotive force, casting migration
as a menace to national (masculinized)
potency whose only solution
is a muscular, overbearing reaction.
This porno-tropic lineage is mobilized
in border porn to stimulate
excitation-frustration cycles
almost to an excess that threatens
to destabilize the optic order of
the Border Spectacle. The ritualized
rape of migrant women as a
mechanism of reconstructing the
dominance of law and the state
looks too much like the obscene
inclusion of migrant life as abject
labor-power.
The leverage point of both, of
course, is the imposition of deportability.
The climax of border
porn videos, almost simultaneous
with the agent’s ejaculation, is the
women’s deportation. In one video,
the agent finishes off onto the actress’
body inside the back of the
police van, promptly hops out and
shuts the gate behind him before
she even sits up. He gets on the
radio to his partner: “I’m done
here. Let’s take her in.” These are
moments where the deportation
regime is briefly visible. Such moments,
however, are mainly seen, as
a structural feature of border porn,
from the vantage point of the oppressor.
The colonial gaze inherent
in porno-tropics dissimulates the
obscene.
Border porn is a site where
the relationship between scene
and obscene comes close to the
surface, where the “disavowed
desirability” of migrants is harnessed
to build erotic tension in
a manner that disavows it further.
The videos are nodes in a diffuse
and contradictory array of spectacular
productions, all contributing
material to the biopolitical
management of different ethnic
populations, primarily for purposes
of capital accumulation. Just as
the border is pornographic, border
porn is a part of the border. It’s
specific violence adds to the specific
violence of the border itself.
1. Nicholas de Genova, “Spectacles of migrant
‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of
inclusion 2. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
3. Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs
and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic
Era 4. Linda Williams, Porn Studies: Proliferating
Pornographies On/Scene 5. Anne McClintock,
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in
the Colonial Contest
39

Visual Stimulation is a Substitute for Thought
(#2)
Grace McMicken

Selected Poems
Anastacia Tolbert
The Monsters Guide To Love
a +ghoul is a monster or spirit associated with graveyards and
consuming human flesh.
dearest ghoul
if you hunger enough to eat her flesh let your lips pucker
themselves into her heart if you cannot reach. her. heart. decide
to dextrose her eyes as they are connected to the thing
she calls seeing you. if while you consume her you feel her
bones canary-ed inside your throat release her. but only after
she sings. if while you consume her you feel the bones inside
your stomach push her together/take more of her in.
side with yourself only. nostalgia: desire her spirit & for this—
you need not consume all of her flesh. but you remember
w a n t how it drags itself down the hallways of
your jaws
how it simmers there a cauldron within a cauldron begging
you to add more add more
until the rolling bubbles come.
41

Folding
when we did our laundry
we made sure we washed the whites first
no time for brown hanging round our necks
no time for stained sheets to jar our glassy eyes
& we realize it takes 4 hands to make a thing small
but only one to make a big mess.
42

Sing(ing)
you used to serenade
the thing like god
like overcast
like santa clause
before you knew the truth
diminished chords
& you find yourself still
humming but you know
the thing is not able
to hear your song
arpeggiating
you know you are singing
to dilapidated windows
& ingrown affairs
that soon your voice will grow weary(t,l,)
too _()_____for the thing not to care to hear you
& you wonder is that happening now
are you a singing ghost hovering without a cause
are you haunting a thing which is not alive
passing tone
& if that’s the case the thing can see
you better than any living thing
& if that’s the case the thing just doesn’t want—
to be sung to anymore. _ _ _ _.
ninth chord
serenade god overcast the truth
still know able song singing
windows—affairs grow weary
you now a cause not alive
see living thing doesn’t want—anymore
----.
43

I Knew Terrible Things
i knew about the terrible things the women with magnolia trees
mushrooming out of their backs is not what we were oh-lord about.
it wasn’t dread sunny side up which made our yolks runny. &
you may say who cares about a yolk & a tree. sunny. terrible: awful,
appalling, horrific, atrocious it was the terrible things we saw
growing in those magnolia trees from their backs the way the
flower did not bloom the way the petals hunchbacked
& hushed no name we surveyed those women who committed
horrible against (you) & the women replied no (one) their
sappy voices sunny the ants reminding them that they are not birth
but burial not a three day resurrection terrible: awful, appalling,
horrific, atrocious but transitioned terrible things make
a list equaling more than the some of their parts but we don’t do
any (thing) we just keep up & down up & down. wondering. wandering
which of those women will split herself open which of those
women i knew with the terrible things would fester herself a nest in
her own back which was her own tree which was her own producing
no(thing) & i knew about the terrible things still i told
her terrible: awful, appalling, horrific, atrocious what a wonderful
thing she is to climb what a wonderful source of shade & she didn’t
mind throwing it because i knew the terrible things because i saw
the dark side of her g(low) because once upon a time we were
more nolia than mag & only a woman with a tree growing out of
her back could shake a leaf at that—oh lord a tree. sunny. terrible:
awful, appalling, horrific, atrocious
44

Q&A
Anastacia Tolbert
Haptic: You teach a workshop
that focuses on how the body
and the memories embedded
in it tell stories. What sorts of
stories do they tell? Why is it
critical that we listen?
Anastacia Tolbert: I believe
our bodies hold stories from
our past and present. They
attempt to protect us from
stories we don’t have all the
pieces to—stories that are too
hard to reconstruct and stories
where we aren’t the main
character. I think it’s important
to unearth those memories so
that we can better understand
who we are in the present and
empower ourselves to BE IN
our bodies more in the present.
Another of your workshops
involved the act of screaming
as part of a self care ritual for
women. Why do you focus on
self cafe?
Self care is something that is
often frowned upon as it relates
to women… specifically
women of color. Some of us
have been taught that to love
or take care of ourselves is selfish
and unnecessary. I believe
self care should not be viewed
as a bonus—something you do
when you are older and all the
children are gone… I believe
self care should be a built in ritual/rite/spiritual
practice taught
to us while we are still children.
Screaming is an exercise of
healing I usually begin all my
workshops with to empower
the participants by choosing to
scream and use their own voices
without the negative preconceived
notions that go along
with screaming or making noise.
In many cases, screaming is associated
with danger or distrust
or unwelcomed or unexpected
body touching. As children we
are told to “stop screaming.”
Boys are often told, “stop
screaming like a girl.” Screaming
in my workshops gives participants
a freedom that they
may not have experienced yet
and a practice they can continue.
In the poem “What to Tell My
Sons After Trayvon Martin, After
Michael Brown, After Medgar
Evers, After, After, After, After
and Before,” you focus on the
devaluation of black lives and
the impossible, contradictory
expectations that are placed
upon black bodies. As a mother
of two sons, how does the
political urgency of these issues
influence your work?
As an artist and mother I use
45

art/writing as a vehicle and
conduit for my activism. For
me (a mother of 21 years/a
mother of African American
men) the “urgency” is 24/7
and ongoing… For some, the
“urgency” is new or something
they are just waking up
to as it hits CNN.
How can the production of
creative work (written, visual,
or performative) play a role in
resisting or subverting oppressive
discourses regarding black
bodies? Ideally, what kind of
relationship would you like to
see between art and activism?
I am not sure art or performance
can stop oppression
or depression or suppression,
but I know for sure that talking
about the systemic oppression
of all people of color through
my work is imperative. It tends
to be the soundtrack of much
of my work. As a queer woman
of color there are a plethora of
topics I unearth for the sake of
social justice excavation and
I hope that much of my work
is detox for the racism, sexism,
classism—all the ism hang
overs people endure. I feel
very fortunate that art/writing
has become my protest walk
and I am grateful for my ancestors
who used art and writing
before me as a means of protest/detest/unrest.
One of your current projects is
a solo performance, 9 Ounces.
How did this project come
about? How does it connect to
or extend your prior work?
The characters in 9 Ounces
have been around for a long
time in various ways. Alice has
a been a character who has
written her story for the last
three to five years. Saraphina
is a combination of women I
knew growing up and women
I admire as an adult. Luna is a
more personal character who
is both a combination of girls
I know and I spirit I have encountered
since 2012. I woke
up one day and all the characters
said they needed more
than just paper to tell their individual
stories. As the writer
and vessel for their creativity
and marginalized voices… I
said YES.
46

Visual Stimulation is a Substitute for Thought
(#3)
Grace McMicken

mannequins, a cortex of accumulated
slamming a door in a long hallway,
accidental conatus, congealed petroleum,
speech-acts, syndicated antennae, stigmergic
scaffolds, mucoidal aliens, sensemaking
compositions, fibers of being, prismatic
masks, networks of limbs, interstices to
machinic capital, circadian syncopations,
deferred articulation, trauma archives,
performative ciphers, ambient panoptic
curated garbage, named entropy, mutant
logistics hubs, redlined subalterity, points
of dissensus, inscrutable difference, folded
exteriority, queer manifestos, refracted
qualia, flexed fragments, hedonic interfaces
impressions, immature soil, fleeting
jouissance, illegible chatter, wind
hypo-thalamic integration, dissipative
systems, sexual plasticity, metastable
apparatuses, dramaturgical
subjection, patent-pending protocols,
bricolage, profane irruptions, vesicle