July 14, 2020 Update: Stay tuned for new Critical Poly 100s forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review in 2020, and in the volume Prairie Sexualities in 2021. You can also find the 100s below in the volume, Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, eds. Elissa Washuta & Theresa Warburton. University of Washington Press, 2019: 154-166.
History & Process
In September 2014, nearly two years into my autoethnographic polyamory practice, I started writing the Critical Poly 100s as a more creative addition to this blog. At that time, I lived on warm southern plains in Austin, Texas where I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas. I was introduced to the 100s as part of an online writing group initiated by my friend and colleague, also a University of Texas anthropologist, Circe Sturm. During 2014-15, Sturm and I wrote weekly with five other women living in different parts of the continent.
Circe Sturm explains the concept and its history in her introduction to "100-Word Collective," a collection of 100s published in 2013 in the journal Voices in Italian Americana. Sturm explains that the 100-Word Collective originated with Emily Bernard at the University of Vermont in February 2009. Sturm was a part of that original group. Bernard's idea has since resulted in the founding of dozens of writing groups, including our own in 2014-15. Emily Bernard's approach involves a writer launching their piece from an idea, phrase, single word, or anything that resonates or sparks from the previous piece. There are no limitations for form, style, or subject. Bernard has explained the process of writing 100s in group as something akin to “a Quaker Meeting—if the spirit moves you, speak. Otherwise, let’s enjoy each other’s words in silence, rich and voluptuous.”[1] In "100-Word Collective," Sturm explains that "One of the reasons so many of us are drawn to this abbreviated format is that it allows us to dialogue with other writers, even when our lives are extremely busy. We also feel freer to experiment with content, form and voice, and to risk vulnerability in our writing....Some ideas catch fire and never lose their burn. This seems to be one of them."
Some writers are not rigid about the 100-word limit. I personally love the discipline of it and work hard to make each piece exactly 100 words. The practice is so generative for me. It is inspiring, calming, and yet exciting at the same time. In 2015, I began to make place/body connections in my 100s writing practice. I relocated to the cold northern prairies in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and to the University of Alberta Faculty of Native Studies in August of 2015. I've continued to write 100s that draw on my experiences with both human and other-than-human loves, including my greatest land-love--the "North American" prairies, and my water loves that are the rivers that wind through the prairies.
In my Indigenous and Dakota translation, polyamorous multiplicity is not only about human relations. It is an ethic that also focuses on multiple relations with place, and values the hard work of relating to and translating among different knowledges. In my ways of relating with human, earthly, and conceptual loves, I reject the usual definition of “promiscuity” as random and indiscriminate. In my redefinition, "promiscuous" is to seek abundance through partial connections. It is openness to multiple human loves, and/or to deep connection with other-than-humans, with the lands and waters of our hearts, and with different knowledge forms and approaches that enable us to flourish as Indigenous Peoples. For example, in my Science and Technology Studies (STS) work, I do not draw a hard line between so-called science and so-called traditional knowledge. I argue that such co-constituting forms of routedness between material and conceptual spaces provide an alternative ethical roadmap--one that values an accountable, responsible transgression of boundaries that by their very nature risk hierarchy and oppression. In short, engaging in polyamorous relating as with (supposed) monogamous relating, is not ultimately relegated to sexual relating. Multi-amorous relations are not always about sex. There are, for example, asexual polyamorists. I learn much from them about good relations. And while I love sex unapologetically and without shame, my Indigenization of the erotic (perhaps like asexual people) does not privilege sex among intimacies. There are many ways to relate well. Sex provides some, not all options. Routing oneself respectfully between multiple bodies is another ethical roadmap. This is a different way of inhabiting the world.
The 100s below document glimpses of how I relate in and inhabit this world. They are ordered in reverse chronological order. There are more on the way, but they will be published in book form first. Happy reading! XO
[1] “100-Word Collective: Introduction.” Voices in Italian Americana Vol. 24, Nos. 1 & 2 (2013)
History & Process
In September 2014, nearly two years into my autoethnographic polyamory practice, I started writing the Critical Poly 100s as a more creative addition to this blog. At that time, I lived on warm southern plains in Austin, Texas where I was an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas. I was introduced to the 100s as part of an online writing group initiated by my friend and colleague, also a University of Texas anthropologist, Circe Sturm. During 2014-15, Sturm and I wrote weekly with five other women living in different parts of the continent.
Circe Sturm explains the concept and its history in her introduction to "100-Word Collective," a collection of 100s published in 2013 in the journal Voices in Italian Americana. Sturm explains that the 100-Word Collective originated with Emily Bernard at the University of Vermont in February 2009. Sturm was a part of that original group. Bernard's idea has since resulted in the founding of dozens of writing groups, including our own in 2014-15. Emily Bernard's approach involves a writer launching their piece from an idea, phrase, single word, or anything that resonates or sparks from the previous piece. There are no limitations for form, style, or subject. Bernard has explained the process of writing 100s in group as something akin to “a Quaker Meeting—if the spirit moves you, speak. Otherwise, let’s enjoy each other’s words in silence, rich and voluptuous.”[1] In "100-Word Collective," Sturm explains that "One of the reasons so many of us are drawn to this abbreviated format is that it allows us to dialogue with other writers, even when our lives are extremely busy. We also feel freer to experiment with content, form and voice, and to risk vulnerability in our writing....Some ideas catch fire and never lose their burn. This seems to be one of them."
Some writers are not rigid about the 100-word limit. I personally love the discipline of it and work hard to make each piece exactly 100 words. The practice is so generative for me. It is inspiring, calming, and yet exciting at the same time. In 2015, I began to make place/body connections in my 100s writing practice. I relocated to the cold northern prairies in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and to the University of Alberta Faculty of Native Studies in August of 2015. I've continued to write 100s that draw on my experiences with both human and other-than-human loves, including my greatest land-love--the "North American" prairies, and my water loves that are the rivers that wind through the prairies.
In my Indigenous and Dakota translation, polyamorous multiplicity is not only about human relations. It is an ethic that also focuses on multiple relations with place, and values the hard work of relating to and translating among different knowledges. In my ways of relating with human, earthly, and conceptual loves, I reject the usual definition of “promiscuity” as random and indiscriminate. In my redefinition, "promiscuous" is to seek abundance through partial connections. It is openness to multiple human loves, and/or to deep connection with other-than-humans, with the lands and waters of our hearts, and with different knowledge forms and approaches that enable us to flourish as Indigenous Peoples. For example, in my Science and Technology Studies (STS) work, I do not draw a hard line between so-called science and so-called traditional knowledge. I argue that such co-constituting forms of routedness between material and conceptual spaces provide an alternative ethical roadmap--one that values an accountable, responsible transgression of boundaries that by their very nature risk hierarchy and oppression. In short, engaging in polyamorous relating as with (supposed) monogamous relating, is not ultimately relegated to sexual relating. Multi-amorous relations are not always about sex. There are, for example, asexual polyamorists. I learn much from them about good relations. And while I love sex unapologetically and without shame, my Indigenization of the erotic (perhaps like asexual people) does not privilege sex among intimacies. There are many ways to relate well. Sex provides some, not all options. Routing oneself respectfully between multiple bodies is another ethical roadmap. This is a different way of inhabiting the world.
The 100s below document glimpses of how I relate in and inhabit this world. They are ordered in reverse chronological order. There are more on the way, but they will be published in book form first. Happy reading! XO
[1] “100-Word Collective: Introduction.” Voices in Italian Americana Vol. 24, Nos. 1 & 2 (2013)
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28. #YEG Summer Sex (8.3.17)
Our breath slows. Ceiling fan turns the cool into a flock of birds, tiny ghosts. Their wings flutter across my out turned calves and the arch of your tapered back, the swells and concaves everywhere on you, pro-ballplayer length. Forgive me my shallow ways, I love your legs. Sweat shines in the coulee between your pectorals. They expand to my breasts, warm and soft. You will recover quickly. I am awed by your power. After twenty minutes, twenty laughs, we’ll go again. I am your least strenuous exercise. In the wan Edmonton summer, the sheets stay dry, no sweat rivulets. |
27. Embody (7.13.17)
His effusive e-words open, close our days. I feel them acutely from across the city though he says he’s no writer. I make a living writing, and cannot word my trust or yearning. I touch it into being. “Love” lacks analytical rigor. My longing materializes in nips on his shoulder. I power rise to his belly. He opens, closes my thighs with his own. I push back hard. Not to repel him but to challenge him: Push harder. I refuse the idea that bodies merging is not itself love. I work my limbs strong for him—my heart, its gesture. |
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26. Summer Relationship Energy (SRE) (7.05.17)
No long thrust. No slow deep cook. Summer is perceptible at 53.5 degrees North. It is when the ice mostly goes. Save occasional evening pellets when bruised clouds build, shake wind like fancy dancers in cut-glass purple, blue, beaded garments. Summer’s tongue traces our breasts, skims kisses across lips, down necks. We widen our eyes—silence. Summer’s gone. Its ghost more present than heat of life itself. We long hard for Summer in cool rooms though the horizon is pink past midnight. Summer keeps us wanting its barely attainable touch. Summer relentlessly leaves us. Summer’s love is never not new. |
25. Sexergonomics (6.18.17)
What is your favorite position? Dominus Blue commanded. It depends? Bodies fit together differently. I like my hair pulled, but didn’t know until my firefighter roped it round his wrist, a tether for rear-end thrusting traction. I thought breasts were my lubrication until hardcore Alberta cyclist neglected them, kneading instead my bottom like bread—huge hands. I didn’t know I could love a smaller woman’s body. Then I did. I didn’t know the drug of melting chocolate with two tongues until the monogamist who kissed hard through his suffering. Before he left me and his wife for that homeschooling mom. |
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24. RiverSide (12.13.15)
So far, a soft winter. Snow skies are purple-pink. I am half here. How long does it take a soul to find the body when a body went thousands of miles away? I ache for that south place, for soil like a mouth’s inside. The city smelled like an equator country. I fantasize of sultry air tumbling over thighs, my skirt pulled up. I left little lime popsicle lizard who lodged in a spindly-limbed plant hanging under skies where a million bats fly. I had music and lovers, but long was that land emptied of all the relations I need. |
23. NorthPrairieCity (12.04.15)
It is technically my ethic to share, I told him, upon hearing that women flood his world, his inbox. Blind date offers. Goddesses emerging from his past, and the woodwork. He replied: I don’t want to be shared, right now. I do cherish days carved from our many relations of love—from dear edgy children, from big-brained companions—our sustenance, those we think, laugh, round dance, skin elk, write with. We traverse prairie highways, prairie skies, the heart of our world. I already share him, but I know what he means. Hear this though: I will not own him. |
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22. SouthPrairieCity (11.29.15)
I will kiss you. If we hold this embrace. In a cicada night, in a wet wrap of heat, her peppercorn eyes: Should we? I want to. We two covet boots, enunciations, and dresses. We never don’t touch. We feed each other stories—how after years of marriage, the gaps grew wide, and we burn. Our tongues roll together, delicious like a million words in our years’ long intercourse. Hands play swells under fabric. South wind too presses in. We three animate possibilities, self-forgiveness. We left good men we could no longer live with, the hardest thing we have done. |
21. EmeraldCity (5.31.15)
This bit of earth has green hills sloping to plains, and water arms contorting like a still dancer, bloodlife rushing within. When the rains pull in and hover, rivers spill into the city that weighs deeper each month. Water struggles in cycles of famine and feast. Crane upon crane erect glassicles into skies like a fairytale painting. Oasis, lithe white bodies jittering in crowds on the strip proclaim it. For sure, our city sparkles with dance and singing, carriages and horses and trucks and merriment. Gems and a dewy face gain you entrance to prime real estate—the party inside. |
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20. HeartKing (5.24.15)
At sofa’s opposite ends, sculpted fantastical like a Queen of Hearts’ possession. Knees forward together, hands properly in laps, he requests I come close. But bodies touching may cloud our mediation. His anime eyes with lashes like peacock’s feather edges blink, brows pop. Surely, he owes no more in our lovers’ diplomatic relations? I was hostile disrupter of an orderly kingdom! My punishment was completed before he delivered his verdict. This private audience comes after exile. Accept the plea bargain. Never again protest and I may visit his realm. It is all his fancy, of course. He never executes nobody. |
19. Unbreakable (4.26.15)
Like monogamy this hurts. I would take flight in skies that tower. But with lighting and artful signs and shadows this city is a set. One can wake and sleep here, walk, eat here. But clouds beyond the Chevron, the café sign are painted. There is no expanse, no cacophony into which I can slip away from his unkind words. I think surely he has shrapnel, scars twisting his mouth. Or his incomprehensible lines that open mine, then silence my words in my throat—perhaps they are scripted of another land’s lineage, another human language. And I am no code-breaker. |
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18. Tattoo (3.07.15)
“I thought you’d use ink and needle?” On my belly, right arm in mid breaststroke. She must have numbed me. I viewed the horror as if upon another’s flesh. She forced the conical skewer in above the wrist. Like piercing a chicken’s joint pre-dinner. She muscled back a prime cut of meat, carved zigzags up the arm. It was then I saw her own scars, sleeve-length, artfully sutured. Blood soaked blankets. But I had agreed. Towels were all I could ask for. No reprieve. If I could not save the arm, perhaps the bed? “No, it doesn’t matter,” she said. |
17. Vampire (2.07.15)
Distant centuries’ stones, bricks, palatial steps, domes. Ever dewy faced offspring of those with reserves: was gold, now glowing digital number. A thousand black satchels. All these humans—bounded bags of organs, bones, flowing fluids. I’ve licked and listened. They drone exceptionalist visions from tongues in cafes and taverns, in wooden or glass rooms, on waves of water, sound, light ten million times over. Shallow skies stretch into dullest immensity, now etched by fire—Earth’s velvet blood burned aloft. Still I watch over this world without love. 523 suns times 13 moons and counting, my lust for veins, a tedium. |
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16. Bay (01.24.15)
In my head a broken descending sidewalk. Late afternoon: not cold, nor hot. Untidy fuchsia flowers like old bits of paper stuck to a wispy bush. A piano climbs slow steps inside a gray-paned front room. The bungalow is dusty pink or yellow, an egg past Easter. I can barely breathe in the city of faded light, pressed by a sky like a low glass ceiling. Thunder and lightening wisely turned back. Formidable mountains. The ivories play a score for purgatory. I want to scream, unhinge the wan serenity. But it will not airlift me, and I will look crazy. |
15. InsideOut (01.17.15)
I slice ghost clouds. Cocooned in the looming engine’s roar, I know the within of time-space-truncators like my own on-ground rooms, their tick-tock, their wafting perfumes. Off the great turning world, I am sky turtle. I am becoming through machines of speed and still I am still inside them. Flesh of my flesh, you are an Earthlier becoming—an explosion of paint silent laid by your narrow limbs to canvas. Your big-little voice infuses song precisely to air. Still you are northern plains lightening, equator rain. We have never mirrored one another. You are my—I am your—inside out. |
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14. IceCity (01.03.15)
A million crisp stars hung silent in blue-black depths. Zoom in: planet, city, flesh. We are noisier—mouths co-mingle laughter, syllables, breath. Warm fingers shed cocoons: touch. We will soon seek heat in the crooks of limbs. But first at the heart of the sub-zero city we rush to tapestried rooms luxurious with lamps and scents. The hours, the table filled with gossip, curries. Red. Neon. Closed. We whoosh in a salt-washed capsule through a grid of red, green, yellow. Quiet engine, cold seeps, tongues of fennel. We ascend. I straddle him. We are aloft the imperial anthem: ice-glass, alabaster. |
13. Fidelitous (12.27.14)
I seek multiple tongues. Desires cross time zones. Body stretches like wings over white-light nets taut between peaks and a black, deep sea—life giver. When my first LandLoveBody sleeps on the Twitter feed, intermittent with shots and false dreams, I turn to a European dalliance mouthing into morning headlines of violence in the streets of empire. AsiaPacific spins to the hard day’s end. I am already here. Together we glitter and toast the close of year. Though we remember grief no less. My fidelity is no one-relation bliss. I won’t ask everything: partial sustenance, stories forged together, shared pleasure. |
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12. NDNSciFi (12.13.14)[1]
High-tech noble savage, I escape in a pod to the sky. My launch obscured by planetary myths: We are mastodons, bones lodged in earth and museums, relics to adorn the living. They war for inheritance. Glued to the video feed, I peer across centuries, and a field of orbiting debris. The project continues in courts and bloody streets. The eliminations, the imprisonments do not abate. Techniques, bricks shift form. Humans versus animals parsed by priests, scientists, CIA. I tried to be their citizen, but the dead cannot inherit. We’re inherited. I hope relatives among the stars will take me in. [1] NDN is shorthand for “Indian,” a term Native Americans use to describe ourselves. In my experience, the use of the term by Native Americans both acknowledges the colonial genealogy of “Indian,” but insists on continued use of the term in a way that connotes an insider’s familiarity with its usage. |
11. aMUSEd (11.29.14)
I could call him enfant terrible. He might roll and rise among the syllables, satisfied. Or disagree, and incisively so. He measures distances to leap between rock-faces of reason, the unlit spaces below. “Wait! Wait! I am in mid-bridge build!” My objections are not unamused. His observations compel construction. His eyes unshuttered, green, gray-blue panes. I lean in. What is there? Inside? The beauties barely shimmer, like sand worn sea-glass. His face floats up to mine from where he nests in a shelter of warm scented bends of neck and breasts. My lips touch him—I breathe: “No, not terrible.” |
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10. Retribution (11.16.14)
Inching, braking, braking again. Collateral damage behind trepidatious cat-lady, bumper sticker graffitied Priuses on the streets of Berkeley. I. Am About. To scream. I restrain myself in the back of the Yellow Cab. Dinnng. A text. From him, back on the Texas plains. “Um, did you mean to give me a hickey on my penis?” Did I? I WebMD’d it. It’s like accidentally discovering you have talent for stopping time, or invisibility. He’d have to hide from his wife for days. Wife? I’ve learned a cheater’s signs. Satirical celestial scriptwriters dinged him. I too hear their gentle admonition. Mea culpa. |
9. Love-Couture (11.15.14)
When slipping inside a love, or a dress, your body must bend and stretch, turn into the folds and openings of thirty, or ten. If you are fortunate, you find two—three, tops?—that drape your fertile swells’ downslopes and hints of bone at the edge. The best ones look woven about you—the tailor’s form. You love them for years. Though many glitter, are handsomely cut, few can so enfold you. Look in the mirror. Does it work? Widen those eyes, turn to the side, look hard where it is hard to look. Ill fit? A no-fault divorce. |
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8. Sexorexia (11.08.14)
She summoned him. They arranged the night. She needed deep, hard, whole body contact. A withering love had turned dry and small and bitter, its leaves strewn dead about the rooms. Surprised, he obliged with his own adept form that would tend her body to a light, lush thing. From gym to bed he came, sprinkling clean sweat onto her. Her eyes soon turned from imbibing into mirrors shiny, and pained with her desire: “Stop, okay?” He took her home of course. “What did I do?” “The right thing,” I told him. What sorrow. Her hunger—her sustenance shame her. |
7. Chichibu (11.01.14)
Once a decade or so outside my skull in air my own voice hangs. Two winters ago, two hours from Tokyo in a taxi we rolled round switchbacks—a paved mountain road. Village lights and the train station glittered below. From the black night, from beyond cold glass my voice spoke without ado: You may not find the one for you. You found yourself. I grieved. I knew. Later in the house nested like a warm candle in cedar-scented hills the seer completed the vision: He may not find another. When you grow old, you will care for each other. |
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6. Malaise (10.25.14)
My speed and movements, my ingestions are calculated. Ever a risk assessor for cells and soul—a single weave inside me. But after the last encounter, or three, I fell into my head: Was it worth the risk of opening? Entangling limbs and tongues? Is unease a vestige of when relations cohered as purity, contamination? I despair if that story haunts me. Weary of thinking on it, I cancel on him. Instead cocoon myself in soft garments and light. I watch ghost stories. Fierce women who hunt them and burn the bad ones back to another mind’s hell. |
5. Sufficiency (10.18.14)
At a give-away—we do them often at pow-wows—the family honors one of our own by thanking the People who jingle and shimmer in circle. They are with us. We give gifts in both generous show and as acts of faith in sufficiency. One does not future-hoard. We may lament incomplete colonial conversions, our too little bank savings. The circle, we hope will sustain. We sustain it. Not so strange then that I decline to hoard love and another’s body for myself? I cannot have faith in scarcity. I have tried. It cut me from the circle. |
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4. Biosocial (10.11.14)
Girls teetered by in babydoll dresses, on arms of boys in shorts with pockets. “Americans are a bit boring, you know?” His tongue formed by French. We resumed funny fighting, pearly cocktails. Strung through the bar’s backyard galaxy little red suns had insects orbiting. Two decades since I inhaled inside his fine wrinkled shirts, he still teases and touches me—narrates an experiment: “You must have jealousy. We are animals. You provide me one storm of love to assess. I require three.” But I fine-tuned a Neurological-Lightening-Interrupter. Why is what we species were factual? Why not also becoming? |
3. Austin (10.04.14)
She was not drunk. As full as her breasts was her heart. Genevieve breathed, “You’re pretty. I’m gonna dance.” She rose from where she’d squeezed between our two sets of thighs. May’s palm polished her bottom. G sashayed away on so much leg and heel. Spring scent fluttered across the thrift store pearl snap of Bearded Dude at the bar. He eyed her over his Lone Star. Not one, not two, but six glossy heads followed her, undulating at 55. Twelve eyes set upon her, nervous—grew embryos of horror. When they hunger over bridal magazines, Genevieve will haunt them. |
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2. Temple (9.20.14)
Henry is gentle. When his shirt came off, I was unprepared for the marks on his body—bites and bruises on his neck, scratches down his back and arms. Dried-blood tracks gouged and routed, crisscrossing his topography. My breath sucked in. My fingers played the air, then lightly his wounds. Did they hurt? I felt several things in quick succession. Shock, a twinge of disgust, then warming anger. Who would mark him with even a small violence? And he would submit? He apprehended the complex brew in my eyes. With a half smile, he said, “Oh, you should see her.” |
1. Houston (9.13.14)
My eyes are dumb apprehenders. No fine visage alone does move me. It is voluptuous sound, undulating between heavy and light, assertive and sweet. His drawl pressed back by my tongue, pushed back to the surface. His voice spilled to my mouth and ears, but didn’t stay long. It needled from eardrum through neck. I arched into him. His sound looped to my belly, cut a hard path south. It was material transfer in no mundane way. His tongue’s droplets de-materialized in the mechanism of sound, re-materialized within a sealed enclave of tight-skirted thighs. His voice is a teletransportation device. |
