Description:
This piece was created for the 2025 Are.na Annual themed around documents, edited by Meg Miller and Michelle Santiago Cortés. After reading the poem at the launch event for the Annual, I also made a video version.

This poem is an homage to the email auto-responders of disabled friends and colleagues. It is a collage of “away messages” I’ve collected over the past three years. I started saving these emails because, to me, they are an ad hoc form of disability culture and a stopgap measure for the dissonance between capitalist work time and disabled bodymind time. I think of them as part of a classic genre of disability worldmaking: repurposing an existing structure or technology toward our needs (see Crip Technoscience Manifesto and also We Are the Original Lifehackers).

I think disabled people know deeply that absence and presence are not a clearcut dichotomy the way non-disabled people make them out to be (for example, see Park McArthur’s Day). I love that an “away” message can feel so connective.

Thank you to Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Yo-Yo Lin, Carolyn Lazard, JJJJJerome Ellis, Taraneh Fazeli, Emily Sara, and Alice Wong for your beautiful and clear messages. Continuing to learn about the blur of presence and absence from you.

Year: 2024
Size: n/a (video is
Materials: collaged away messages