by Petra Kuppers
One origin story of this essay is the fall of a particular tree on social media, and that tree’s roots in ancient empires. In September 2023, the Sycamore Gap tree in the UK died under an axe, fell across social media horizons around the world, and provoked tears in many who had never seen the living 300-year-old tree standing at Hadrian’s Wall, an old Roman road in Britain. In the days after the news, the Guardian and other papers reported on the police investigation, and on subsequent arrests. Other news outlets commented in the same week on a TikTok video with the hashtag #RomanEmpire that claimed that men thought of Rome daily. Many women and non-binary or queer folx circulated countering memes on social media, pointing out that they instead thought about how to keep themselves safe in the streets.
I also began writing this essay in the month when a tree in our garden had to be taken down. It was a Siberian elm, a tree of Asian origin. All kinds of violences against living beings from Asia have pervaded the US empire’s cultural scene for a long time, and when I look up this tree’s description online, I find negative stereotypes emerge that can all too easily be read in racialized terms.
This particular tree, huge and thick and comforting as it was, had been weakened by multiple ice storms and strong winds. These climate events had devastated the tree population all over our small rust-belt ex-motor-town of Ypsilanti, Michigan, and its more famous neighbor, Ann Arbor, both colonial cities in Three Fires Confederacy Territory.
While my wife and I listened with heavy hearts to the tree guy about why this tree had to go, my thoughts drifted to the complicated connections between Asian imports and US car makers, and how this particular land and its slow-moving plants have witnessed that story play itself out. Feeling the tree’s protective bark with my hand for a last time, I heard shouts of empire, border security, and the many reports on anti-Asian violences that are part of MAGA and anti-COVID-precautions protests. But whatever discourse fields surrounded this Siberian Elm who had been our co-habitant in the garden, climate emergencies have proliferated all across our region. And all of them, from floods to storms to ice burdens, have weakened many of the tree guardians that line our streets and yards.
So, finally, this essay began after all this, when I laid on the Elm’s tree stump, left in the corner of our lot. I counted the stump’s growth lines. Which is not as easy as it sounds, because the stump was still bleeding sap, and little ants were nourishing themselves from it. The combination of sap and digestive matter obscured some of the fainter lines, the traces of leaner years. But from what I could tell, the tree was about 60 years old. It had been a young tree, given the age of the giant White Pines who live in the other corner of our garden. Certainly, though, the Elm had been old enough to remember events from the year of my birth, 1968. And one of the most resonant local stories of that year that still circulate around my neighborhood and my region: the murder of young women, witnessed by land, trees, and by poets and writers who are interested in the stories the land holds. Over the last decade, I have written poems based on these murder stories and on my embodied being on this land: poems as fragmented witnesses of material transformations.
Three beginnings, haltings, stumblings. My story is oblique and braided, a gesture of respect for the women whose deaths set me in motion, and who pushed me to think about how women, non-binary others and disabled people like myself traverse land, and how old crime stories have shaped our understanding of who gets to traverse where, how and when in safe ways. How can I use fragmentation and poetic land practices, including tree stories, to offer an alternative to the traditional true crime story which fixes people into victim positions and fulfills the desire for details and narrative closure?
Our cultural world(s) are deeply penetrated by true crime and police procedural genre conventions. I am creating my poems, meditations, and performances around gender, land, and death in ways that are in conversation with these genres. My work does not deny the sensationalist lust for death details – but it seeks to undercut it, asks it to fold back onto itself, back onto the reader, and to me, lying on the freshly bleeding tree stump of the Siberian Elm.
The street I live on hosts a famous murder house. It was the site of the evidence that finally convicted the Michigan Murder of the killing of one of the young women and university students from nearby Eastern Michigan University and the University of Michigan. I do not wish to narrate the well-known story of these years, 1967-1969, easily accessed in numerous journalistic treatments, blogposts and true-crime podcasts. The story was made internationally famous by a 1976 book, The Michigan Murders by Edward Keyes, an early and highly influential entry into what became the true crime genre. Poet and writer Maggie Nelson has engaged with the case in two of her books: Jane: A Murder, and The Red Parts.
When people ask young women not to hitchhike, they might not realize how they, in turn, obliquely remember the Michigan Murders, and let women’s choices of movement be influenced by a killer’s action. These young white cis women of Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor were on their way to parties, to boyfriends, or on a trip home: freely using their thumb or a university noticeboard to get rides. And many of them were found, eventually, either in disused old barns and old houses, or else near the drainage canals of new developments. The sites tell a story of land use patterns in motion, a 1960s world churning, de- and re-establishing habitat patterns, taking down old and planting new trees in new neighborhoods.
The tree in my yard would have been around a decade old at the point of these murders, probably a slender, smooth-skinned tree. The house we now live in was built in my own birth year, in 1968, so the tree would have been part of the lives of the teacher’s family who lived here before my wife and I bought it after the matriarch’s death.
It strikes me how many adjectives used to describe a decade-old tree and young women might be one and the same: willowy, slender, tall or stunted, gracious, lush, mature, stricken, fragile. Land, trees, women: of course, the doctrine of discovery, virginality discourses, and other colonial attitudes have thoroughly pervaded the English language, making it hard to make an original point here, much less a claim. ‘Claiming ground’ is not something I need to do, anyway. I just lie down with the Elm’s stump, smell its botanical, slightly astringent scent, feel the warmth of the sun on its yellow-brown rough surface which still shows the teeth of the saw.
I did a lot of this lying about in public, touching grass and soil and trees in the neighborhood in the years of the ongoing COVID pandemic, in particular during the lock-down. I wrote a poetry collection about the land I live on and which I traverse in my slow, halting disabled way. I either inch along with my cane, or move my wheelchair’s wheels carefully over tree roots that have exploded sidewalks. This gives plenty of time for contemplation. It offers a strong focus on what the land does, at the ground level, how soil and roots respond to human habitation.
The resulting writing is an ecopoetics of a decaying psychogeography: all the stories, smells, heat signatures and echoes that accumulated upon my investigation. What happened here, in the time-registers of trees and land plots? What happened here, in the registers of the decay of flesh and the life-cycle of flies and beetles? How is my own bodymindspirit, my being on this land, connected to these cycles of death and life?
There were the old Michigan Murders in my street. And then, as I was accumulating my poems, there were the fallow lands and abandoned houses of Detroit, sites I had visited weekly in the years leading up to the pandemic’s onset: the sites of much city reclamation, much artistic activism, reimaginging what brown fields and exhausted soil might become. A new murder story exploded in 2019. The 2019 Detroit serial killer used abandoned houses to discard the Black women he murdered. After brutalizing these women, he wrapped them in old carpets, left them to decay alongside Detroit’s holey infrastructure.
Again, I won’t share more police-procedural detail: a quick internet search will give you all the details. You will soon see that there’s a second reference field for women in the press coverage of those Detroit killings, a pervasive and racialized stereotypical gendered reference field that I do not wish to activate here, but that you can see playing out on crime action shows on TV and streaming every day. Race, gender, class, and their meanings underlie both the police procedural and empire. Surveillance and boundary techniques keep hierarchies and orders intact.
I did visit these sites, too, drove by and saw police tape fluttering in the wind, mapped sites out on internet maps and physical maps, worked out what was there then, in the long ago past, in the intermediary steps of capitalist pressures and civic neglect that led to the abandoned houses now. I saw small trees growing in lush profusion in ex-house lots. I occasionally got out of my car, set up my scooter, and touched the grass and bark on these murder sites, respectfully and mournfully. But urban precarity and poverty worked as a warning miasma to me, this white woman not from the neighborhood.
All of these murder sites abut onto the travel pathways of the Saginaw Trail, an ancient Indigenous trade route. The Saginaw Trail connected our region to others, river to lake, pounded by feet, shaded by old trees. All murder sites are within easy reach of the colonial travel routes, as well as to Woodward Avenue, the iconic site of Detroit motor city, Motown sound, the pathway to freedom (and Canada), the colonial concrete over the Saginaw Trail.
Back to my backyard tree, and to the sap the tree stump continues to cry. The sugary water still keeps rising through the Elm’s intensive root system that remains beneath our yard, our house, and likely the neighbor’s yard, too. We are in the flood basin of the Huron river, and this neighborhood was part of the old trade routes, too, Anishinaabeg trails alongside rivers. There are old messages here, old miasmas, violences and survivances, communicated in plant hormones, scents, liquids, transformations. And the ants taste the story of the tree’s absence, and seed the tree stump with molds, hastening yet more cellulose transformatory shifts.
In the performances I led and the drifting poems I wrote, the land’s stories of fallen women create contemporary pressures. When we share after the performances, many listeners intertwine their own stories of gendered precarity and sexual violence with the subjects of these true-crime stories. We think together about the relative openness of the land, about what kind of terrain feels safe, what sight-lines we need. This communal ecosomatic query about gender, violence, racialization, class and land shifts my writing and motivates my driftings. The query asks me to lie down again on the weeping tree stump. There’s mourning, and commemoration, and then there are the ants, working away. They recycle, just like this writing does, making new paths out of old stories. New stories, new pathways, allow us to move on from old Roman streets.
I am sure you have your own stories deeply hidden in your social habitus, your embodied memories. Here is a prompt for you, an invitation to take this essay’s inquiry into your own bodymindspirit. Think about how your walk on the land shifts when you read of assaults, map a psychogeography of misogynistic and (to use Moya Bailey’s term) misogynoir crimes. How do you step?
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” The old nursery rhyme invites thoughts of forces and spirits in the land, escaping through fissures and bending asphalt till it breaks. The rhythm and some of the words found their way into one of my poems. But the rhythm of it, the invocation of it, was with me throughout, hopscotching its way along broken asphalt and pavements in Ypsilanti and Detroit. How long have women and queer folx, racialized people, and so many others had to watch their steps and watch their backs, avoiding the straight lines of the Roman roads traversing old lands? What nourishment, what dangers, what sanctuary have trees posed and offered to us? And when their roots crack our pavements, what else escapes?
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist and a community performance artist. Her fourth poetry collection, Diver Beneath the Street, investigates true crime and ecopoetry at the level of the soil (Wayne State University Press, 2024). Her previous collection, Gut Botany (also WSUP, 2020), won the 2021/22 Creative Book Award by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. She teaches at the University of Michigan and is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow.
Adrian Acu is a Filipino American teacher, writer and photographer living in Oakland, CA. His writing has previously appeared in Boulevard Magazine, Bivouac Magazine, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television; his photography has been featured at thirdspace. He is currently working on a photo essay on the Coliseum BART Station and an essay collection on the poetics of video game mechanics.