SERATONES

Greetings Earthlings! I’m A.J. Haynes: lead lady of Seratones, abortion access advocate, and your new favorite space disco swamp fae auntie. My main interests are liberation and time travel. When I’m not playing/writing music or practicing resilience in the hellscape that abortion access in the Gulf Coast South, I’m learning from plants.

Plants are our direct lineage to the cosmos. They are our guides to help fulfil our destiny to, as Octavia Butler wrote, take root among the stars. Plants are portals to accessing multiple timelines. The first life to crawl from the cosmic cataclysm. They are creator and destroyer, nurturer and poison. When I garden, I am tapping into the multiversed intelligence of plants. Some of my earliest memories growing up in rural North Louisiana were watching my Uncle Louis meticulously turning the soil around my

great grandmothers house for rows of corn, tomatoes, peas, and turnip greens. I was always tasked with shelling purple hull peas that smelled of sweet earth. Summers brought watermelons from our neighbor Mr Booker’s garden. All from seeds, they’d kept and that kept us fed. I remember my great grandmother telling me how her mother showed her which tree bark could be boiled to make a cough remedy. My mama loved to play in the garden, pulling up weeds by hand. The long memories of how we are shaped and shaped by plants come to me every time I sink my hands, that now remind me of my mamas, in the dirt.

I now reside in a small cabin in North Mississippi with my partner (and some very mischievous hummingbirds). The land here reminds me so much of my childhood, the dense clay so fecund and rich with nutrients and narratives. I just planted some okra a few days ago and the tender seedlings have already burst forth from the soil. The kale I planted before this past winter frost has sprung forth hardy and generative. They remind me that scarcity is a myth created by greedy small-minded people with too much power and not enough loving-kindness.

When I garden, I make sure to honor the indigenous plants that are in communication with their new transplanted neighbors. I watch the cleaver, chickweed, and purslane cluster move where they are needed. Notice how the small mycelium tends to the soil. All moving together in concert, sending signals of resilience and resistance.

Main photograph by Joshua Asanti