Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok people in present-day Marine County.

Each week we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

We cannot separate our practices of timekeeping from colonialism and industrialism.

Since we began operating by the clock, our relationship to time has been bound to projects

of extraction and productivity. For centuries now, the clock has been weaponized to control

the time of others. We have used time to oppress, to yoke certain bodies to the economy,

to limit their purpose to labor.

In this episode, acclaimed poet Roger Reeves narrates his essay

when the Prince of Heaven sleeps, in which he contemplates how this narrative of time

is expected to be occupied by black men.

Questioning the two opposing images of black men

we are persistently shown, bodies moving tirelessly,

in constant motion, working slave-like,

and bodies still and lifeless.

Roger instead centers images of black men resting.

Muhammad Ali, sleeping in a four-poster bed.

John Coltrane in the throes of domesticity.

DMX watering orchids.

Mike Tyson caring for his flock of pigeons.

In these images, the weaponry of time is interrupted and subverted.

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