In the 150 years since its construction by the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, the periodic table of chemical elements has become both a ubiquitous and iconic expression of scientific thought. In its tidy arrangement of substances, identities, atomic weights, and other properties, it illustrates the chemical sciences’ ontological argument about the elemental and universal structure of nature. As Michelle Murphy (2017, 495) has argued, this same "functionalist bent" leads to the problematic governance of chemicals as discrete entities, obscuring the complexity and inequity of our respective entanglements with toxicity and its infrastructures. The essays in this series take an ironic stance towards the functionalism and naturalism of the chemical sciences, nominating materials, beings, forces, and other entities that are elemental to our present anthropogenic predicaments. From sodium fluoroacetate, a common pesticide used to "control" rodent populations in countries such as Aotearoa New Zealand, to malhar, an Indian raga that is believed to inspire the clouds to rain, these critical and creative essays respond to a dire need to question universalist classificatory systems and to theorize the elemental in situated ways.