we all become curious

December 17, 2023

I am often thinking about BuzzFeed, about how it published poets and essayists, about how the reporters and editors there would review and recommend and in...

this deletion is / temporary. 

December 10, 2023

It’s raining in New York, and it’s making the kind of steady, reassuring patter that you tell yourself sounds like night rain back home, that version of home...

We have to cross / the river and my strength fails me.

December 3, 2023

In another job, in another time, when I had to be thinking through a policy around bereavement leave, I was reminded of - indeed, once again confronted by -...

circle without end and without God. /

November 26, 2023

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range — about seven meters. And in it four dead and eleven wounded. And...

How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul

November 19, 2023

When I was growing up, many of the books that were available to me — what would now be called “Middle Grade” — were books by Enid Blyton. I read them all:...

as in a relay race: / the baton never falls

November 12, 2023

Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only...

The grieving have only the unknown.

November 5, 2023

I know I’m stressed about everything going on because I am considering a new hobby that I absolutely do not have time for. So instead I have watched several...

Everything is symbolic in / literature.

October 29, 2023

In Trinidad, for the first time since January 2020. On a work call—this was a “working holiday”, as are they all, aren’t they—and I hear the accent of home,...

Speak this because I exist.

October 22, 2023

There is an exercise I practice, or try to. It begins, what is the most useful thing I can be doing right now? It continues, to whom can I be useful (because...

make way for / those who know little.

October 15, 2023

After every warsomeone has to clean up.Things won’tstraighten themselves up, after all.Someone has to push the rubbleto the side of the road,so the corpse-...

protested / but not enough

October 8, 2023

War, again. Or perhaps, still. Or indeed, always. Attribution And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but...

October is / when night guzzles up/ the orange sherbet sunset

October 1, 2023

Every third conversation, oh yeah, they couldn’t come because they have Covid. Nonchalant, but not immune. Schedule the no-longer-called-boosters; stay...

There is an autumn sadness upon me, / A dreamfulness in my heart,

September 24, 2023

A changing of the seasons. Wistful is how I feel about autumn, a season I didn’t experience for the first eighteen or so years of my life. Funny how quickly...

Is it possible my function is to hold / All the intricate, interstitial pain

September 17, 2023

Congratulations to all those on the National Book Awards Longlists, and especially to Charif Shanahan and all the poets. Attribution: Specks of toothpaste...

Fortune's expensive smile / Is earned

September 10, 2023

Sometimes, when you are on the nine hour flight that followed the five hour drive that started at 5.30am, and the seat next to yours is occupied by a very...

my body just laughs because it knows who started this war

September 3, 2023

That ability can be temporary is something you understand deep in the body if you have lived with chronic pain, or just chronic physical dysfunction. Doing a...

What are poets for, in such an age? / What is the use of poetry?

August 27, 2023

“In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health:...

I keep forgetting the change in climate change.

August 20, 2023

Fire, floods. What a thing to be living through a climate emergency. There are mundane adaptations. Office dress codes, for instance. Take it from a person...

I know the stories of our loss

August 13, 2023

Research by Clay Trauernicht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii, and others has shown that the scale and frequency of wildfires have been...

it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

August 6, 2023

Bob said, if you know your history / then you would know where you're coming from And so I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. By myself,...

Most likely, you think we hated the elephant, /

July 30, 2023

Exit, July. Every year since that longest March, the March we thought we’d get through with just a couple of weeks of inconvenience, for some value of ‘we’...

Let them say, as they must say something: /

July 23, 2023

If you listen to Caribbean music long enough, you will encounter fire. It stretches across genres—soca, dancehall, reggae– and across decades. Deployed as a...

muffled our laughter / lowered our voices / let out our hems / dekinked our hair

July 16, 2023

I attended what could reasonably be described as a post-colonial girls’ school, one founded by Presbyterian missionaries to the Caribbean who were concerned...

We are strange / and unbelonging.

July 9, 2023

In the Discourse: bathing suits and boundaries; manipulation and meaning. In the FT: a starchitect, falling. A hedge fund manager, flailing. Another round of...

a concrete jungle drum can’t play no calypso

July 2, 2023

There is something ridiculous, perhaps, about crying in a soca party. But then, it was David Rudder in a slightly incongruous setting - midtown Manhattan -...

And if sun comes / How shall we greet him?

June 25, 2023

What happened to hundreds of people who drowned off the coast of Greece?75 years of Windrushers, a "bittersweet" anniversary at best.There are days, weeks,...

Do not go gentle into that good night.

June 18, 2023

Let them say you were complicated. That you made mistakes and that you owned up to them. That everyone knew your name. That you were a fierce defender of...

Embrace. / Grow flowers with your lungs

June 11, 2023

In crisis, gather the generations. Figure out how to be in two places at once. Rearrange schedules. Book flights and hotels. Figure it out. Make it happen....

emigration is never an election issue

June 4, 2023

June. Complicated month. Yet another opportunity to litigate whose rights are worth defending despite backlash from folks whose whole personality is hating...

Stars are great drops / Of golden dew.

May 28, 2023

Some lovely responses to the question, “what would you say to your 17-year-old self?” Including: “(You haven't started watching Buffy yet, but log onto alta...

Whatever / what is is is what / I want.

May 21, 2023

Growing up, as a student of that very proper school on the hill, the one that provided both a demanding and rigorous curriculum and that policed skirt...

now I start to understand her love

May 14, 2023

a farewell to BuzzFeed News, by SMI and Millie We wanted to be your smartest, most interesting friend. But first we had to ship a mobile app, for iOS and...

Because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying.

May 7, 2023

“Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying.” What was in your mind when you wrote that line?When white men are shooting black...

This rain. / The blues gone gray / and yellow

April 30, 2023

New York has been churlishly soggy and cold and dark the whole weekend. Leading, to quote a witty friend, to "an excess of lassitude".April ends in showers....

The recent buds relax and spread, / Their greenness is a kind of grief.

April 23, 2023

Live long enough in media to see multiple of the places you worked just cease to exist. Live long enough in media to have a nemesis list related to the...

There are no curses—only mirrors

April 16, 2023

The algorithms always know when I'm having a back flare-up, because I tell them. Lots of searches for "psoas" and "sacroiliac" and "piriformis" followed by...

So many of us are breathless, / you know, like me

April 9, 2023

If you punched* Nazis and stole their memorabilia, I suppose you could keep them. Much less convinced than if you acquired them by other means, though.So...

There are no good kings. / Only beautiful palaces.

April 2, 2023

Eight years ago Alana Massey published an essay titled "Against Chill". It was a different time on the internet, in media, and in culture. It is always a...

I stepped outside to answer and rain / Beat my chest.

March 26, 2023

There is something about rain in Trinidad, sharp and sudden and sometimes fleeting. Of course there is the smell, the petrichor of the collision of hot pitch...

Everything’s a testament To life lived on the fringe

March 19, 2023

Been a long minute since I did one of these, so: Read: Babel Watch: Grand Crew, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,...

a kind of terror / at the chain / of events

March 12, 2023

I spent many a Friday night, fifteen years ago, writing about banks that failed. Another bank failed on Friday, as financial institutions sometimes do, and...

Empty jar: / I think to grow beansprouts and look into ordering seeds.

March 5, 2023

March, the longest year. Everything since, marked. Folks talked about a before when there was a sense that there would be an after. Yet it is still, somehow,...

we would speak / in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself

February 26, 2023

There is a song that I have seen performed live probably a dozen or more times, though not in the last two decades. It's called Miracle, and it's by a...

I would do it all over again: Be the harbor and set the sail,

February 19, 2023

It seems I am always thinking about James Baldwin, at least since I first knew to be. I bought, on a whim — because that is what good bookstores are designed...

How do you know what you want / If you don’t tell you?

February 12, 2023

“How are you doing?” A question when, sincerely presented, demands and merits a sincere response. “What are you willing to stop doing?” A provocation...

things that can't be undone come to call, / muttering recriminations at the door,

February 5, 2023

Dates and times: not my fave. What day is it: hold on, let me check. What time is it: hold on, let me check. Where am I supposed to be now: hold on, let me...

7. monster until proven ghost / 8. gone

January 29, 2023

I am always thinking about stories. I am always trying to change the rules about who gets to set them, tell them, define them. I am always trying to...

/ what if in the endlessness, / what if in a lifetime of conversations,/

January 22, 2023

If you have had friends for a long time, if you have been friends for a long time, then being with and around them, the people who knew you then is like...

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways;

January 15, 2023

A reiteration of Dr. King’s words and works. First published in 2020. First, Letter from a Birmingham Jail(1963), or the one in which MLK is exasperated...

You weep, Janus! / Or is that laughter

January 8, 2023

Staring down a couple weeks of travel for work, mentally steeling myself for the planes and the trains and the hotels and the working every time zone. Making...