She meant

$ · March 7, 2021

I traffic in words, but I have run out of ways to explain. Yes, they lifted the mask mandate and all the business restrictions. No, vaccine access here isn’t...

What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

February 28, 2021

Feels like it’s been March this whole time. Disaster anniversaries are a special kind of shock to the system. They mark time. They mark us. And we should...

When it comes to Asian-American grief, do Americans want to know?

$ · February 28, 2021

Editor’s note: I wrote a version of on Tuesday (a rare day off!) to revise later and then…did not. Slightly revised and updated as of Sunday 28 at 3.30pm CT....

The After Party: Dispatch from Fantasy Island

February 21, 2021

Editor’s note: As promised, once a month I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After Party, will...

I tire so of hearing people say,

$ · February 14, 2021

Halfway through February, nearly a year into the pandemic, and I am losing count of the number of people declaring their despair. Halfway through February,...

Because you still listen, because in times like these

February 7, 2021

This week I hit a wall. Or perhaps the wall hit me. I can’t quite pinpoint the moment when I felt the bricks come crashing down. Maybe it was when I was...

This tart sermon

$ · January 31, 2021

This pandemic steals lives (RIP, Francisco Assis da Conceicao, and may all who loved you find peace) and it steals time and it steals, unapologetically and...

I need to learn

January 24, 2021

Many, many years ago I wrote another newsletter. Technically I still have that newsletter. Technically alot of things are true. In that newsletter I would...

There’s more to MLK than “I Have a Dream”

January 18, 2021

Last year for MLK Day, I compiled a list of resources for folks who might be interested in deepening their knowledge of Dr. King’s words and works. Here it...

I always thought language was / Akin to the body

January 17, 2021

Unsent Tweets, March 2020-Jan 2021 coping with the pandemic by watching and reading and listening to work created by people so obviously brilliant and good...

Everyone is crying out for peace

$ · January 10, 2021

Some folks stormed the US Capitol and killed a police officer. They flaunted Nazi paraphernalia and Confederate flags and Q shirts and Proud Boys tattoos....

i am running into a new year

$ · January 3, 2021

No resolutions. New intentions. Considered outcomes. Intended effects. You can only control so much when all about you a pandemic swirls, uncontrolled. We...

The perfect moment is now.

December 27, 2020

Six years ago Phil Hutchinson died. I didn’t know that then; it took a couple of days for the news that the world had changed for the worse to reach me. I...

you cannot catch / my rhythm

December 20, 2020

December 2020, and so many people are just about hanging on. It is not clear what they are hanging on to, and how long that grip will last. I do not want to...

what advice do the drowned have for the burned?

December 13, 2020

Pandemic rituals: at the appointed time on Sunday nights, fire up Twitch and connect my phone to the nearest bluetooth speaker. Start this newsletter while...

And still a world begins its furious erasure—

December 6, 2020

Geneviève Bergeron. Hélène Colgan. Nathalie Croteau. Barbara Daigneault. Anne-Marie Edward. Maude Haviernick. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Maryse Laganière....

You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries—

$ · November 29, 2020

We thought Things were Bad, because people were dying. And then more people died, and more people died, and more people died. What happens when you combine a...

After that came a sadness so big it made everyone

November 22, 2020

When I say two seconds, I don’t mean the time it took him to die. I mean the lapse betweenthe instant the cruiser braked to a halt on the grass, between that...

Inhale. So many of us are breathless,

$ · November 15, 2020

I have no way to process this much pain and this much grief. The quiet desperation is everywhere, in the eyes of masked strangers avoiding you on the...

Peace.

November 8, 2020

It is a powerful thing to affirm to the eyes of a watching world that though you might be the first, you will not be the last. It is a powerful thing to...

is not protecting

$ · November 1, 2020

What is happening in Texas but really they’re asking is my guy going to win, please tell me my guy is going to win. It’s not always a guy, just usually....

Many of them remain unaware of . . .

October 25, 2020

Existence right now feels like a series of unfinished sentences. A series of lives ended abruptly. Of livelihoods upended. Of families fractured. Of...

Guilt is not a response to anger;

$ · October 18, 2020

My current favourite videogame is about a dysfunctional family. When last did a single phrase—“good morning, my beautiful son”— reveal so much about so many?...

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.

$ · October 11, 2020

Video game writer (writer for video games) was not on the list of acceptable professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer, extremely educated housewife) at my all-...

How am I to understand the fluidity with which we continue in our days?

October 4, 2020

It’s still a conspiracy theory when you believe in it. Everyone is tired. Some of us have been tired. Do you remember a place differently when you know you...

I must write the same poem over and over,

September 27, 2020

And when they bombed other people’s houses, weprotestedbut not enough, we opposed them but notenough. I wasin my bed, around my bed Americawas falling:...

i / haven't enough room to both rage and weep.

$ · September 20, 2020

Sometimes, in a migraine season, you get to a point where what you notice is the absence of pain. You realize, all at once, that you do not feel terrible....

You do own to hear me faintly /

September 13, 2020

Less a realization, and more a remembrance: I am rarely angrier than when someone is wasting my time. It is possible to feel like entire industries are...

tired i count the ways in which it determines my life

September 6, 2020

People who survived HIV and AIDS in the 80s and the early 90s were bemused when we said the closest antecendent to coronavirus and COVID-19 happened more...

Everything was not all right.

$ · August 30, 2020

Chadwick Boseman died, and we grieved. And then there was another scar from another wound, another mark from another lash. Another collective keening....

Between the idea / and the reality

August 23, 2020

One problem with loving words, and with doing some version of words “for a living” is that every day you are confronted with whether you read or you write or...

For it is important that awake people be awake,

$ · August 16, 2020

I know Saturdays by the rhythm of the chores I do; I know Sundays by the ritual of the newsletter. Every other day is a blur; every day a new height of...

There is something that those who have been to hell and back possess.

$ · August 9, 2020

We are having the conversation again, about what we will do if / when our immigration status becomes once more a question of life and death. For the moment...

The challenge is in the moment /

August 2, 2020

James Baldwin died long before I could read, and decades before I’d find his work and be permanently changed by the encounter. Through him, I found Countee...

This email respects your privacy

$ · July 29, 2020

Hello. Last night some of you—I don’t know who or how many of you, because I deleted the emails they sent in error—may have been affected by this: Substack...

Feel the water cannons start to press through the walls and soak your feet.

July 26, 2020

The more we—our lives, our choices, the defaults we are granted—reflect the status quo, the less time we are called upon to spend explaining and defending....

There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise.

July 19, 2020

Who did we have time for today? What does it mean to practice survival? What does it mean to make time for yourself when all around you the world is burning?...

Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards

$ · July 12, 2020

There’s a kind of bone-tiredness you get from being responsible for a constant stream of micro and macro decisions; from constantly context-switching between...

but when we are silent

July 5, 2020

There we are all were, thinking we’d by now be getting slowly past the point of needing to measure our days by bunches of bananas turned into bread. Instead,...

There are so many roots to the tree of anger

$ · June 28, 2020

If a man shouts ‘white power’ in a video and you retweet that video and then you delete it hours later and then the people whose job it is to defend and...

I will no longer lightly walk behind

$ · June 21, 2020

Every day you learn that you can, in fact, be angrier and more exhausted. And so every day you learn how not to let the anger and the exhaustion win. Joy is...

I wondered how long 400 years is, / how many bodies, /

June 14, 2020

You lose count of the videos. You lose count of the names. You lose count of the circumstances. You cannot escape the knowledge of the deaths. You cannot un-...

it’s hard to / relate to folk who don’t consider their own demise fifty ’leven times /

$ · June 7, 2020

I have a blood pressure monitor, which is a thing my doctors recommended I get. I haven’t used it in two weeks. I don’t need to. I know what it will tell me....

Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn't begin the same way, each time it begins it's the same.

$ · May 31, 2020

From my living room, where I have spent the past few days immersed in The News, I can hear and see both protestors and police. The protestors are chanting:...

and may you in your innocence

$ · May 24, 2020

On Saturday night it was bashment, on Sunday afternoon it was Bach. But it is always music. Even in a pandemic our expectations of each other have not...

I would call my friends on other devices;

May 17, 2020

I was one of those teenagers who’d say things like “if you have no expectations you can’t be disappointed” and who was very into zen kōans and who spent a...

The woman in front of me had been reading

$ · May 10, 2020

Today I am thinking about Wanda Cooper-Jones. About Gloria Darden. About Sybrina Fulton. About Geneva Reed-Veal. About Gwen Carr. About Lesley McSpadden....

Even what was beyond us / was recast in our image;

May 3, 2020

What does it mean, for tens and hundreds of thousands of people to die? Friends, colleagues, children, grandparents, strangers. What does it mean for their...

I am glad / you are so small,

$ · April 26, 2020

Still safe, still well — such is the drumbeat of my days; an exercise in daily gratitude for what I have and who I have in my life. Sad, tired, angry — all...

We are spendthrifts with words,

April 19, 2020

I think about words, constantly. When I am not writing them, I am editing them. When I am not editing them, I am thinking about how to write them. When I am...