The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

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November 23, 2025

a disembodied echo

A night of poetry at BAM, curated by Hanif Abdurraqib and featuring him alongside his friends Clint Smith and Sarah Kay and Anis Mojgani.

Scrawling notes in the dark - ‘evening starts with HA reading YoungBlood by Assata Shakur’; ‘Innocent is a category that was invented to define the guilty - Sarah Kay’; ‘This Clint Smith reading, my god’; ‘lol this poem, yes’.

Everywhere I turn someone else is arguing about why we should outsource all our thinking to machines. So I am grateful for poetry, and for the people who think and feel and write what they think and feel, and allow the rest of us in.

It is a hard time to be a person in the world and that means it is ever more important, every day, to hold on to humanity.

Support the art you want more of; be the change you want to see happen.

sky     the drone’s soft hum is a disembodied echo    the drone was mistaken for a star once     the drone renders itself celestial     the drone scoffs at sovereignty     the drone asks what is a border if you can fly right over it?     the drone was built by a man     the drone killed a man     & a woman     & a child     the drone killed a child  
— from the drone by Clint Smith

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