Archive (Page 11) • The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

Why the agony of the anti and the gone? I’ll make a drama of myself in two parts.

February 13, 2022

There's a game (conversation starter?) called Big Talk. Questions like, what are you thankful for in this moment? And, what can you do right now that...

Of all the things that happened there / That’s all that I remember.

February 6, 2022

Folks will line up to defend the powerful, the wealthy, the famous. It doesn't matter the allegation or the platform. People here might not believe in the...

If you knew a mother, any mother, you would carefor mothers, yes? No.

January 30, 2022

Sometimes it's a call, sometimes it's an email, sometimes it's a text - do you know anyone at [take your pick of large, wildly profitable, multinational tech...

The accumulated weight of all our question marks

January 23, 2022

People keep saying metaverse. I ask them what they mean.Games, they might say. Which ones, I say. You know, the ones with lots of people in them; what's the...

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, / an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.

January 16, 2022

Time (the lack of it, my desire to increase my agency over how is spend it) is one of my primary obsessions. January 2022, and we are once more in a liminal...

Pleading for it to depart never works. / Better to invoke blessing, welcome the unbidden guest

January 9, 2022

I do not like writing about myself (a curious disclosure, coming from someone who's written what used to be a called a "personal newsletter" every Sunday...

sit here wondering / which me will survive

January 2, 2022

I have spent most of my thinking life thinking about identity. I am confronted with the disconnect between who I know myself to be (take my name, for...

when something dies / we remember who we love,

December 26, 2021

I am not much for Decembers. Rest well, Aunty Maribel. Love you always, Phil. Onward to January. Attribution I did not mean to write about death, but rather...

I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

December 19, 2021

"Why do you lowercase your name" is a question I get asked frequently at work, followed closely by "and how come you get to?" My go-to answer to the first,...

Two girls discover / the secret of life / in a sudden line of / poetry.

December 12, 2021

Perhaps it is still true now, but it was certainly true then: your IM / chat alias was both code and key, hint and obfuscation, tease and truth. And mine,...

Angry words, / Cruel words, / Comradely words, / Shy words tiptoeing from mouth to ear

December 5, 2021

December, too, is a cruel month. A month of deaths and lives extinguished abruptly, a month of births and promises of the future, a month of shadow and the...

a concert in the balcony of anxiety / made of what has also always been inside of us

November 28, 2021

Got boosted, for which I am grateful. Grateful too for the relatively high vaccination rate in NYC, and that the friends and family in various places face...

slowness enters me like something familiar, / and it feels like going home.

November 21, 2021

"Let me know when you reach home" is an expression of love and fear that I learned in Trinidad, a place where teenagers fuelled by alcohol, exhaustion and...

The cheerful mild constant anxiety / of your childhood turned / to writing

November 14, 2021

"How do you do what you do" / "How did you get to be doing what are doing" are questions I am never quite sure how to answer because I am not always sure...

because even in heaven / they don’t sing / all the time

November 7, 2021

I've spent a month of hours on the phone and in branches at Bank of America trying, fruitlessly, to first convince them I was a real person and then to...

These are the seasons Persephone promised / as she turned on her heel

October 31, 2021

“Hey, I see you talking about this! I’m now going to argue you’re a terrible person who can’t be taken seriously because you didn’t talk about this other...

call the people you’ve been thinking about calling. / do the things your pummeling heart says do.

October 24, 2021

Texting friends in different states about various permanant climate emergencies and whether they're prepared for them, or how I spent my weekend. (please...

in autumn I remember that we are cold-smitten

October 17, 2021

These days, in the spheres over which I exercise some modicum of control or influence, the question that occupies me most is not "how". It is "when". I'm not...

Wish you could be here / to talk about it like it was so important. / Wish you could. /

October 10, 2021

Eventually you find that you've been to more funerals than weddings. You know the rituals and how they differ, and indeed how much they are the same. You've...

Thunder grumbles on the horizon / I buy time with another story

October 3, 2021

There's a TikTok video doing the rounds, with associated commentary, of a college student's reaction to being surprised by a visiting girlfriend.No part of...