a deputizing of hundreds. a machine gun on standpipe hill. a dropping of bombs from chartered planes.
I thought I would send this on Wednesday, and then Thursday, and then Friday. I say the names of the days, but on Wednesday I thought it was Tuesday and on...
Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war.
Do you ever forget that your friends are dead? Perhaps in the middle of the movie or the play or the book or the song or the sentence you find yourself...
Is it from a dimly lit stone that wars flare up?
This week I learned that a journalism school declined to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer prize winner and a MacArthur genius grantee, in the...
It doesn’t matter that / there is nowhere to run to.
"I turn often to poetry" feels like such a ridiculous thing to say. Do I mean, instead, pretentious? Perhaps I do, despite the years I've spent trying to...
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
2021 is a constant bifurcation; good things are happening to people, bad things haven't stopped happening to people. Sometimes when kids die we wonder...
running and running until she reaches / at last the one and only door
I've spent a large chunk of this weekend on hold with a bank, long enough that I've essentially memorized all the transitions in their automated messages. I...
Time is a nice medium, but very little can be made from it. And perhaps one of its finer qualities is its tendency to go on.
Reader, it is Thursday. Dates are not a strength of mine. For instance: I remember every correction I've ever had to issue or have issued on my behalf in the...
I learned it’s okay to glance down / into the sea. So many lessons bubble up if you know / where to look.
I have long believed in the power of group texts-as-proxy, for both strong and weak ties. And never more intensely than over the past 14 or so months....
we used our words we used what words we had to weld, / what words we had we wielded
Several years back the low-key genius Rachel W Miller raved about the work of Cheryl Mendelson, the author of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping...
There are politics to death / and here politics performs / its own autopsies
There's an active shooter in Austin today, still at large at the time of writing this. Three people are dead. Three people in Kenosha. Eight people in...
by cowardice or courage / the one who find our way / back to this scene
Thank you for being a ~ premium ~ subscriber. I do not enjoy being photographed. I never know what to do - with my face, with my body, with my hands. But...
I would laugh if I was not being smothered by the violence of imagination
There is no end to the absolutions those who have wronged you might seek, because there is no end to the stories we will tell ourselves about our goodness....
To live another person’s biography is not the same as to live his or her life.
Q. How can we get the black people to cool it? A. It is not for us to cool it. Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most? A. No, we are only...
I address you aftermath, you as vengeance.
Bouncing between the ordinary–hello, welcome to The Main Event: No longer hosted on Substack edition–and the ordinariness of despair. A year of bad days and...
I want to be the woman who sits
Some housekeeping: I’ll be moving this newsletter off of Substack. This isn’t my first platform switch - I’ve been in the game since the early days of...
She meant
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.
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?
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
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,
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,...