I must write the same poem over and over,
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.
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 /
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
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.
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
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,
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.
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 /
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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, /
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 /
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.
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
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...