The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

my ghost is my plus-one tonight.

March 17, 2024

Once you notice something like segregation, or bigotry, or the casual but relentless othering of certain groups, you never really stop. Sure, you can choose...

folks think / they’re saying nothing / when they’re saying the most.

March 10, 2024

Lots of planes this week, several time zones, not a lot of sleep. At the other end of one leg of it, family. Never straightforward, increasingly worthwhile....

Most mornings I would be more or less insane, /

March 3, 2024

Fragments I find myself returning to: At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all...

Slogging, wobbling, / wavering. Atilt / and out-of-sync

February 25, 2024

I’ve been absolutely walloped by whatever cold / flu / lurgy that is going around the city and have spent a majority of the past three days asleep. What I...

Someday / we will learn how to live.

February 18, 2024

Because I had a migraine and because I was busy, I didn't spend any time in the Kindle app reading any of the various books I'm working my way through. That...

the time shortens between where we are and where we are going

February 11, 2024

For a long time now, I've had all my various bits of search history turned off. Every time I go to YouTube it nags me that my "experience" would be improved...

But let’s get this straight. Let’s call a spade a— / Poor choice of words.

February 4, 2024

This year, like most years recently, I made no resolutions. Instead I chose a word and theme: play. So far that has meant: filling up a small sketchbook and...

It was summer all winter. / It was melting 

January 28, 2024

Three friends in hospital in a week is surely three too many, you think, and then you remember the rest of the world. Breathe in, breathe out, be glad it was...

I’ll bite / the feeding hand until I’m fed / and buried.

January 21, 2024

We have reached the part of the US political cycle where presidential candidates start dropping out, but the books are still banned. We have reached the part...

They don’t appear to understand that . . . / If only they would make an effort

January 14, 2024

Someone I respect gave something up, something meaningful that mattered to them, did so quietly. Someone I have no public opinions about gave something up,...

fa / ll / s) /

January 7, 2024

I have been reading about colour, and about texture, and about shape. There are more elements in the formal canon, but these three (and absence, space,...

Here’s tae us. Promises / made to be broken, made to last.

December 31, 2023

There have been many rituals. In Trinidad, pig foot souse at midnight; scotch and coconut water; the kinds of friends you make once, if you’re lucky. In...

we make / our own magic

December 24, 2023

It’s all so messy – pine needles, tinsel, glass balls shattered, peace on earth Dark waiting: we make our own magic — Two Haiku for Advent by Kelly Belmont...

we all become curious

December 17, 2023

I am often thinking about BuzzFeed, about how it published poets and essayists, about how the reporters and editors there would review and recommend and in...

this deletion is / temporary. 

December 10, 2023

It’s raining in New York, and it’s making the kind of steady, reassuring patter that you tell yourself sounds like night rain back home, that version of home...

We have to cross / the river and my strength fails me.

December 3, 2023

In another job, in another time, when I had to be thinking through a policy around bereavement leave, I was reminded of - indeed, once again confronted by -...

circle without end and without God. /

November 26, 2023

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range — about seven meters. And in it four dead and eleven wounded. And...

How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human Soul

November 19, 2023

When I was growing up, many of the books that were available to me — what would now be called “Middle Grade” — were books by Enid Blyton. I read them all:...

as in a relay race: / the baton never falls

November 12, 2023

Not the peace of a cease-fire, not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb, but rather as in the heart when the excitement is over and you can talk only...

The grieving have only the unknown.

November 5, 2023

I know I’m stressed about everything going on because I am considering a new hobby that I absolutely do not have time for. So instead I have watched several...

Everything is symbolic in / literature.

October 29, 2023

In Trinidad, for the first time since January 2020. On a work call—this was a “working holiday”, as are they all, aren’t they—and I hear the accent of home,...

Speak this because I exist.

October 22, 2023

There is an exercise I practice, or try to. It begins, what is the most useful thing I can be doing right now? It continues, to whom can I be useful (because...

make way for / those who know little.

October 15, 2023

After every warsomeone has to clean up.Things won’tstraighten themselves up, after all.Someone has to push the rubbleto the side of the road,so the corpse-...

protested / but not enough

October 8, 2023

War, again. Or perhaps, still. Or indeed, always. Attribution And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but...

October is / when night guzzles up/ the orange sherbet sunset

October 1, 2023

Every third conversation, oh yeah, they couldn’t come because they have Covid. Nonchalant, but not immune. Schedule the no-longer-called-boosters; stay...

There is an autumn sadness upon me, / A dreamfulness in my heart,

September 24, 2023

A changing of the seasons. Wistful is how I feel about autumn, a season I didn’t experience for the first eighteen or so years of my life. Funny how quickly...

Is it possible my function is to hold / All the intricate, interstitial pain

September 17, 2023

Congratulations to all those on the National Book Awards Longlists, and especially to Charif Shanahan and all the poets. Attribution: Specks of toothpaste...

Fortune's expensive smile / Is earned

September 10, 2023

Sometimes, when you are on the nine hour flight that followed the five hour drive that started at 5.30am, and the seat next to yours is occupied by a very...

my body just laughs because it knows who started this war

September 3, 2023

That ability can be temporary is something you understand deep in the body if you have lived with chronic pain, or just chronic physical dysfunction. Doing a...

What are poets for, in such an age? / What is the use of poetry?

August 27, 2023

“In cities around the country, if you want to understand the history of a neighborhood, you might want to do the same thing you'd do to measure human health:...

I keep forgetting the change in climate change.

August 20, 2023

Fire, floods. What a thing to be living through a climate emergency. There are mundane adaptations. Office dress codes, for instance. Take it from a person...

I know the stories of our loss

August 13, 2023

Research by Clay Trauernicht, a fire specialist at the University of Hawaii, and others has shown that the scale and frequency of wildfires have been...

it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

August 6, 2023

Bob said, if you know your history / then you would know where you're coming from And so I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. By myself,...

Most likely, you think we hated the elephant, /

July 30, 2023

Exit, July. Every year since that longest March, the March we thought we’d get through with just a couple of weeks of inconvenience, for some value of ‘we’...

Let them say, as they must say something: /

July 23, 2023

If you listen to Caribbean music long enough, you will encounter fire. It stretches across genres—soca, dancehall, reggae– and across decades. Deployed as a...

muffled our laughter / lowered our voices / let out our hems / dekinked our hair

July 16, 2023

I attended what could reasonably be described as a post-colonial girls’ school, one founded by Presbyterian missionaries to the Caribbean who were concerned...

We are strange / and unbelonging.

July 9, 2023

In the Discourse: bathing suits and boundaries; manipulation and meaning. In the FT: a starchitect, falling. A hedge fund manager, flailing. Another round of...

a concrete jungle drum can’t play no calypso

July 2, 2023

There is something ridiculous, perhaps, about crying in a soca party. But then, it was David Rudder in a slightly incongruous setting - midtown Manhattan -...

And if sun comes / How shall we greet him?

June 25, 2023

What happened to hundreds of people who drowned off the coast of Greece?75 years of Windrushers, a "bittersweet" anniversary at best.There are days, weeks,...

Do not go gentle into that good night.

June 18, 2023

Let them say you were complicated. That you made mistakes and that you owned up to them. That everyone knew your name. That you were a fierce defender of...

Embrace. / Grow flowers with your lungs

June 11, 2023

In crisis, gather the generations. Figure out how to be in two places at once. Rearrange schedules. Book flights and hotels. Figure it out. Make it happen....

emigration is never an election issue

June 4, 2023

June. Complicated month. Yet another opportunity to litigate whose rights are worth defending despite backlash from folks whose whole personality is hating...

Stars are great drops / Of golden dew.

May 28, 2023

Some lovely responses to the question, “what would you say to your 17-year-old self?” Including: “(You haven't started watching Buffy yet, but log onto alta...

Whatever / what is is is what / I want.

May 21, 2023

Growing up, as a student of that very proper school on the hill, the one that provided both a demanding and rigorous curriculum and that policed skirt...

now I start to understand her love

May 14, 2023

a farewell to BuzzFeed News, by SMI and Millie We wanted to be your smartest, most interesting friend. But first we had to ship a mobile app, for iOS and...

Because white men can’t / police their imagination / black men are dying.

May 7, 2023

“Because white men can’t/ police their imagination/ black men are dying.” What was in your mind when you wrote that line?When white men are shooting black...

This rain. / The blues gone gray / and yellow

April 30, 2023

New York has been churlishly soggy and cold and dark the whole weekend. Leading, to quote a witty friend, to "an excess of lassitude".April ends in showers....

The recent buds relax and spread, / Their greenness is a kind of grief.

April 23, 2023

Live long enough in media to see multiple of the places you worked just cease to exist. Live long enough in media to have a nemesis list related to the...

There are no curses—only mirrors

April 16, 2023

The algorithms always know when I'm having a back flare-up, because I tell them. Lots of searches for "psoas" and "sacroiliac" and "piriformis" followed by...

So many of us are breathless, / you know, like me

April 9, 2023

If you punched* Nazis and stole their memorabilia, I suppose you could keep them. Much less convinced than if you acquired them by other means, though.So...