The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

no one is neutral here. And you must choose your part in the end

April 10, 2022

What does it mean to be brave? If it is situational, what do these times demand? If it is universal, how are we called to show up? It feels - absurd!...

There will come a time when some bastard / will surely write heroic poems about this.

April 3, 2022

You don’t have to look at the videos of the bodies in the streets to know that there are bodies in the streets, or to know why they are lying there, why it...

There is a magic made by melody

March 27, 2022

Musicians are always dying. Bob, Freddie, Kurt, Tupac, Biggie, Amy, Chester, Chris, Taylor. Aaliyah. Selena. For that, every time, a specific kind of grief....

It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.

March 20, 2022

"The word "children" was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images." "The bodies of the children all lie...

It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.

March 20, 2022

"The word "children" was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images." "The bodies of the children all lie...

We would try by any means / To reach the limits of ourselves,

March 13, 2022

It’s still war (it’s war still). We’ve reached the “media organisations reacting to news of journalists being killed while reporting” stage. We are well into...

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be / fooled

March 6, 2022

How much doom is too much doom? And is this a test?This week I will take a deep breath (maybe a hundred, maybe five) and do the things I need to do: the work...

nice people do not notice this transformation all at once

February 27, 2022

It is / would be Carnival in Trinidad. Tabanca.It is / did it have to be war in Europe.What emotion do I describe here? Which of them?I defer to the people...

Modes of witness / expose our inadequacy, the human.

February 20, 2022

"A 35-year-old woman was stabbed to death inside her Lower Manhattan apartment early Sunday by a man who had followed her from the street and into her...

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...

All the Earth has borne beguiles us / & battered bodies build our acres.

September 26, 2021

A month back in New York. Two days away from three weeks into the new gig.A worrying number of as yet unopened boxes of books.A forest of packing...

I repent better in the waning / season

September 19, 2021

Something I finally learned is that you can run out of energy long before you run out of time. I appreciated this Scalawag piece on the relentlessness of...

We might find a humanity that is not asking to be seen, but demanding instead.

September 12, 2021

I haven't worked out of an office since November 2019. This week I go back into one, at least for now, because attempting to forecast the contours of this...

I mean, / what pearl forms around a grain of plastic in an oyster?

September 5, 2021

A housekeeping note for paid subscribers: I'm working on the note about your subscriptions further to last Sunday's update. Still no action needed on your...

the dead are changeless. / They grow no older. / It is I who have changed,

August 22, 2021

I have never been a fan of those "[person] would be [x] years old if they were alive today" posts, because they're not alive and what does it matter how old...

i want to talk about respect. / how even the desperate deserve it.

August 15, 2021

Most people born into generations of US passports, most people who are white and comfortably middle class, most people who practice one of the religions not...

did you know roots are easy / to snap?

August 8, 2021

I am organizing my books, and the Discourse is misrepresenting Marie Kondo again, because where would we be if the commentariat consistently read the work we...

The being of some is: to be. Of others: to be without.

$ · August 1, 2021

I slept a lot this weekend, and not because I'd planned to take the time off. Earlier this week I had an allergy panel done - I got tested for the severity...

Invisible until you won’t see them / won’t bend and lift their comfort

$ · July 27, 2021

There was a tiny window when it was possible, if you squinted at just the right angle and allowed yourself an unreasonable optimism, to feel hopeful about...

The After Party: "community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist"

July 25, 2021

Editor’s note: As often as is possible I'll be handing the keys to this newsletter over to paid contributors (pitch me! It's $450 all-in). These special...

Just take the imagists. Their heads explode.

$ · July 18, 2021

I've been taking a voice acting class, which is still a sentence I am not entirely comfortable saying aloud. I am taking this class precisely because merely...

Do not raise your small voice against it. And do not / take cover.

July 11, 2021

A deep resentment borne of the months and months and months spent in collective acknowledgement of the duty of care toward endless unknown others while the...

It feels better to move with time than it does to constantly race against it.

July 10, 2021

Editor’s note: As often as is possible this year (pitch me!) I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling...

a different kind of life

$ · July 4, 2021

There are weeks that really feel like inflection points. Oh, the ocean's on fire? Fire clouds? Sure. Why not. When I was in high school, I placed second in a...

hope bleeds slowly from my mouth / into the dirt that covers us all

June 27, 2021

I have been thinking about Britney Spears, and the absolute horror of her conservatorship. I grew up in an era in which pop music was defined in no small...

The After Party: "Identity is a hallucination...and everything is a story"

June 20, 2021

Editor’s note: As often as is possible (pitch me!) I will be handing over the keys to this newsletter. These special editions, which I am calling The After...

You are trying to be precise but everything is a carbon-like surface that scrolls by with pinpricks emitting memory’s wavy threads.

$ · June 13, 2021

I’ve learned how to ride bikes a few different times. As a kid, on a faux-BMX, from a combination of parents and that one uncle who was like a parent and was...

The magic settles uneasy; it turns out fairy dust was always / fake.

June 12, 2021

How To Wash Your Makeup Brushes 1) Assemble supplies at a leisurely pace. Pause to contemplate whether you really need three different but functionally...

I ask that they describe / an object right in front of them, to make / it come alive, and one writes about death,

June 6, 2021

"He started writing the list in 1984, six years after he first suspected there was something wrong, that patients were suffering symptoms with no explicable...

Reporters & fathers call your generation “the worst.”

May 30, 2021

Every week I google "em dash" and then I copy and paste the symbol onto the otherwise empty page. I have memorized the shortcuts for the acute accent, the...

a deputizing of hundreds. a machine gun on standpipe hill. a dropping of bombs from chartered planes.

$ · May 29, 2021

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...