The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

Watch them seethe when stimulated

October 16, 2022

Somewhere, in the Discourse about Ye and Elon, is a forgetting. Subject / object collision and conflict, media mediated. We (that media we) show ourselves...

foolishly imagines / she has the right to exist.

October 2, 2022

We can look everywhere, even if we don’t want to, and everywhere we can look there is despair. And every where, every day, people keep going. The fight goes...

How much have I dared in opposition?

September 25, 2022

Stole away to Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge, a middle of the day matinee. One of those times when I could also recite large chunks of the source...

We give because someone gave to us. / We give because nobody gave to us.

September 18, 2022

What do you want remains a cruel question. But I suppose if I had to answer, and if I had to answer truly, I would say: time. Time that is mine. Time that...

Is there aught you need that my hands withhold, / Rich gifts of raiment or grain or gold?

September 11, 2022

I like seasons, perhaps because where I grew up there only two (rainy, dry) and other than the ongoing prospect of tropical storms or hurricanes that mostly...

then meaning came with its invincible glare

September 4, 2022

Sometimes I think about the parallels between “someone is wrong on the internet” and “the very serious function of racism”, which is of course distraction....

sun rises / like rent / sun rises / like a flag / sun rises / like the ocean

August 28, 2022

It is not like you remember it, they say. It is even darker than you recall. So instead you get snippets and shapes and songs and scenes, things that you...

The oldest among us will recognize that glow

August 21, 2022

Very very early in the pandemic, I started saying - in written memos and out-loud on Zooms - that it would be inaccurate to describe the adjustments of 2020...

divisions grow stronger. / That’s what “chosen” and “unchosen” will do.

August 14, 2022

Tried roller skating this weekend. Made it roughly (barely) halfway out of the locker room before practically (actually) falling over. So then I took the...

When disaster comes, some of us will stand on / the rooftop to address the ghosts.

August 7, 2022

On a plane leaving Las Vegas, where the temperature hit 41 degrees Celsius, or just about 106 F. Thinking about why people live there, about why I enjoyed...

The Destiny of Earthseed / Is to take root among the stars.

July 31, 2022

onward, to the stars

my family drowns again / on a microphone for strangers

July 24, 2022

36 degrees celsius. 102 degrees fahrenheit. These don’t feel like real temperatures, until you’re outside and walking around. And I’m just walking around....

We will be as falling stars to those watching from the edge

July 17, 2022

How hot does it have to be before it's a climate emergency?Conversations with friends about the return of low-rise jeans and visible thongs that segue into...

and pain becomes the only keeper / of my time

July 10, 2022

People who live with chronic pain or illness become experts in details. They will know if the muscle involved in a current episode is the erector spinnae or...

liberation from my own daily routines

July 3, 2022

Over the past several weeks I have been practicing making space. The thing about practice is that it is not about perfection; it is about consistency and...

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

June 26, 2022

Attribution: But we must recognize that many of our high expectations of rapid revolutionary change did not in fact occur. And many of the gains that did are...

Dad, he turns, and looks / at you, bewildered, /

June 19, 2022

Took a few days off (well, mostly: the gyrations in the markets I cover for work meant I was about as connected as not), hit up two bookstores, bought some...

/ We are not wise, and not very often / kind. And much can never be redeemed.

June 12, 2022

Things I miss about Trinidad:- friends- family- Diwali, Eid, Old Year's- mango season- julie mango- long mango- mango chow- Maracas- liming until 4am at some...

what is history but constant recitations / of flawed people pushed

June 5, 2022

I am always fascinated by silent edits. Like the one that takes "wasn't as bad as some feared" and turns it into "wasn't as deadly as some feared".Who is we...

Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power, /

May 29, 2022

Kids Who Die This is for the kids who die,Black and white,For kids will die certainly.The old and rich will live on awhile,As always,Eating blood and...

black magic island that spawns boat people and chaos

May 22, 2022

There’s a lot of Discourse swirling right now about academic vs journalistic attribution because of some editorial decisions and assumptions made by...

i am tired, / but i am not the first / to be tired

May 15, 2022

I have been thinking about how I answer questions, and what I choose to obscure when I answer them. “How come you already know so much about [process,...

Choices are always field work, / freedom song, elegy, / captivity narrative.

May 8, 2022

There are days and there are weeks and there are days and there are weeks and they each and collectively feel like there is no reprieve. How much worse can...

Freedom / Is a strong seed / Planted / In a great need.

May 1, 2022

There’s a James Baldwin quote — indeed, there’s always a James Baldwin quote — about the role of the artist that goes like this: “An artist is a sort of...

something encloses the impossible in a fable

April 24, 2022

“Beauty stands in for unconsummated mourning” was a beautiful sentence in a review of beautiful and not so beautiful things (art!) that included a brief and...

Float in the black / and stay there / if you need to

April 17, 2022

Something can be a privilege without being pleasurable. The (absence of) one does not negate the (reality of the) other. Is rest a presence or an absence?...

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...