The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

Everyone loves that familiar warbeat: I know all the words to this war.

May 23, 2021

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?

$ · May 20, 2021

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.

May 16, 2021

"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.

$ · May 12, 2021

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

$ · May 9, 2021

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.

$ · May 6, 2021

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.

May 2, 2021

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

April 25, 2021

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

April 18, 2021

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

$ · April 11, 2021

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

April 4, 2021

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.

March 28, 2021

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.

March 21, 2021

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

March 14, 2021

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

$ · March 7, 2021

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.

February 28, 2021

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?

$ · February 28, 2021

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

February 21, 2021

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,

$ · February 14, 2021

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,...

Because you still listen, because in times like these

February 7, 2021

This week I hit a wall. Or perhaps the wall hit me. I can’t quite pinpoint the moment when I felt the bricks come crashing down. Maybe it was when I was...

This tart sermon

$ · January 31, 2021

This pandemic steals lives (RIP, Francisco Assis da Conceicao, and may all who loved you find peace) and it steals time and it steals, unapologetically and...

I need to learn

January 24, 2021

Many, many years ago I wrote another newsletter. Technically I still have that newsletter. Technically alot of things are true. In that newsletter I would...

There’s more to MLK than “I Have a Dream”

January 18, 2021

Last year for MLK Day, I compiled a list of resources for folks who might be interested in deepening their knowledge of Dr. King’s words and works. Here it...

I always thought language was / Akin to the body

January 17, 2021

Unsent Tweets, March 2020-Jan 2021 coping with the pandemic by watching and reading and listening to work created by people so obviously brilliant and good...

Everyone is crying out for peace

$ · January 10, 2021

Some folks stormed the US Capitol and killed a police officer. They flaunted Nazi paraphernalia and Confederate flags and Q shirts and Proud Boys tattoos....

i am running into a new year

$ · January 3, 2021

No resolutions. New intentions. Considered outcomes. Intended effects. You can only control so much when all about you a pandemic swirls, uncontrolled. We...

The perfect moment is now.

December 27, 2020

Six years ago Phil Hutchinson died. I didn’t know that then; it took a couple of days for the news that the world had changed for the worse to reach me. I...

you cannot catch / my rhythm

December 20, 2020

December 2020, and so many people are just about hanging on. It is not clear what they are hanging on to, and how long that grip will last. I do not want to...

what advice do the drowned have for the burned?

December 13, 2020

Pandemic rituals: at the appointed time on Sunday nights, fire up Twitch and connect my phone to the nearest bluetooth speaker. Start this newsletter while...

And still a world begins its furious erasure—

December 6, 2020

Geneviève Bergeron. Hélène Colgan. Nathalie Croteau. Barbara Daigneault. Anne-Marie Edward. Maude Haviernick. Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz. Maryse Laganière....

You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries—

$ · November 29, 2020

We thought Things were Bad, because people were dying. And then more people died, and more people died, and more people died. What happens when you combine a...

After that came a sadness so big it made everyone

November 22, 2020

When I say two seconds, I don’t mean the time it took him to die. I mean the lapse betweenthe instant the cruiser braked to a halt on the grass, between that...

Inhale. So many of us are breathless,

$ · November 15, 2020

I have no way to process this much pain and this much grief. The quiet desperation is everywhere, in the eyes of masked strangers avoiding you on the...

Peace.

November 8, 2020

It is a powerful thing to affirm to the eyes of a watching world that though you might be the first, you will not be the last. It is a powerful thing to...

is not protecting

$ · November 1, 2020

What is happening in Texas but really they’re asking is my guy going to win, please tell me my guy is going to win. It’s not always a guy, just usually....

Many of them remain unaware of . . .

October 25, 2020

Existence right now feels like a series of unfinished sentences. A series of lives ended abruptly. Of livelihoods upended. Of families fractured. Of...

Guilt is not a response to anger;

$ · October 18, 2020

My current favourite videogame is about a dysfunctional family. When last did a single phrase—“good morning, my beautiful son”— reveal so much about so many?...

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.

$ · October 11, 2020

Video game writer (writer for video games) was not on the list of acceptable professions (doctor, lawyer, engineer, extremely educated housewife) at my all-...

How am I to understand the fluidity with which we continue in our days?

October 4, 2020

It’s still a conspiracy theory when you believe in it. Everyone is tired. Some of us have been tired. Do you remember a place differently when you know you...

I must write the same poem over and over,

September 27, 2020

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.

$ · September 20, 2020

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 /

September 13, 2020

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

September 6, 2020

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.

$ · August 30, 2020

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

August 23, 2020

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,

$ · August 16, 2020

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.

$ · August 9, 2020

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 /

August 2, 2020

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

$ · July 29, 2020

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.

July 26, 2020

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....