The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael

There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise.

July 19, 2020

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

$ · July 12, 2020

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

July 5, 2020

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

$ · June 28, 2020

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

$ · June 21, 2020

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, /

June 14, 2020

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 /

$ · June 7, 2020

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.

$ · May 31, 2020

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

$ · May 24, 2020

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...

I would call my friends on other devices;

May 17, 2020

I was one of those teenagers who’d say things like “if you have no expectations you can’t be disappointed” and who was very into zen kōans and who spent a...

The woman in front of me had been reading

$ · May 10, 2020

Today I am thinking about Wanda Cooper-Jones. About Gloria Darden. About Sybrina Fulton. About Geneva Reed-Veal. About Gwen Carr. About Lesley McSpadden....

Even what was beyond us / was recast in our image;

May 3, 2020

What does it mean, for tens and hundreds of thousands of people to die? Friends, colleagues, children, grandparents, strangers. What does it mean for their...

I am glad / you are so small,

$ · April 26, 2020

Still safe, still well — such is the drumbeat of my days; an exercise in daily gratitude for what I have and who I have in my life. Sad, tired, angry — all...

We are spendthrifts with words,

April 19, 2020

I think about words, constantly. When I am not writing them, I am editing them. When I am not editing them, I am thinking about how to write them. When I am...

Sweet is it, sweet is it

$ · April 12, 2020

I rode my bike today, for the first time in this new state. Texas, pandemic. Kept my distance, waited on the lights. I am angry all the time. At the people...

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, /

April 5, 2020

Last week I joined the ever-burgeoning ranks of people who’ve been smitten by Animal Crossing: New Horizons, persuaded by a friend and former colleague of...

I’m waiting for my right mind.

$ · March 29, 2020

In tragedy you are reminded of the difference between being allowed access and belonging. In tragedy you learn which bonds hold you fast and which hold you...

Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

$ · March 22, 2020

I am mostly furious, and because this is not a good state for me to be in for an extended period I have been trying to redirect my rage into work and works....

Someone is dancing us.

March 15, 2020

I am a person you can text in a crisis. I am never more calm then when all hell is breaking loose. It is one of the traits that I have sharpened and polished...

I have been woman / for a long time

March 8, 2020

There are boxes—mostly of books, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows me—piled precariously in every room of my current apartment. This is the...

All I want / is to be the river though I return

$ · March 1, 2020

I have a new job, and for the second time in two days, I have a migraine. I haven’t had one in a while (a migraine, not a job) and I had forgotten that you...

One way to erase an island is to invent the waters

$ · February 23, 2020

I am the very definition of the so-called “high-information voter”, except for the “voter” part. I am semi-permanently disenfranchised: I am not allowed to...

Please remain calm,

February 16, 2020

A thing about being a person — a non-white, immigrant, female person especially — is that other people sometimes forget both that you are not entirely like...

Not the blue the orthodoxy of the day

$ · February 9, 2020

I have been trying to practice yoga daily, or nearly daily (rest, too, is part of the practice). I had forgotten just how much the act of making space to...

The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much

February 2, 2020

Saeed Jones, a brilliant poet and memoirist, wrote in January about the ritual of annual determinations: “We don’t make resolutions in this house; we make...

Our bodies spun / On swivels of bone & faith, / Through a lyric slipknot

January 26, 2020

Grief is messy, complicated, unpredictable because people are messy, complicated, unpredictable. The narrative of our lives is not something over which we...

Beyond dreams and the arc of justice

January 20, 2020

[Dear Reader, this is long.] I have long been one of those people moved to irritation and sometimes anger by misattributed quotes. I once intervened to stop...

running and running until she reaches

$ · January 19, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot about time (this is, perhaps, a mark of having friends who died young). Time in the sense of deadlines; time in the sense of...

awards medals to generals

January 12, 2020

These days, the siren song of ~grad school~ is not quite so loud, replaced by the incessant drumbeat of so what are you doing to reduce all these harms....

Not everything that is faced can be changed;

$ · January 9, 2020

As promised, some riffs on news consumption (and production, dear colleagues) in a time of misinformation. The first thing to remember is that if you think...

Listen.

January 5, 2020

I remember those long nights in the library as an undergrad, inhaling Red Bull and speed-reading my way through the set texts on asymmetrical warfare and the...

to dare to have nothing so much to lose

December 31, 2019

On Saturday I went to a wedding over which a Presbyterian minister presided and on Monday I attended a funeral held under Muslim rites. On Sunday I played...

Does it tell you that your heart is afire?

$ · December 22, 2019

There is an intimacy about Trinidad that is difficult to describe; a familiarity, a possessiveness, a jealousy. Here I am and am not myself. I am more myself...

I do not believe as some / that the vote is an end

December 15, 2019

Housekeeping, ish. I let some* of my domains lapse this year; the tiniest of concessions to the inevitability of how “the desktop web” (and my role in it,...

Some requests for hiring managers

$ · December 15, 2019

As promised, I’m going to experiment a bit more with the $ newsletters. To that end, I’ll be sharing versions of things I’m reading, watching, listening to,...

Now each of us

$ · December 8, 2019

I realize that part of the anxiety that has been stalking my days is related to an upcoming international trip. What if I don’t get back in? What if they...

No air. Breathe in.

December 2, 2019

It’s World AIDS Day. Get tested. Practice safer sex. Work to end stigma about gender and sexuality and about sex work. Work to end HIV and AIDS shaming and...

Free people keep afever

$ · November 24, 2019

There’s a version of my life that is filled with fresh, local, sustainably-harvested flowers and cloth napkins and just enough of everything I want and need....

let this be the healing

November 17, 2019

I moved this weekend, though it feels like I have been in geographic limbo for at least six months. Which means I once again confronted with the reality of...

All of it has always seemed so arbitrary to me,

November 10, 2019

“Very tired” is the only honest answer to the obligatory politesse of “how are you doing?” “Very tired and about three weeks from a quiet, controlled, and...

No one can stop her.

$ · November 3, 2019

I travel frequently, both for work and because of the decisions I’ve made about the architecture of my life. Over the years I’ve developed a few routines and...

and i become relic

October 27, 2019

It is quite a thing, on the day before the first anniversary of the Tree of Life massacre, to see some of the most powerful people in the world defending...

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them:

$ · October 20, 2019

There are many ways to respond to stress. You can drown yourself in books and tea; go for a run; practice yoga; add several new piercings to your collection;...

I love your hair / You always wear such interesting things

October 19, 2019

In Chile the students are marching. In Washington DC, Kirstjen Nielsen is gearing up for the start of her non-apology tour. In two weeks I will walk out of...

“Put your hands up! Show me your hands!”

$ · October 13, 2019

There are things you think about— like what it means when you can be black in your own home minding your business and somehow still be killed by police. When...

get up and try to do something

October 6, 2019

Botham Jean died, and then Joshua Brown died, and this keeps happening, will keep happening, and we rush to valorize the appearance of forgiveness without...

Fear is the paralyzing agent,

$ · September 29, 2019

What a year this week has been and other such refrains. How does anyone even keep up with everything and other implicit shrugs. I mean what can I even do and...

In the beginning before the beginning, there were drums, and hymns,

September 22, 2019

Kids marched. Another black trans woman was run off Twitter. Another tech CEO stood up for government agencies charged with detaining and deporting children....

T.S. Eliot said that humankind cannot bear very much reality.

September 15, 2019

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Will not stay still. There are very few days when I am not...

But this was a kind of joy, too, forged

$ · September 15, 2019

If your news organization is comfortable suggesting to its 700K+ social media audience that “having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may...