my body just laughs because it knows who started this war
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?
“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.
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
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.
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, /
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: /
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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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. 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.
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.
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
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.
“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
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.
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...