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...
There are no curses—only mirrors
The algorithms always know when I'm having a back flare-up, because I tell them. Lots of searches for "psoas" and "sacroiliac" and "piriformis" followed by...
So many of us are breathless, / you know, like me
If you punched* Nazis and stole their memorabilia, I suppose you could keep them. Much less convinced than if you acquired them by other means, though.So...
There are no good kings. / Only beautiful palaces.
Eight years ago Alana Massey published an essay titled "Against Chill". It was a different time on the internet, in media, and in culture. It is always a...
I stepped outside to answer and rain / Beat my chest.
There is something about rain in Trinidad, sharp and sudden and sometimes fleeting. Of course there is the smell, the petrichor of the collision of hot pitch...
Everything’s a testament To life lived on the fringe
Been a long minute since I did one of these, so: Read: Babel Watch: Grand Crew, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves,...
a kind of terror / at the chain / of events
I spent many a Friday night, fifteen years ago, writing about banks that failed. Another bank failed on Friday, as financial institutions sometimes do, and...
Empty jar: / I think to grow beansprouts and look into ordering seeds.
March, the longest year. Everything since, marked. Folks talked about a before when there was a sense that there would be an after. Yet it is still, somehow,...