The Main Event, by stacy-marie ishmael
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love what is mortal
June 15, 2025
Every yeareverythingI have ever learned in my lifetimeleads back to this: the firesand the black river of losswhose other side is salvation,whose meaningnone...
The world is full of places
June 8, 2025
On Friday, a funeral. Today, a family reunion / 90th birthday gathering some four generations deep. In all circumstances, gratitude. For the friends who roll...
to melt into the sun
June 1, 2025
In Trinidad for a funeral, a set of circumstances that has become increasingly familiar over the years. There was a time when I resisted attending funerals....
our names this country’s wood / for the fire
May 25, 2025
The joke is that I was once heartbroken enough to invent my own apocalypse. The joke is that I stayed alive long enough to witness a few real ones. The...
thinking what i’m doing / is poetry
May 18, 2025
Kids these days: Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to...
now I start to understand her love
May 11, 2025
here’s to the kids who live / in us and never leave
May 4, 2025
Sometimes, when I am feeling particularly overwhelmed by the ways in which the powerful are cruel and vindictive to those with much less, I turn to acts of...
Not everything that is faced can be changed
April 27, 2025
Word people are upset, because other people are using “deport” to describe what is happening to US citizens. Words mean things, they say, retreating to form...
a single garment of destiny
April 20, 2025
Conversations these days depend in part on the most recent dispatch by which folks are targeted or threatened or both. Undertones become overtones the more...
Proof that we learn to live with the unthinkable.
April 13, 2025
An instinct to repair, to mend, to hunker down, to create comfort, to soothe, to allay and alleviate. Not to withdraw, but to congregate. Not to avoid, but...
until history / rewritten resurrected
April 6, 2025
If you’re the kind of person who would be accurately described by the phrase “Extremely Online” (derogatory), then you’ve seen the memes about millennials...
No wisdom / given to me by anyone.
March 30, 2025
On my mind / in my bookmarks: archives, and history, and the difference between art and pasticheanalog photo albums as personal history and community archive...
we wanted never / to dream again,
March 23, 2025
Small victory: after six weeks, CVS Caremark has deigned to allow me to fill the prescription written by my neurologist for the medication that keeps my...
What is that leaping in your chest?
March 16, 2025
When everything is too much: eat wontons in Flushing, find solace in tea, appreciate the gift of excellent company. Make marks on paper; play with...
Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy
March 9, 2025
Mahmoud Khalil was inside a university-owned residence Saturday night near Columbia’s Manhattan campus when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement...
to do good sometime / Accounted dangerous folly
March 2, 2025
A checklist for 2025: check titers / re-up on shots against mumps, measles, rubellatell people the HPV vaccine a) saves lives b) is recommended for folks...
hope's a reptile waiting for the sun.
February 23, 2025
Latest addition to the walls: a Sarah Matthews print of an MLK Jr. quote from his speech on “The Other America”. (I do also recommend watching the video of...
Remember you are all people and all people / are you
February 16, 2025
In yet another hotel room after two days of transit; one of those long flights with intermittent-at-best WiFi that has you wondering what is happening in the...
What do you need to say?
February 9, 2025
I spent this weekend mostly asleep because in America, RTO has also meant a return to people coming to work while coughing and sneezing and wheezing and...
Things got ugly / increasingly obviously
February 2, 2025
I find, that when there is a lot going on and I am trying to understand the whats and the hows and the whos, it is helpful for me to read and to think and...
remembering was never recommended.
January 26, 2025
Today I learned about Kira Johnson Dixon. This weekend I learned about the self-imposed decision to cut materials about the Tuskegee Airmen and about the...
We mean to be the people we meant to be /
January 19, 2025
But where are we going to be, and why, and who? The disenfranchised dead want to know. We mean to be the people we meant to be, to keep on going where we...
Can you run away from yourself?
January 12, 2025
I have had access to the internet since at least 1995. And for all kinds of reasons — how I was educated, my own interests and personality, people I got to...
Play louder.
January 5, 2025
First real week of January, of 2025. Weeks yet before I will adjust to writing the new date. I made no resolutions. I will make no resolutions (though this...
and the old years blow back / like a wind
December 29, 2024
Traditions, various: black eyed peas; pig foot souse; twelve grapes; collard greens; champagne; tamales; music; commune; reminisce; reflect; resolve; king...
Today I am the oldest / I have been.
December 22, 2024
Tis the season to unsubscribe from desperate marketing appeals promising 20% off things you don’t need. Tis the season to make that appointment you’ve been...
we must provide our own guide-posts
December 15, 2024
RIP, Nikki Giovanni: “I think the transgender kids are the bravest kids right now that we see; they’re as brave as my generation was in breaking down...
It is going to be a very hard winter and we all know it in our bones
December 8, 2024
Decembers are not my favourite month. So, instead of the alternatives: I drink tea and eat cakes with a dear friend, for hours. Read books. Re-read books (or...
it's just around / the corner
December 1, 2024
Thinking about David Wojnarowicz and Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Ross Laycock and Keith Haring and Melvin Dixon. About Freddie Mercury and Eazy-E. About Nancy...
we all want to be / alone, I reply, except when / we do not
November 24, 2024
Lots going on is a euphemism. Lots going on is a season. In times of lots going on, dive really, really into die cutting and paper crafting. Reduce, reuse,...
let this be the healing
November 17, 2024
Just as some books find you when you most need them, so does art, so do poems, so do people. People are on the move; they are moving. In the group texts:...
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
November 3, 2024
I get to vote, because of hundreds of pieces of paper painstakingly filled in (except for the ones that must be intentionally left blank); and thousand of...
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
October 27, 2024
Another last-minute flight home tomorrow, because this is life now. They don’t tell you, when you decide to uproot yourself from the place that you are from,...
intention’s ambush
October 20, 2024
[Housekeeping note: Taking a rest day]PS: Got that sewing machine though! Special thanks to Lam, Eleanor, Ann, and Erin for their expertise, generously...
I know you / I see you / I hear you
October 13, 2024
Some things I’ve found inspiration in recently: “How to navigate a maze of perverse incentives without losing yourself. The search for purpose, validation,...
Give me weapons of minute destruction
October 6, 2024
Challenged by [gestures broadly at everything]. Sustained by the echo of small joys: gallons of tea shared with a friend; long walks in beautiful places;...
perhaps we do well to live with uncertainty.
September 29, 2024
I am in Trinidad for reasons, some of which required leaving the office on Wednesday at short notice and managing to score the last seat on the flight that...
This is what we have / we do what we can.
September 22, 2024
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Me, I find myself reaching for music, back into the depths of the archives. Sometimes it is soca (touchless),...
i want to talk about respect. / how even the desperate deserve it.
September 15, 2024
If you study international relations, or humanitarian law (which is the law of war and of armed conflict, which may or many not overlap with human rights...
Wake up, people, examine your minds
September 1, 2024
Songs in the key of Independence It's amazing to you I'm sure / We didn't get Independence before This is the voice of the people / The people in the...
I am treacherous with old magic
August 25, 2024
I had forgotten, or suppressed, the particular kind of knowing discomfort — indeed, a whole-body unease — that accompanies seeing women in highly visible...
when we speak we are afraid / our words will not be heard
August 18, 2024
On Friday night I attended the screening of the remastered version of The Spook Who Sat By The Door, which I’d never seen and with which I was only vaguely...
The ice sheets will melt. / Things will get ugly.
August 11, 2024
Most people don’t get to have it all; most people are fighting for just a fraction of what’s left. The people with the biggest share fight hardest to keep...
the time is always now.
August 4, 2024
I knew this week I’d invoke Baldwin; I didn’t know, as I was thinking about which of his lyrical sentences I’d start with, that the one I would keep going...
love that casts a widening pool of light,
July 28, 2024
When you have moved constantly, over decades — cities, states, countries — putting art on walls falls down the priority list. For a combination of reasons,...
even as each moment is an answer.
July 21, 2024
Sometimes you plan to spend an evening in a botanical garden and sometimes instead you are obliged to stare at red and green numbers flashing across a...
do what has to be done, again and again.
July 14, 2024
You do not usually know when you’re living through something that might later be described as a “turning point”. But sometimes, sometimes you do know. At...
What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
July 7, 2024
At some point we each have to navigate the boundary between informed and overwhelmed; to accept that there is a difference between opinion and judgement. I...
Let your laughter fill me like a bell.
June 30, 2024
I have long believed that you rise up or fall down to the level of your best group text. This is not a novel idea; many a reasonable and unreasonable...
I had long hair and it was political.
June 23, 2024
I do not remember when I first realised how annoying I found the phrase “identity politics”, and whether that preceded or was a consequence of realising how...
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