The Slowdown

Today's poem is Congratulations! Your Grief Is About to Stop Being Relevant! by Bridget Bell. The Slowdown is taking a week to return to some of our favorite episodes from Maggie's tenure so far. We'll be back on Monday, March 30 with new episodes. Today's episode was originally released on January 28, 2026.In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem captures a time of grief in the speaker's life, when life goes a little quiet after a flurry of support and care.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is from Mosaic by Supritha Rajan.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When I see the word productivity, it's hard not to see the word product nestled inside it, reminding me again of capitalism. I think we should try to keep whatever we can from getting chewed up — and spit out! — by capitalism. Creativity included. Creativity, especially.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Reverse Requiem by Ina Cariño. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem inspired me to learn more about requiems — what they are, how they've evolved, and how we might think of them more broadly and metaphorically.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is After Dinner by James Ciano. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem reminded me of one of my father's rituals when I was young, one of his ways of taking care of himself. He'd go to the driving range at the local golf center some evenings after dinner to, in his words, ‘hit a bucket of balls.' When we return to our rituals, we bring whoever we are that unique day, and we link it with whoever we've been before. In our rituals, we can find our own wholeness in a fractured world.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is If Night You Were a City by Adam Wiedewitsch. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I've always loved myths, legends, fables, and fairy tales. When I was young, the myth of Icarus was one that captured my imagination.”Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Surety by Anna Zumbahlen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Writing is a way of memorizing moments. I know this. I do this. Because a poem can act as a portal, taking me back to a specific time and place. So often, mid-experience, I start to sense the poetic possibility of the moment. I find myself making a metaphor or grasping for imagery and descriptive language. I'm half living in the present, half processing this moment's future on the page.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poets are known for making big moves in small spaces. We value brevity and compression, which go hand in hand. In a brief poem, maybe a poem with only a handful of lines, each word weighs a ton. We have to choose them carefully. An enormous amount of meaning — and possibility — is packed inside every word. I picture them as expandable suitcases, unzipped so that we can stuff even more inside them. That's compression! The words themselves may be few, but they carry a great deal.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Out of These Wounds, the Moon Will Rise by Jay Hopler. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is about wishing, and in that way, I think it's about hope. Even when a wish is farfetched and seems less than likely, hope is what allows us to make it anyway.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Epistemic Distance by Emma Bolden. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I'm a poet, so I'm all for nuance. I embrace ambiguity, and I'm flexible in my thinking. But I refuse to believe that we're living in a post-factual world. We might be tempted to call epistemology too abstract, too intellectual, too high brow, not relevant to the lives of real people. Who needs to know about this branch of philosophy when we're just trying to get by, day by day? But if there was ever a time to think about what we know, and how we know it, it's now.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Solar Eclipse by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “The last total solar eclipse, my kids and I put on cardboard eclipse glasses and spread a big quilt in our backyard, where we could lay and look up. I could see neighbors in the yards around us doing the same thing. We were all ogling the sky. When totality happened, the sky got darker and the air felt cooler. Our patio lights, which automatically come on at dusk, lit up. It was so eerie. And at the same time, it was so nice to be looking up with everyone else, sharing the same experience.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is The Road to Baghdad by Seth Brady Tucker. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Home is a mythic place as much as a real place. It's different in our minds than it is on the map. And some of what we remember isn't on the map at all — the way we felt when we were there, how we spent our time in that place, and who we were with. The emotional cartography of any place is different from its actual cartography.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is It Was Like This: You Were Happy by Jane Hirshfield. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “If someone asked you, at the end of your life, “What was your life like?” I wonder what you might say. How would you characterize your lived experience — the whole of it, cradle to grave? You couldn't tell every story, or detail every friendship or romantic relationship. You couldn't list all of your jobs or accomplishments in some sort of highlight reel. You couldn't describe every place you visited and what you experienced there. So how would you summarize your life? Your tiny-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-but-enormous-to-you life?” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Common Denominators by Cynthia Arrieu-King. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “There's one phrase toward the end of this poem that I keep coming back to: “The earth is a school.” The more I hear it, the more I agree. The earth is a school. The world is for learning and becoming, and we humans — we students — have so very much to learn.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Pardon My Heart by Marcus Jackson.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “If I had a different kind of heart, a tougher heart, would I be able to see what's happening in the world around me and not feel so brokenhearted? What would it be like to be able to sleep through the night, unbothered? I can't imagine feeling less, or caring less. That's not the heart I have.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Five Paragraph Essay on Time by Kathleen Flenniken. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Recently, I told a friend that I had procrastinated a task, and so I had to really hustle to get it done on time, and she kindly corrected me. Or, rather, she reframed what I was calling procrastination as something else: triage. That's what she called it. She said, “You have so much to do, you have to triage tasks—tackle the big and immediate ones first, and let some of the smaller ones go for a bit.” She had a point. I didn't have a time management issue or a lack of focus. I was juggling multiple tasks, and that meant that some of them naturally had to wait.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Geranium by Karen Solie. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem reminds me that even though “volunteer plants” may create extra work for me, I respect their hardiness, their resourcefulness, and their ability to take root.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Poem about everything except— by Amy Lemmon. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I was drawn to today's poem from the get-go because of its title: ”Poem about everything except—.” I went in anticipating maximalism — “everything but the kitchen sink,” as the saying goes, and the poem delivered.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Or am I a room with a roof taken off, still holding onto my idea of ceiling by Kelly Hoffer. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Fireplaces, thunderstorms, ocean waves—these sounds are popular “white noise” for sleep and relaxation. And it's odd, when I think about how these sounds represent very real dangers in nature. About how we are soothed by the contained version of something that can harm us.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Somewhere Else by Adam J. Gellings. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “I was born at 4:30 in the afternoon on a cold Sunday in February. All of this is either useless information — time of day, day of the week, month of the year — or it's part of our own myth-making.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Sleep by Matthew Dickman. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poems so often say the things we can't. They give language and shape to ideas that feel too big for words — like love, and mortality, and grief.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Perspective, Coyoacán by Corey Van Landingham. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is an ekphrastic poem, a poem inspired by a piece of art. It opens with an epigraph that is a quote by Frida Kahlo. It strikes me now, reading that line of hers, that while she's talking about painting herself, it can also refer to writing about oneself.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Word for It by Kevin Craft. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “The planet we call home is full of miracles, and we don't have to look hard to find them. Today's poem is about paying attention to the beauty around us, and to the life around us, even if we don't fully understand it. Especially if we don't fully understand it.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Poem to Remind Myself of the Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is such a beautiful meditation on knowing ourselves, and knowing what we need to be at home in our own lives.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is February by Jim Moore. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Despite February being my birth month, it is easily my least favorite month of the year. The winter weather in the Midwest is brutal. By mid-January, the twinkling lights and holiday cheer that make December bearable are gone. By February, I'm over it.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is on projection by Raena Shirali. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “One of the things I love about poetry—one of the things I look forward to, and revel in, as a reader and listener—is the way a poet can make the familiar strange. A familiar landscape, thanks to poetic language, can be transformed into something unfamiliar.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is an excerpt from THERE IS ONLY ONE GHOST IN THE WORLD by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “ Today's piece is collaborative, written by Sophie Klahr and Cory Zeller. I love the way it begins with the legend of the Bermuda Triangle but then turns toward the incredibly personal, though there isn't a single person's perspective or experience behind it.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Rubicon by Carl Phillips. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “‘Crossing the Rubicon' has long been a widely used idiom. It refers to having stepped over a line, or passed a point of no return. We use it to say that one has taken the final step into dangerous waters from which there is no retreat; once that line has been crossed, nothing will ever be the same. A new beginning of a certain kind.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Historical Site by Tommye Blount. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem is one of those that crushes me with its ending. Our Detroit poet manages to whittle the grand and often devastating expansiveness of history right down to the explosive synapses which drive and alight our very gray matter.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short. And Not a Good Poet by francine j. harris. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Everyone is a hero to someone, or a beauty, or a problem, or all of the above. Today's poem acknowledges exactly that with a brutal, identifiable honesty. But what this poet insists that we remember is how we are all, also, even if not loved, then so, so very lovable.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Closing Time; Iskandariya by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem, in ways that I aspire to in my own writing life, manages to take a deep breath in and collapse two thousand years of danger into a single moment of misunderstanding.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is A Backstory Beyond My Recounting by Paulann Petersen. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem asks who we think we are. That existential question can feel like judgment or threat, but the poet turns it back toward the daily realities of our own agency.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Our most important journeys often take us through vistas that we hadn't, couldn't, even imagine when we took our first steps. Leaning into adventure forces us to embrace uncertainty.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Home by Warsan Shire. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Immigration, which built the United States—for better and for worse—is again on trial not just here, but in much of the West. The crackdowns are beyond devastating, yet the potential for complete societal collapse seems unable to trigger our better natures to see each other's humanity.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Nightline: September 20, 1982 by June Jordan. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem reminds me of the power of poetry to comment, to respond, to shed light and offer us space to form our own impressions of what the facts may mean. To decide, then, with the knowledge provided by our very own bodies, what we mean to do about it.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Orchestra by Russell Brakefield. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Restoration, like most things worthwhile, is far from simple. But we know, and this poet shows us, that by taking such deliberate steps toward doing recovery, repair, and renewal, in our poetry as well as in our environmental stewardship, we re-establish our own ability to live our own best lives.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Gratitude by Cornelius Eady. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Samiya Bashir writes… “Today's poem makes a promise of its title, dresses it in flesh and bone, and tracks it across time. It's a clear, bold promise that might actively change the future not only for its speaker, but for the world we all share.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Mistake by Heather Christle. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “As humans, we're hardwired to see faces. How many of us have come upon a discarded item of clothing or a balled up blanket on the side of the road and shuddered to think it might be a dog or a deer? There's a sense of relief when we realize we're looking at an object, not a dead creature, but there's also another feeling—one I hadn't been able to put my finger on until I read today's poem.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Hackberry by Cecily Parks. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem is a kind of love poem—to a beloved tree, and to the sense of home it created.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Congratulations! Your Grief Is About to Stop Being Relevant! by Bridget Bell. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem captures a time of grief in the speaker's life, when life goes a little quiet after a flurry of support and care.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Come Back! by Camille Guthrie. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “One of the poets I discovered in college was H.D.. Born Hilda Doolittle, she published under her initials. I remember being wowed by her poems, which were experimental and strange, unlike anything I'd read before—and unlike anything I've read since.” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Apocatastasis by G.C. Waldrep. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When a poet, or a child, plays with figurative language, they explore the possibilities and the boundaries of the words we use to describe the world around us. Life will throw at us things that are hard or impossible to describe, both beautiful and awful things. So I think that kind of play isn't just a writing tool—it's a life skill.”Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Today's poem is Birthday Wish by David Groff. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Today's poem muses on different kinds of knowing without privileging one over the other. What we know vs. what animals know vs. what plants know, for instance. I think of us humans as being on a need-to-know basis, and this poem reminds me that we don't need to know—or be—everything." Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp