1458: on projection by Raena Shirali

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 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 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 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