[encore] 1383: The Situation in Our City by Ciona Rouse

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 poem is The Situation in Our City by Ciona Rouse. Today’s episode was originally released on October 28, 2025. In this episode, Maggie writes… “This poem has me thinking more and more about chance, and about our circumstances. It also has me thinking about the ways we take care of one another, and how we can—and must—do BETTER. As James Baldwin famously wrote, ‘The children are always ours.’” 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 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