Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I was reading recently how a cellphone isn’t the first thing we should look at in the morning. That’s especially hard for those of us who use our phones for morning alarms. But what sleep experts say is that we should keep our phones not only turned off at night, but in another room altogether. I have yet to do this, but it makes sense. How can you turn off, when it is always on?

I am trying to have a different relationship with my phone. As I travel a lot, my phone is my lifeline to my husband, my family, my best friend message-threads that keep me laughing and sane. But of course, it’s also the place where headlines hit hard and breaking news flashes during an otherwise quiet moment of solitude or creative contemplation. What baffles me is how, for the most part, this juxtaposition is how we live all the time. In the same minute we may have seen a picture of a cat, someone’s wedding photo, a terrible image of war, and an ad for an old fashioned alarm clock that will undoubtedly help improve our sleep habits. This, my friends, seems to cause a sort of wicked whiplash.

No wonder our attachment to our phones feels both obsessive and desperate. Just last week, I was in the Little Rock, Arkansas airport, flying back to Lexington, Kentucky and my phone stopped working for a whole five minutes. I don’t want to admit this, but I was beside myself. How would I text my husband and tell him I was coming home? How would I board the airplane without my electronic boarding pass, how would I respond to the emails that all began with “somewhat urgent” and “I know you’re busy, but…”? I was, and am, actually embarrassed by how panicked I was about not having access to my phone. And it’s making me wonder if it’s time for a little reexamining of my own attachment to this all-encompassing object of pleasure, agony, and everything in between.

Today’s poem does the work of exploring how the phone and its headlines and alerts can create a dystopian panic that is hard to disentangle from our lives.

Anxiety checks her phone again
by K.A. Hays

& each possible path through this minute glows from a screen:
two texts, a tragedy, Your Day at a Glance, breaking news.
Anxiety demands to walk not just the path she walks 
but less worn paths through invisible cities

& old-growth forests, one foot in each 
& a third foot on a third path through a 2,200-acre landfill
forged by anxiety herself with only a spoon.

Anxiety issues a dictum,
shames herself for not following said dictum,
shames herself for shaming herself,

sliding into the throat & ballooning,
red & blue balloons, & clowns, sad clowns,
& bakes a tasteless dry cake.

Anxiety issues just one invitation to the party,
then sighs to find one body arriving at the party,
one body that has not given enough.

Enough. One body, overrun, buzzing
with toxicity, & droughts, floods, fevers, chills,
arrives, having lost 92% of its biodiversity,
having coaxed early blooms & frozen them fruitless, 
having bred mosquitoes & destroyed what was sown,
having poisoned harvests & hastened extinctions 
& burnt & stormed,
having swirled with ads, warnings, poisoned harvests,
having become ad & warning & poisoned harvest,
splitting & spilling—even so,

the body arrives, 
grand, multiple, & turning
this minute. A temporary miracle.

"Anxiety checks her phone again" by K.A. Hays from ANTHROPOCENE LULLABY copyright © 2009 K.A. Hays. Used by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.