TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

The first time I was in love, I started missing baseball practice. Instead, I went to the library. Cherie spent afternoons after school doing her homework there. I could barely think about anything but her, not my upcoming games, not my algebra homework, not the transitive properties of acute angles, not even the high school I would attend after middle school. Popular songs took on meaning in a way they hadn’t before: “Love me in a special way / what more can I say.” What an immense feeling, to live with a perennial lump in my chest!

Whenever Cherie returned a book to a shelf, I picked it up and skimmed it. Without giving away my identity, I left notes in the books she read more than once. She spawned my first flying dream. I flew over houses and landed in her backyard where we ate pound cake. So, you probably figured by now, it wasn’t love but a crush.

Friends, coaches, and family noticed my forlornness. My mom was the first to figure it out. She encouraged me to say a kind word to Cherie, and just talk to her, without all the passionate feelings. I did, and… it went nowhere. Now, I laugh thinking of my pre-teen self. That fall, I began high school. I found another girl who sparked amorous feelings.

While I do not aimlessly fall in love anymore, that spirit of infatuation still makes up my inner disposition as a poet as I encounter life around me. I feel a heavy kinship with the speaker in today’s poem. Their embrace of the world exhibits the ecstatic yearning and vulnerability essential to the imagination.

In Love
by Chloe Martinez

                    After Dorianne Laux 

I’m in love with you, coffee,
and with you, green ink in my pen,
and with you, imaginary reader. 
I’m in love with you, recirculated office air
that gets a little too warm, then 
a little too cold, because now I am
putting on and taking off repeatedly
this shawl I got long ago
when I was a student,
living in India for the first time,

and it still smells like incense
in Mount Abu, where the lake
was named Nakki, fingernail,
and the surrounding mountains were said
to be holy fragments of the body
of a goddess who fell to earth there.
I was a little in love with her.
I climbed long flights of stone stairs
to visit the mountain cave shrines
where she accepted flowers, coconuts, and cash.

Shawl, I’m in love with your pattern of vines.
Your border that runs wild. I’m in love with you, memory 
of how my body felt then: curious
and excited, shy and defiant. 
Also you, knowledge of how it feels
now: sometimes tired, or heavy
with sadness and experience, 
which are often the same thing,

but other times, electric, connected
back to that person. She didn’t 
know much. I wasn’t in love with her
then, but now I see her better.
How she stood unsure on a rural road. 
Nowhere she had to be, and the forest
lush and loud all around her.

"In Love" by Chloe Martinez. Used by permission of the poet.