TRANSCRIPT

Hi, it’s producer Myka Kielbon. This spring, The Slowdown team and I asked you to help us select for the podcast — to send in poems that have helped you slow yourself down. In just a few days, we received nearly three hundred entries. We then chose just five submissions to share this week. Here’s today’s community curator, to share what’s special about their submission. 

My name is Jeannine Hall Gailey. I live in Woodinville, Washington. This poem really fits The Slowdown, because it's dark and funny. The first time you read it, you can understand everything it says and you can understand it at a certain level. But the more you go back and read it and think about it, like it really has these dark twisty turns that you're like, ‘Oh, what was that poem really about?’ Which is something I love. Love can hurt - And you're like, Oh, well that's sort of innocuous. And then you're like, is it innocuous? What do we do for love? Good question.  

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

My friend once said to me, “I no longer think of wolf girl.” “Wolf girl?” I replied. She clarified: “Oh, that’s the name I’ve given my ex-. You know, wolf in sheep’s clothing?” We laughed. 

I heard a lightness in her voice where before, for over a year, I’d heard pain and resentment. This person’s deception and abandonment of my friend cut deep. She lost a serious amount of weight and became reclusive. It seemed she could only muster enough energy to care for her cat and just barely herself. 

During their early days together, I recall my friend floating above ground in joy. In the beginning, to get closer to her, she learned all of her favorite teams, their players, their stats. As long as I knew my friend, she had disavowed sports. In the relationship, she never let an occasion go by to make this person feel cherished: birthdays, yes, but even her pet’s adoption day; she showed up with specially wrapped treats and toys. She cleaned out a section of her closet for when her partner visited. She practically built a temple to her by placing pictures everywhere around her apartment.

Her family thought she was dating a narcissist with governing tendencies. Her closest girlfriends tried to sound the alarm, but some life moments have to play out to their gory end. Sometimes, our only intervention is a loving attentiveness, a willingness to listen and comfort when the time comes.
What is it about this stage of dating that has us turn off the radar, render us blind to the red flags, to what we hope our instincts should catch? We become wild in our desperation to present ourselves as worthy of love. Our passionate hearts render us prey to the lost souls who present facades of well-being.

Today’s allegorical poem captures the staggering wisdom of finding and losing love. As we learn about another, we learn as much about ourselves — and the dialectical role of endings

Hunger

by Kelli Russell Agodon

If we never have enough love, we have more than most.
We have lost dogs in our neighborhood and wild coyotes, 
and sometimes we can’t tell them apart. Sometimes
we don’t want to. Once I brought home a coyote and told
my lover we had a new pet. Until it ate our chickens. 
Until it ate our chickens, our ducks, and our cat. Sometimes
we make mistakes and call them coincidences. We hold open
the door then wonder how the stranger ended up in our home. 
There is a woman on our block who thinks she is feeding bunnies,
but they are large rats without tails. Remember the farmer’s wife?
Remember the carving knife? We are all trying to change
what we fear into something beautiful. But even rats need to eat.
Even rats and coyotes and the bones on the trail could be the bones 
on our plates. I ordered Cornish hen. I ordered duck. Sometimes
love hurts. Sometimes the lost dog doesn’t want to be found.

"Hunger" by Kelli Russell Agodon. Used by permission of the poet.