Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I have traveled many miles across the country in a car. I have taken in my fair share of asphalt roads and billboard signs. I have talked to numerous gas station attendants, and driven past many big box stores: Costco, Home Depot, Books-a-Million. I revel in the show of Americana but the sameness of the experience makes me believe I haven’t journeyed far from home.

There’s something sad, sometimes, about taking in all of the country from the fringes. I used to view the highway as a symbol of escape and possibility. Now, I view the road as a complex portal to our great melancholy. Today’s poem exposes a thin veil of desolation on the surface of life. It’s as if we are all waiting for something magical to happen, to lift us out of our collective spiritual anguish.

Shelf Life
by Nathan Xavier Osorio

I count the stones I throw from the overpass,
its amber light buzzing in the fog that crawls

through the community college quad and over the quiet music
emporium, its dusty Stratocasters and sousaphones pointed proudly

toward the sun that will extinguish thousands
of years from now in a grand act of coming up short,

its spires of flame pirouetting into themselves, feeling whole
for the first time, a blues thick like the powdered malt

my tía pulls from the shelves of the warehouse club,
its display of oversized membership cards twirling on clear 

noodles of nearly invisible twine above the cash registers
where Papi, with his head draped in a paper hairnet,

hands out hot-dog and soft-drink specials, his disposition industrial 
like the tenacity of SPAM™ or the American spirit, his shelf life awful

and collapsing in a firework display of fear like our star,
the Sun, a name we’ve assigned to it to instill law

and order in the natural, in the giant of the uncontainable,
in the celestial passage of people from one place to another,

over volcano or desert or in a perpetually delayed bus,
its driver singing The fare box is busted, oh! The fare box is busted,

and continues to be on the urgency of avenues, numbered
to make sense of what comes before and what is to come after,

to fabricate anticipation and hope—is this why I’m convinced 
of the end? Why I’m sitting in the early-morning rumble of garbage 

trucks and Dominican supers named Hank, contemplating the sun
on the first overcast day of fall, mourning the apple blossom

I haven’t seen in nearly a decade or the family dreaming of wormholes,
Chinese takeout, and the warm embrace of ballistic missiles—

what a beautiful time it is to be alive! To shut down devices
and to think only of the plastic cogs in the hanging clock,

the filmy brine in the can of pork shoulder, and the five-pound hawk
who just last night I saw lurch to the center of the baseball diamond, 

her plumed chest curdling time with each breath, her talons splattered
red with a pair of mice, her eyes amber and alive in the hills

I can see out my window, the space between the trees as black 
as the marrow I suck from bones. I think one day I will retire

from this overcrowded town and head to wherever this hawk
has raised her family. There I will lie so that her nest

will eclipse the sun and rumors of war and its shadow 
will find its home in my center.

"Shelf Life" from QUERIDA by Nathan Xavier Osorio © 2024 Nathan Xavier Osorio. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.