Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

Rock bottom is a funny place. I’m not sure that it’s real. Yet, it’s also a place I’ve been to. If anyone has been there, then I suppose we all end up in our own rock bottom at some point.

The summer I turned twenty one I was sleeping in late most days. I would hear of something my friends had been up to only after it happened and feel left out. I spent a hell of a lot of time talking on the phone with some guy fourteen hundred miles away in Austin whom I poured my ennui into.

I went to the campus print shop everyday to putz around on the unguided summer research project I had finagled funding for — a letterpress printed pamphlet of poems. I had bitten off way more than I could chew and was stewing in self doubt. It was my last summer before my senior year of college. I had just returned from a semester abroad in Korea, and Los Angeles was hot and dry and lonely. The nights were heavy and dark and endless. I felt like I was always in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, doing not enough.

I got through it. It took finding purpose. And then I thought that I would never feel that way again. I thought that I knew what purpose was and that I wouldn’t lose it. I thought I knew that my brain works better when I get up early and answer all my text messages, when I do things with my hands and set up scenarios to get all my friends together, when I allow myself melancholy and exploration, when I let fun and love in.

But maybe I was giving myself too much credit to control my own experience of the world. Life, as beautiful as it is, is also rather disturbing. It is vivid and grotesque, loud and uncontrollable. Change is literally disturbing, aside from being inevitable, the one sure thing, they say.

The truth about nothing ever ending, nothing ever being final, is that things will be the same again, too. Just not all at the same time, in the same way. You’ll find a new rock bottom. And, a new way out.

Today’s poem sees the darkness and the light in the world, the absurd and gentle. It sees opening and closing. It learns by waiting, by witnessing.

Waiting for the Annular Eclipse
by Rhoni Blankenhorn

It does seem as though the quality of light is changing.
Sun like a lidded eye,
astroturf casting shadows on itself.
My lover sleeps inside.
I hear him breathing in my mind.
Down the street, someone is building a house
with what sounds like a single goddamn hammer.
More and more I worry
my attention will not hold.
One is not supposed to look directly
at a cosmic event — of course I look.
We’re all drawn to doing what we’re not supposed to.
Last night, we walked the downtown,
past an alley stuck with gum —
a filthy corridor, half-lit like the beginning
of a music video from the 90’s.
There’s something apocalyptic about how tourists
build attractions. Because I’m expected to contribute,
I do not. Instead I touch novelty candy
shaped like lunch meat. My lover buys Turkish delights.
Now he sleeps inside. Now dogs bark
as the light changes. I wait and I wait for nothing
to come to full conclusion.
Wait, I mean, occlusion.

“Waiting for the Annular Eclipse” by Rhoni Blankenhorn from ROOMS FOR THE DEAD AND THE NOT YET, forthcoming from Trio House Press. Originally published in Mercury Firs. Used by permission of the poet.