Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

So, it goes like this: wake up, eat yogurt, commute to work or walk into the next room (your home office), midday, call a relative, possibly a sibling or a parent, text a friend, laugh through the hours, at some scrolled meme, at some joke on a Zoom meeting, prepare an evening meal or pick up takeout, sit down at the table and scroll the headlines, get angry, shake your head, watch a TV show to chill you out. Go to bed.

That’s the general cycle. Throw in a book you cannot put down. Throw in some workout routine or an after-hours gathering at a favorite watering hole with coworkers. Throw in time with a beloved, your favorite human being on earth.

What breaks through the impenetrable folly of it all? What lends itself as miraculous in the dailiness of our lives? The magic sprouting of a bed of daffodils in spring time, a sculpture made from black twizzlers that the artist intricately wove together into a font of wonder, or the breathtaking smile of a friend that is all the gardens you ever gazed at.

Sometimes, just sometimes, someone will utter a phrase that sends us reeling inward, that seems off the grid of the unexpected, that lifts us above the quotidian. Likely, just likely, this is the work of poetry. Well, it’s why I return to poetry, again and again. I want the chance to know that I am not alone, not suffering or merely living in some void. Today’s poem reminds me that we were made to experience life to the fullest.

A Little Slice of Heaven
by Jaswinder Bolina

“And it’d make sense for the thing you feel least
    in the afterlife to be the thing you felt most

in the current life, though you’d have to admit
    if there’s an afterlife, it’d mean this life

is reckoning for a prior execution, which means this
    shit show might be the penance we deserve,”

she said, which seemed an odd stab
    at small talk, even for a madcap pediatrician,

but—Alakazam!—she pronounced the baby perfectly

healthy and ordered him a round of shots
    before redeploying us to another six-month stint

in the wild. But that thing she said really stuck with me,
    sitting beside you the whole bus ride home and later

feeding the toddler a bowlful of consolidated peas
    and carrots and beside you in bed until morning,

and the days peeled away like that, like platitudes
    from a quote-a-day calendar, like rounds of a deli loaf

off a slicer, like cross sections of the cortex
    cut clean by an MRI, and it really stuck in my head,

that thing she said, and it probably always will until 
    I acquit myself of the grist of this life and submit

to the next one, where I may never feel again
    as I do beside you tonight, sopping up

bouillabaisse, my serious love, with the soft guts
    of a baguette on a Friday in a life

I must’ve qualified for and justly received,
    I know not the hokey jurisprudence of why.

"A Little Slice of Heaven" by Jaswinder Bolina. Used by permission of the poet.