Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

My friends and I have been talking about the importance of crying lately. The usefulness of tears. There are times when I go around for days or even weeks not knowing exactly what is wrong, but feeling off. Or perhaps I know what’s wrong, but I cannot name it all without spinning off in the universe forever, never to be found again. The new surge in the pandemic, the climate crisis, the human cruelty. It’s those times where there is a tightness in my chest that feels foreign and familiar all at once.

What I have learned to do with that feeling, or rather, the only thing that helps me, is crying. Even if I can’t muster the tears on their own accord, I might have to turn on the saddest song I know, slowly sing along to “Waitin’ Around to Die” by Townes Van Zandt or “Blue” by Joni Mitchell or “Pain in My Heart” by Otis Redding. I can conjure those tears just in time to save myself. Once I needed to cry so much I watched the scene in Anne of Green Gables where Matthew dies and she holds him in the field.

I torture myself to tears because what follows the tears is something like relief. My chest finally releasing the fist it has knotted itself into and I can breathe again.

Of course, there is so much to want to lie down and cry about. The big stuff, the small stuff. And sometimes in order to find even the smallest amount of healing, I have to let all that in, feel it moving inside me like millions of shards of glass until at last, I can stand up, look at my swollen face in the mirror and walk into the world again.

Today’s poem honors that need for crying, the need for tears, and the way in which we avoid them, and long for them at the same time.

The Lunch Counter of Eternal Tears
by Nikki Wallschlaeger

Instead of crying on your shoulder I cry on the internet. Instead of 
crying I make allusions to crying by cherry-picking the subjects.
Instead of crying on his shoulder I build a fountain of black amethyst
in an artificial square. Instead of crying I ring the bells of a bottomless
road. Instead of crying I listen to Roy Orbison’s “Crying” because the 
way he waterfall-sings “crying” feels like a worn leather booth that
wouldn’t refuse me service. Instead of crying I understand what I’m
sacrificing for someone who’s long gone. Instead of crying I think of 
lurid romantic scenarios where I’m not crying and you’re the one being 
insufferable when you think about me. Instead of crying I listen to 
“Put Your Head on My Shoulder” by Paul Anka and I recognize how
some songs are never about deep emotional connections with special
people but for getting in the pants of willowy virgins. Instead of crying 
I put on Live-Evil by Miles Davis to smudge the room of 1950s white 
nonsense. Instead of crying Miles’s trumpet screams like the last free
lion dying alone in the wilderness. Can I lay my head on your shoulder
and cry?

"The Lunch Counter of Eternal Tears" by Nikki Wallschlaeger, from WATERBABY by Nikki Wallschlaeger, copyright © 2021. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.