Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I keep a journal that I write in every day. Sometimes it’s just lists of things I need to do with an intention scrawled on the top of the page and other times it’s recollections of my dreams or beginnings of poems, or some memory that strikes me, or something I want to remember. I have become attached to keeping these journals because it makes me realize how much I do during one day.

Before I started journaling with such regularity, I remember thinking I barely accomplished anything in one day. Like that John Prine song, “Angel from Montgomery” with the lyric, And I ain’t done nothing since I woke up today. But the truth is I do a great deal. I write it all down, I take notes, I make lists and check them off, and even in writing down my dreams I am witnessing my life.

Annie Dillard once wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing.” I think about this a lot when I’m planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.

Today’s list poem acts like an electrified journal. Its rhythmic pacing and imaginative specificity allow us to see the magic in the mere act of being.

It’s 9:30am, I’ve ran four miles, cried four times, & eaten two chicken sandwiches
by Christian Aldana

did abstract illusions in plane. 
did taste your gum. 
did enamor elevated electricity. 			
did diddle mechanoreceptors. 
did strain silence to shadow shower. 
did ring the belly-button with tip. 
did read your words. did laugh.
did put towel down. did splatter stomach. 	
did dust eyelashes. 
did make eggs, a pound of bacon, bagels, & coffee.
did soak feet hand in hand. 
did run along alligator snout lined with sabal palms.
did vasodilate. 
did wash. did brush hair. did whiskey your tequila. 
did put you in mouth. did get vicariously carried then slurried. 
did wake to sheer curtains washed in light. 
did crystalize laughter for later use. 
did burst into zone-out. 
did drink boozie coffee schmoozing per usual.
did drink with cup cut in half, the liquid too. 
did kiss through seizing instances. 
did defy little listener that salsas between my ears. 
did see soaring fires & wrinkling mountains in your lips. 
did nip your ears in the gruff thuds of morning. 
did run past broken bells hacking creaking breath of Floridian winters. 
did watch an orange death of day get vacuumed into darkness. 
did hear night sounds night critters night time filling. 
did fall deeper into this loverhood, this place of fleshness. 
did lose myself between legs.
did intend the way I am: wild-eyed & extinctual at voice’s crumbling cliff. 
did tongue a blue vein. 
did suckle in the black fur of night. 
did enter the blood of your month. did straighten my spine as shower steam held us. 
did wear life’s red lipstick, lying naked under clouds grappling the moon

"It’s 9:30am, I’ve ran four miles, cried four times, & eaten two chicken sandwiches" by Christian Aldana. Used by permission of the poet.