Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

Lately, there is a lot of talk about self-care and the traps of commercializing self-care. Self-care has become a buzzword and an industry. Buy this $30 candle and feel healed. Buy this $100 kitchen appliance and feel healthy. Buy this $200 cozy sweater and feel rich. I admit this is appealing to me at times. I can try to throw money at the problem as much as the next person. I too can fill my shopping cart like it’s filling my soul.

Still, the self-care that I most gravitate towards is free. Like napping. Maybe a walk. Maybe a little cry on the couch. Maybe just lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling and not answering anyone but myself for a whole ten minutes. There’s a beauty in silence, in the need to shut out the world for even a moment.

Once when I worked in a high rise, I would shut my office door sometimes and just visualize myself in a green field, a breeze on my face, birds all around, and I’d try to hold that in my heart. Then, I’d open my eyes and remember my office was literally inside the curve of the scrolling Nasdaq sign in the middle of Times Square and go about my day. That fantasy saved me though. I’m a firm believer in fantasizing as self-care.

Today’s poem praises the act of fantasizing. For me, this poem is not only an ode to the subject of the speaker’s fantasy, but also an ode to the pleasure of igniting the imagination. This poem honors the value and power of the mind’s ability to find something, anything, that helps us survive.

Notes on Self-Care
by Yesenia Montilla

                                  For Hikmet & Girmay
 
what better way to forget that the world is burning
than by imagining me in London Town with
 
Idris & his Luther wool coat with its deep
pockets where both my hands fit
 
as he walks me to his flat
& the décor is ridiculous: French chic
 
with some touches of Kentucky country
but it’s my fantasy & there’s no room for black leather
 
couches or 70-inch TVs—no bachelor’s Shangri-La here.
No beer in the fridge, only rows & rows of vintage Bordeaux
 
I chase Idris across my forehead
whirling into bed with him like a wrecking ball
 
envisioning his scruff face
against my neck, his beard
 
better than any exfoliator I’ve ever owned
 
his languid fingers like rakes
against my plump body
 
& he loves my poems—
 
all of him, his 40 trillion cells
at attention to every stanza I write
 
& what better way to live than to desire this way?
& this is not escapism 	                  	it’s survival—
 
One day, this earth will rot
or worse        	      be made good  
 
& there will be no need
for this sort of daydreaming
 
One day, this earth will be good
or worse                   we’ll be good    
 
& Idris will be a faint taste of something I once
wanted like trees shedding against a November sky
 
I’ll sit down to write a poem
about the time I fantasized I made love to Idris Elba
 
not remembering how in my sorrow he held
me like one of my metaphors
 
between his fingers        
as though my poems were just delusions  
 
foliage falling to the earth routine & dying
thin as rice paper
tender as paper cranes—

"Notes on Self-Care" by Yesenia Montilla. Used by permission of the poet.