TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown. 

Growing up, my two younger sisters and I were often at odds. We were close in age, and we shared close quarters, but we weren’t close. We’re all born two years apart—“stairsteps” my mother used to say. When we were ages nine, seven, and five, we argued over Barbies, or what to watch on the one television in the house, or whether the youngest was able to “tag along” on a bike ride or a play date. When we were seventeen, fifteen, and thirteen we fought—sometimes physically—over clothes, shoes, and CDs that one of us borrowed (er, stole) from the others. We screamed at each other to get off the phone. We tattled on each other about missed curfews, bad boyfriends, and all of the things we weren’t supposed to be doing. 

Sure, my sisters and I loved each other, but we didn’t always like each other. Only after we all went away to college did we become close. I grew up thinking that having siblings was inevitably like this: You’re annoyed with each other, and you compete, and sometimes there’s even a fistfight, but once everyone grows up, you come back together.

These days, my sisters and I talk and text frequently, confiding in each other about our lives. On many Sundays, we have dinner with our own families at our parents’ house—yes, sitting around at the same table we sat at as children. Stealing CDs from one another all those years ago must have helped us develop a similar taste in music, because now we like to go to concerts together, too.

If you’re lucky, as I am, your siblings are your lifelong friends. But I know not everyone is lucky in that way. Sometimes, because of an age spread, because of personality differences or family issues, siblings are not close. 

Today’s poem looks, tenderly, at two siblings attempting to close the distance between them. The poem is made even more poignant by the fact that its setting, a bar in California, has since burned down in a wildfire.

Rancho Bar
by Margot Kahn

You’ll feel like you’re on a ship, belowdecks,
my brother says when he takes me to a bar

at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.
The ceiling is low. The floor is a carpet of tartan.

It takes three beers and twenty years
for my brother to tell me what he has to say,

show me the pictures of his life scrolling
across a screen. What else have I missed

that’s been right before my eyes? Who else
have I not known for the sin of not seeing?

What did you want when you were young?
my brother asks me. Sex, I say. I wanted 

to travel. What did you want? I ask back.
When the rain breaks, we walk home.

From the kitchen you can see all the way
across the valley to Los Feliz,

Sunset, Hollywood, the ocean.
In the bathroom, paper towels in a jar

catch drips from the leaky faucet.
In the bedroom, my brother is sleeping.

What he wanted is still what he wants,
the thing that makes everything easier.

“Rancho Bar” by Margot Kahn from THE UNRELIABLE TREE © 2025 Margot Kahn, published by Northwestern University Press. Used by permission of the poet.