TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

It’s Christmas, and though I’ll see a lot of people I love today, I won’t see everyone I love. That’s the thing about traditions. They put us in certain places with certain people, and we’re lucky for that, but only so many people can fit into a living room or around a dining table. Only so many of our loved ones live close by or can travel to us for the holidays. There are some people we just…miss.

We might call or text them on a holiday. We might send photos of our festivities to them, and we might ask for photos of their celebrations so we feel like we’re together in some small way. Some years at our holiday parties, we FaceTime absent loved ones, passing the phone from person to person, so we can all see each other’s faces.

This year I’ll be with my kids, and I’ll see my parents and my siblings. I’ll see my niece and nephews, and some aunts and uncles and cousins. I’ll even see some family friends. But there are people dear to me who won’t be in that room, or around the dining table. Some will be elsewhere, with their own families. Some are no longer with us. Their absence, their distance from us, is felt all year round but is more acute on holidays like Christmas. Traditions are constants, so the variables—the things that have changed—stand out all the more.

Here’s to the people we love who are with us during the holidays. And here’s to the people we love and miss.

Today’s poem is fairly compact in its form—the way it looks on the page—but it’s so full of distance. And where there’s distance, there’s longing.

Losing the Band
by Ashley D. Escobar

I spot a bug on the wicker chair         across from me.
        I should be somewhere                          three hours ahead from
now.                 Nobody wants                  a novel about a girl
swept in Christmas.                         Mine would be called Losing the Band.
I try to make out last December            through the fog               in my glasses.
        All I taste is a stranger’s                          breathy vocals. 
I climbed up loaves of bread        breaking fever         to hear the last
of the reverb.        I haven’t wrapped your present yet.          I let the bug
        crawl up my translucent tights.        I remember our first snow
and the way the streetlamp lit up        streaked in paint thinner          white.
I kept your tulips in the ice box         and the tambourine         in the fireplace.
        I won’t sleep on your side          of the desk       when you’re not here.
We’ll hitchhike           back to our world            of airmail sailboats
and wind-up toys        and have teeth           on the same day.
        I leave a message using         speech-to-text
as the bug leaves        my line of vision.             I’ll wait all night
in thirty degrees              if it means icicles       on spidery branches
and pure                                                                                                         noise.

"Losing the Band" by Ashley D. Escobar. Used by permission of the poet.