TRANSCRIPT

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

You can find anything on social media. Anything. I’ve seen accounts for amateur mushroom foragers, accounts where one tiny dog is dressed up in a different elaborate outfit each day, accounts for cooking with whatever’s in your pantry. I follow one woman who gets dressed in her bright, airy, impossibly clean bathroom each day, and she looks better in clothes I can’t afford than anyone has a right to. I follow astrologers and philosophers and chefs. I follow skincare gurus and film directors and, yes, poets. Lots and lots of poets.

And some things frequently show up in my feed for reasons I don’t understand. One of those things is an account devoted to finding human faces in inanimate objects. I don’t follow this account, but I see the posts regularly. The admin shares photos with captions like, “Can you see it?” Sometimes, I look, and often, yes, I see the face—the eyes, nose, and mouth in a photograph of tree bark, or a pile of laundry, or some eerie reflection in a window. And sometimes I don’t see it. 

As humans, we're hardwired to see faces. To seek faces. It’s a psychological phenomenon referred to as pareidolia, from the Greek para, meaning "beside," and eidolon, meaning "image" or "form." Pareidolia is often associated with finding or assigning human physical characteristics in nature, but it also includes objects outside of the natural world, like buildings or cars. Because, well, the human mind developed before we developed the built environment.

But it’s not just human faces we think we see, it’s other living things. How many of us have come upon a discarded item of clothing or a balled up blanket on the side of the road and shuddered to think it might be a dog or a deer? How many of us have seen out of the corner of our eyes a flapping plastic trash bag in the wind and mistaken it for a bird? 

There’s a sense of relief when we realize we’re looking at an object, not a dead creature, but there’s also another feeling—one I hadn’t been able to put my finger on until I read today’s poem. This poem does what the best poems do: it articulates something deceptively simple yet hard to explain.

Mistake
by Heather Christle

For years I have seen
dead animals on the highway

and grieved for them
only to realize they are

not dead animals
they are t shirts

or bits of blown tire
and I have found

myself with this
excess of grief

I have made with 
no object to let

it spill over and 
I have not known 

where to put it or
keep it and then today

I thought I know
I can give it to you

“Mistake” by Heather Christle from PAPER CROWN © 2025 Heather Christle. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press.