Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

In the 1980s, despite being the top-ranked rhythmic gymnast in the United States and among the world’s best, Wendy Hilliard (one of my personal heroes) was sidelined in the early Olympic era of the sport through racially coded “re-ranking,” a decision she formally challenged and overturned, exposing the limits of meritocracy in elite athletics.

Much like the powers-that-be who decided that a young, busty, Black girl must not be allowed to represent the U.S., sometimes the way that we see each other has nothing to do, per se, with who they are, but with who we are. Sometimes we challenge each other just by being, because being is complicated. It’s difficult. And none of us can be reduced to each other’s outside gaze. Whether that’s women in sports – and any kind of women (cis, trans, intersex, young, old, every kind of race) – or in poetry, in food service, in search of intimacy, in a family. 

Thing is: everyone is a hero to someone, or a beauty, or a problem, or all of the above. Today’s poem acknowledges exactly that with a brutal, identifiable honesty. But what this poet insists that we remember is how we are all, also, even if not loved, then so so very lovable. 

Katherine with the Lazy Eye. Short. And Not a Good Poet
by francine j. harris

This morning, I heard you were found in your McDonald’s uniform.


I heard it while I was visiting a lake town, where empty woodsy highways 
turn into waterside drives. I’d forgot


my toothbrush and was brushing with my finger, when a friend
who didn’t know you said he heard it like this: You know Katherine. Short. 


with a lazy eye. Poet. Not a very good one. Yeah, well she died. the blue


on that lake fogs off into the horizon like styrofoam. The picnic tables
full of white people. I ask them where the coffee is. They say at Meijer.


I wonder if you thought about getting out of Detroit. When you read at the open mike
you’d point across the street at McDonald’s and told us to come see you.


Katherine with the lazy eye. short and not a good poet, I guess I almost cried.
I don’t know why, because I didn’t like you. This is the first time I remembered your name.


I didn’t like how you followed around a married man. That your poems sucked
and that I figured they were all about the married man.


That sometimes you reminded me of myself, boy crazy. That sometimes
I think people just don’t tell me that I’m kind of, well…slow.


Katherine with the lazy eye, short. and not a good poet.
I didn’t like your lazy eye always looking at me. That you called me


by my name. I didn’t
like you, since the first time I saw you at McDonald’s.


You had a mop. And you were letting some homeless dude
flirt with you. I wondered then, if you thought that was the best


you could do. I wondered then if it was. 


Katherine with the lazy eye, short, and not a good poet.
You were too silly to wind up dead in an abandoned building.


I didn’t like you because, what was I supposed to tell you. What.
Don’t let them look at you like that, Katherine. Don’t let them get you alone. 


You don’t get to laugh like that, like nothing’s gonna get you. Not everyone 
will forgive the slow girl. Katherine


with the fucked up eye, short. Poetry sucked, musta’ knew better. I avoided you 
in the hallway. I avoided you in lunch line. I avoided you in the lake.


I avoided you. My lazy eye. Katherine with one hideous eye, shit.
Poetry for boys again, you should have been immune, you were supposed


to be a cartoon. your body was supposed to be as twisted as
it was gonna get. Short. and not a good poet. Katherine


with no eye no more. I avoided you, hated it, when you said my name. I
really want to leave Detroit. Katherine the lazy short.


not a good poet. and shit. Somewhere someone has already asked
what was she like,  and a woman has brought out her wallet and said


This is her. This is my beautiful baby.