TRANSCRIPT

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

I’m a novice when it comes to birding. An amateur. I have the Merlin app on my phone, so when I’m out and I hear a bird’s call or song, I can hit record and let the app identify the bird for me by sound. It knows my location, so it searches a database of birds known to be in my area. It’s nerdy, I know, but I love it.

A few years ago I went birding with a friend of mine who’s an expert. We drove out to one of her favorite spots: a historic cemetery in Central Ohio. She lent me an incredibly high-tech set of binoculars, and we wandered around the grounds. I laughed later, looking at the photos on my phone, because most of the shots I took were of headstones and family crypts. I took very few photos of birds or even the sky, instead focusing on the ground and what lay beneath it.

Walking among the graves in Greenlawn Cemetery, I felt like I was supposed to walk solemnly and whisper. I remember being wary about where — and, potentially, over whom — I was stepping. Cemeteries are peaceful, reverent places, and yet they’re places I don’t visit regularly — not unless I’m birding, apparently. If I want to feel close to someone I’ve lost, I’m more likely to look at photos, or tell stories, or listen to songs that remind me of them. And yes, I’m likely to write about them. That’s part of how I honor their memory and keep them close.

Today’s poem may be set in a cemetery, but it remembers a loved one alive and embodied.

Anniversary
by Edward Salem

Kneeling to carve back the grass encroaching
like cuticles on a fingernail, I noticed how close
her flat headstone was to the others around hers.

Watering the flowers at his wife’s grave,
an old man told me they’re placed above
the abdomens, not the heads, as you’d expect.

I think he meant to explain they were less crowded
underground than it appeared, but I didn’t follow.
I pictured a pair of rotten feet standing on my mother’s

head, her green feet standing on another’s head,
and so on in a horizontal grid, gaudy totem poles.
I wasn’t sure what part of her body I stood over,

but I stepped aside as if she could feel my weight,
like when I was a child and she’d lie on the carpet
and tell me to walk all over her back. I’d laugh

at the funny feeling underfoot, the squishy,
bony, fleshy ground I massaged by walking,
losing my wobbly balance turning around

after each short lap from shoulders to butt. Yet
standing off to the side of her grave felt wrong.
Every year, every visit, like the bashing of a gong.

“Anniversary” by Edward Salem from INTIFADAS © 2026 Edward Salem. Used by permission of Sarabande Books.