TRANSCRIPT

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

I think a lot about the number of lives I’ve already lived in this single body. How many times I’ve started over, personally or professionally. How many new relationships, new jobs, new books I’ve begun, having no idea how they would turn out — or if they would turn out.

I find the notion of “do overs” incredibly inspiring. And forgiving, right? Because we don’t just have one shot to make a life we love. No, we get to reinvent ourselves again and again, as many times as we want to — or need to. I think of it as “reincarnation lite,” the idea that we can be reborn, and transformed, many times in this lifetime. No death required.

I’ve been trying to impress this idea on my kids, too, lest they think the choices they make now are choices they will have to abide by and live with forever. I remind them their interests can change, their styles can change, even their personalities can change. Teenagers who are athletes don’t always stay athletes. Teenagers who are bookish and shy don’t necessarily stay that way. There are talents, and pieces of themselves, they will discover later. They will be becoming who they are their whole lives. Much like their mother!

I once heard the comedian Pete Holmes say, about his past, something along the lines of: “That life was the weird horse I rode to get to this life.” I think the speaker of today’s poem would like that imagery as much as I do. Here’s to weird horses, and to do-overs, and to new beginnings, which are endless.

Dispatch as Prologue or Epilogue
by Megan Gannon

Every beginning is arbitrary, every
end a fiction. Start with your first

poor decision, or back further, start
with the woman whose daily

whittling/belittling taught you
you’d better be smart, at least.

Start with the man you might have been
happy with, if happiness was what 

you’d wanted, poet at twenty-two. Start
with the first man to show you your every

pore was a mouth open to more flesh.
Start with that darkness where you felt

your skin dissolve. Start with your fear
of being lost, then finding that the day

to day sameness was how you’d become
unseen. Start with the third time

you told your husband, “Every time
I see you like that, a little of my love for you

dies.” Start with the moment you realized
his good enough  for you wasn’t good enough

for the son you’d been given by another woman.
Start with the years when you mistook

silence for peace, when so much
nothing almost crushed you,

when you could never fill the house
with enough noise to feed your boy.

Start with the man you couldn’t resist.
Start with the way he bent time to hold you

in a full waiting breathlessness. Start 
with the small cracks and breaks. Peace

was never what you wanted, was it?
Now you’ll never run out of artifacts

to sift through, never dig deep enough
to unearth every shard. You were hurt,

and now you’ve done some of the hurting.
It all begins with wanting, with finding

yourself wanting. Start there.

“Dispatch as Prologue or Epilogue” by Megan Gannon from DISPATCH FROM EVERY SECOND GUESS © 2026 Megan Gannon. Used by permission of Dzanc Books.