TRANSCRIPT

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

This show is a place where we come together to take a pause, to find space amidst the daily noise — against, or alongside, the difficult and dismaying news of the day. Today, I’m pausing to remember something horrible that happened nearly a decade ago.

On June 12, 2016, a man walked into Pulse, an LGBTQIA+-friendly nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire. He killed forty-nine people. Forty-nine people. Pulse was hosting its regular Latin Night the night of the shooting, and most of the victims were Latino. Latino and queer and young, most of them in their twenties and thirties. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. It was also the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history at the time — though only for a year or so, until the 2017 shooting at a Las Vegas music festival.

I remember these events well, because they horrified me and broke my heart. I remember because I was enraged — am still enraged — at our inability to enact common sense gun control in this country. I remember because I’d written a poem called “Good Bones” that went viral for the first time in the wake of the Pulse shooting and again after the Las Vegas massacre. I call that poem a disaster barometer, because any surge in its popularity is a sign that something terrible has happened.

We read and share poems in times of tragedy because they say something we need to say, or need to hear. That is certainly true of today’s poem. It speaks to something that feels unspeakable. It sings to us in the dark.

A Love Poem Will Not Save The World by
C. Russell Price

On the last perfect day beside the last perfect body
of water, we got infected with a persistently bad idea.
We cancel our appointment with a squalling therapist.
You are smiling, you are emptying the world
so we can be alone. But who would dare to exist, 
just for that? It’s Spring, bitch, be in love.
When you were in a ditch, I was in a ditch.
They were different ditches, but there we were 
waiting for one another like a phantom limb. 
I’ve made the stupidly courageous act
of letting our loudmouthed scars fall in love. 
The daisies beside us are closing their mouths
in anticipation of what comes next.
I recognize this is the actual end 
because I finally feel alive.
I’m hawk-eyeing your hairline
as you talk about your youth in Florida. 
Were you there then, too, looking out the pier
wondering if there could be someone out there
just as strange as you?
The waves have started to crest 
as you speak French; the dogs cease
their yawps. I still my mind to ride your tongue. 
I am terrified of wide open spaces,
all the possibilities of someone with ill intentions.
I’m fighting my thoughts of Florida again,
the nightclub, the 50 phones scuffing the floor 
like downed birds. I was not there,
but I will never be the same. 
Tell me again (in French) the word for pulse. 
Let us rename what we have to remember.
I don’t think I will ever not be afraid again.

"A Love Poem Will Not Save the World" by C. Russell Price from OH, YOU THOUGH THIS WAS A DATE? © 2022 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2022 by TriQuarterly Books / Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.