TRANSCRIPT

I’m Diannely Antigua, and this is The Slowdown.

There was a time when love, or the possibility of it, came to you as a mixtape or burned CD. The songs were carefully chosen and painstakingly ordered. It wasn’t limitless, like today’s playlists. You had maybe seventy or eighty minutes, which meant every song had to mean something. And when you got one, you’d sit there rewinding and replaying, trying to decode the hidden message the music played back.

Out of all the mix CDs I’ve received, it’s impossible to forget the first. I was eighteen, in college, and my crush was in my Public Speaking class. When he learned that I’d spent most of my religious childhood not listening to secular music, he set out to immediately rectify the situation. He made me a mix CD.

I played the CD for the first time in my car, with an adapter that connected my Walkman to the stereo’s cassette deck. I listened to the songs and lived in their lyrics. In one song, I was the punk rock princess and he was my garage band king. In another, I was Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite. I listened to the whole CD, believing the songs had revealed his feelings. I carried with me the little warmth of being seen, that maybe I was beautiful, and that maybe beautiful things could happen to me.

A month later, we had our first date at a Chili’s restaurant. We kept ordering refills of our sodas long after the meal was done, just so we’d have an excuse to keep sitting across from each other. After that date, he made me another mix CD. I remember pressing play and not bracing myself. I wasn’t searching for clues anymore. I was just listening. And maybe that’s what changed. The first CD felt like a question. The second was an answer.

Today’s poem brings me back to that kind of listening, to the intimacy that can live inside shared sound, and the quiet way music lets us reach each other across space and time.

Boombox Ode: Enjoy the Silence
by K. Iver

A landline lets me dance with you.

                                   My one-deck and your two-deck

are dialed to 98.5 fm without

                                   an echo. If we speak aloud

this miracle of fiber wire

                                   and radio wave, harmony

could split. From our speakers:

                                   soft synth, a baseline, a choir

reverbing, a guitar riff that rises

                                   and falls, asks and answers. I can’t

see your movement, the bedroom

                                   you’re quiet in. Somewhere, bodies

like ours are pulsing under the same

                                   pink neon to the same words

like violence, break–Bodies like ours
                                   
                                   are touching and strangers watch

only because they’re gorgeous.

                                   Let me pretend you’re back in my

bedroom, before my mother found us.

                                   You’ve risen from the pine floor

and pulled me up. You want me

                                   to stand for this. Let me pretend

all I’ve ever wanted, all I’ve ever needed

                                   is here.  Tell me that’ll be us. Soon.

"Boombox Ode: Enjoy the Silence" by K. Iver from SHORT FILM STARRING MY BELOVED'S RED BRONCO © 2023 K. Iver. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Milkweed Editions.